20. May 2012 by admin.

Barbara Ehrenreich has written an essay in TomDispatch:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175543/tomgram:_barbara_ehrenreich,_looting_the_lives_of_the_poor/

Posted in Barbara Ehrenreich | No Comments »

20. May 2012 by admin.

In 1979, when I was finishing high school and starting college, I read Howard Ruff’s How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years.  I was aware of inflation, was starting to understand what it meant, and I remember a few perilous months in early 1980 when the price of gold shot up, and it seemed at one point that the economy might go off the rails.

Now we face the same problems as back in 1979, only worse.  Howard Ruff has updated How to Prosper.  But we got through the last thirty years in mostly decent shape.  There was no hyperinflationary collapse.

Why is this time different?

More specifically, the bad things that we feared at the end of the 1970s never materialized.  Why should I worry this time?

Two thoughts:

• In 1979, we were still a productive country.  The Chinese were not in the business of manufacturing anything and everything for export.  There were still many businesses that were run in the interest of providing whatever goods or services they purported to provide, rather than making this quarter’s numbers.
• In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President.  Much has been written about how he turned the country around and made us prosperous again.  But he didn’t balance the budget, and indeed, first brought us into the era of huge deficits.  Reagan was every bit as inflationary as his predecessors, if not more.  But there’s one difference:
  • Under previous Presidents, inflationary spending went everywhere in the economy, and consumer prices went up along with everything else.  When the price of bread and gasoline go up, people get angry.
  • Under Reagan and subsequent Presidents, inflationary spending got directed into the investment markets.  Consumer prices still went up, but nowhere near as quickly as before.  But the stock market and the real estate market shot up.  When the prices of houses and stocks go up, people are happy, as they think they’re getting richer.

In 1979, we had margin for error.  That margin has been relentlessly squeezed out over the last 30 years.

Yes, it’s different this time.

Posted in Navel-gazing, Things Falling Apart, Money | No Comments »

17. May 2012 by Dude wheres my job.

I’m convinced that’s what the problem is with many, if not most, hiring managers and interviewers.

This is why we are in the pickle that we are in.

How many times has this happened to you? You see a job ad; the job sounds perfect for you.

You fire off your resume; you get a call to come down and discuss the job.

And then you find out that what is in the ad does not reflect what the actual job duties are.

A very good example: the last interview I had.

The job that the company was filling: an admin assistant/customer service rep.

When I was at the interview, I asked what my job duties would be. “You will be doing the same thing as the other 2 people I have working in the office.”

This was a small company — maybe 8 or 10 guys in the warehouse, producing the product (wallpaper) and 2 individuals in the office. He had no other office staff; the owner did not have an assistant or admin.

What this was was an order taker/order processer job; that’s my guess. The “Admin assistant” part came in probably because there is paper work to be filed, the occasional email/letter to send a client, etc. That is not the same thing as being an admin assistant.

Meanwhile, this guy has been running the company for over 30 years. You think he would get it by now. NO?

A company that is 12 people tops, including the owner - and this would be the third admin. Nope.

He just wasted my time.

Here’s another example: During an interview, the hiring manager asked me “Was your admin assistant job sales or admin oriented?” I told her sales oriented.  “This job is heavily administrative…”

I have done BOTH. And besides, if it was heavily administrative, why was that fact not reflected in the job advertisement?

Any job ad you look at is automatically prefaced CONTAINS LIES AND OTHER MISLEADING INFORMATION.

What you are taking now when you reply to an ad is a chance.

When you get to the interview let your first question be “What are the duties of this job?” And then listen carefully. Also ask what you’d be doing on a daily basis and for the interviewer to give you an example of what a typical day on the job is.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

13. May 2012 by admin.

Many years ago, before I entered the workforce, I understood that Social Security is not a retirement program.  It is a tax, whose proceeds are used to pay retirement and other benefits.  The difference is subtle but important.

In a real retirement plan, the money collected from you and/or your employer is invested over time.  In a defined-benefit plan, there is a commitment to pay you in the future at a specified rate.  In a defined-contribution retirement plan, the money is held in your name and invested.  But in either case, the money is invested in a productive enterprise, so that it will grow, and the amount paid in at the beginning is driven by the amount to be collected at the end.

Under Social Security, the money that you and your employer pay is lent to the rest of the government and spent.  The money that you ultimately receive in benefits is paid by current workers.  The vaunted ‘trust fund’ is an accounting fiction.  And the politicians who vote for new goodies can just as easily vote to take them away.

I didn’t know about defined-benefit and defined-contribution plans in 1979, when I was finishing high school.  But the rest of it, I knew back then.

And it wasn’t a deep dark secret: I read about it in books from the library and bookstores.

The government wants us to believe that Social Security is a pension plan.  They even send out statements every year with the benefits that we might receive, if the politicians don’t change their minds.  But it isn’t so.

Now, I’m roughly halfway through my working life.  With the recent discussions over the Social Security tax, it’s really clear that it’s fake.  (The employee share of Social Security tax was cut by a third a couple of years ago, as a temporary measure.  The cut was continued after raucous debate, as it was the only tax cut that reached the majority of ordinary Americans.  A real pension plan, driven by the need to pay people in the future, would never do that.)

Yet people still believe that Social Security represents a commitment for their retirement.

Now that I’m halfway through my working life, I would have liked to believe that Social Security would be there for me.

But now I’m sure that I will ultimately retire in a coffin.

Posted in Politics, Dysfunctional Government, Money | 3 Comments »

12. May 2012 by admin.

This week, President Obama, our Non-Leader, came off the fence and indicated that he was in favor of marriage between two people of the same gender.

On one level, it seems eminently reasonable.  Civil marriage gives a couple a passel of legal rights with respect to each other: inheritance, joint tax returns, access to medical data, etc.  If two men or two women are in a committed relationship, and want to avail themselves of these rights, they should be able to.

But outside of the legal definition, and the couple themselves, is such a couple really married?

Marriage has existed for eons as a basis for family and children.  It’s true that not every married couple has children, but if you have a man and a woman who presumably like each other’s company sleeping together, you have to at least admit the possibility.

Today, heterosexual marriage is not the ‘basis’ that it used to be: some 40% of the births in the United States are to unmarried women.   Admitting marriage between two men or two women would further erode the status of marriage as a benchmark for families.

And this is what many people worry about: not so much the rights of gay couples, but the impact of redefining ‘marriage’ so that it is no longer exclusively heterosexual.

Unfortunately, railing against it won’t help.  The societal forces that led us to consider gay marriage won’t go away if we pretend they don’t exist.  The Rick Santorum solution–if we legislate the morality of the 1950s, we’ll all be happy and prosperous again–won’t work.

While I acknowledge that gay marriage is an idea whose time has come, I don’t have to like it.

Posted in Popular Discontent, Politics | 9 Comments »

7. May 2012 by Dude wheres my job.

Last Tuesday I sent a resume and on Wednesday, I called the company to verify receipt. The email went directly to the company ceo.

He got on the line and told me the next step is an interview with the HR department, 7 time zones away.

I waited all day Thursday and half the day on Friday: no phone call here. And no email from HR, asking me when I am available and what time, for a phone interview.

Yesterday I sent that same gent an email, telling him I never heard from Hr and would he know when the interview by phone is scheduled for — these high end execs all have calendars, right? — it’s now after 2 pm and I never got a hollaback from the ceo.

I consider this a dropped ball. Common sense and courtesy has it, does it not, that you email first and ask when the candidate is avaiable for a phone interview?

I did some research and googled; this is a very “young” company with 2 offices: one here and one overseas — and their LinkedIn lists about 12 positions in the office stateside — but no names are attached to each position.

Wow. Are they looking to hire 12 people (including the job I applied for — that one has no name attached to it, either) or are these positions currently filled but the person’s name is just not filled in?

This company oddly reminds me of a start up I worked for briefly way back in 2000.  The company was fine — until it sort of exploded and the director of management hired many many new people (that’s a story in itself). That’s when everything imploded and went down.

There was nobody to supervise and monitor these new bodies (it was an unspoken “there’s your seat; welcome aboard. Get the hell to work”) and there was no routine for each person. IT’s hard to describe but this was sort of like a reverse lifeboat drill.

That company was sold to some other concern several months later and the parent company itself went out of business — securities fraud.

Anyway, I consider this a dropped ball.  If you can’t follow through on a phone interview, wow…. what can I tell ya?

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments »

30. April 2012 by Dude wheres my job.

From this morning’s on-line funny papers (aka Craigslist):

 XYZ SCHOOL OF ALLIED HEALTH
IS VERY HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE THAT WE HAVE NEW PROGRAMS AVAIL
WE HAVE THE FOLLOWING
EKG
PHARMACY TECH
CNA
CPR
CHHA ( TENEMOS CLASSES EN ESPANOL)

WE HAVE MUCH MUCH MORE
WE HAVE AM/PM AND YES YES WEEKENDS CLASSES !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL XXXE AT XXXXXX
OR YOU CAN GO ONLINE AT XXXXX
CALL NOW SEAT ARE LIMITED

Pharmacy techs, CNAs and such used to be jobs where you trained on the job.

Perfect for allied health care students. When they graduated, there’d be more to take their place, which was fine; I liked to call these jobs “permanent temporary jobs.”

I wonder if the potential student knows that the job they’re paying to train for pays a whopping $12 an hour…or less???? Not livable wage and there is a very very high turnover in jobs like these.

Hospitals in my area and in my state are not hiring. They are closing or in limbo; quite a few of them are up for sale, or looking for buyers. One is in a “sanctuary town” — the town is filled with Mexicans. (and the state just gave another big monetary chunk to that hospital; they got 100 million a few years ago to keep the place open and alive)

So you throw money into the hat, as usual —- and no job guaranteed. There is “job placement service” — they promise you the world and in the end you’ve taken a handful of worthless courses and no job. AND no doubt a school loan to pay off.

And so it goes with the education cartel. You pays your money and you takes your chance, as somebody famous once said.

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

29. April 2012 by new_wave_princess.

I mentioned this in another thread but I think it needs its own thread. I have noticed an interesting trend with women I know and that is how many of them have given up the rat race to become stay at home moms. Another trend I am seeing is the opposite and that is how many women I know who are not marrying at all.

Growing up I lived what can be best explained as a Brady Bunch lifestyle. This show which was on during my early life (and in syndication as I got older)is the way I often describe my childhood. My mom gave up a career she loved to stay at home with me and my brother.  The reason was that back when she was becoming a mother the woman’s movement was just starting. Oh there have always been women who worked and had kids but these women were often attacked. My mother being more traditional than many women she worked with felt it was best she raise kids full time. Luckily she had this choice as my dad made good money. As a result I think I had many advantages my friends with working moms didn’t. She was able to teach us how to read and write before kindergarten and both me and my brother always did well in school. Later on she became the perfect mom and she was a Brownie Leader, homeroom mom, school helper, and pretty much anything that could be done in the classroom she did. She became friends with my first grade teacher Mrs Silverstein whom I absolutely adored and was devastated when she moved to California. In between school she would shuttle me to all my activities such as dance (I was chosen to hold the flag in several parades and the teacher wanted me to study at a famous school like Joffrey), CCD (religious education), gymnastics (where the teacher advised me to quit because I was way too tall to ever be a gymnast and at 5′7 I never would have been successful) and all the various acting and music classes I took.

I mention all of this to kind of explain where I am coming from. Most of my friends lived the same life and as children we were taught that as girls we were mothers first and foremost. The friends who had mothers who worked were often ostracized by women like my mother who would often say they weren’t “real” mothers. Later on though my mom did go back to work and eventually became manager of a print shop for a friend of hers. Side note but this friend of hers had two salesman who went on to successful careers in acting and comedy. The one salesman is a famous comedian that my dad grew up with and he knows his family as do I.

I suppose this background could explain many of my female classmates but then the 80’s happened. What I find interesting about the 80’s is that while Reagan was far more conservative than either Ford or Carter this is the era when the superwoman/career woman exploded. Maybe it was because at this point many families needed two salaries to survive or many other things, like the divorce rate increasing but more women went to work. This was shown quite heavily in the sitcoms of the time such as the Cosby Show, Family Ties, Growing Pains and Who’s The Boss. The few shows that portrayed a stay at home mom were often shows set in the past like Happy Days or the Wonder Years. This is also when my mom went back to work. I was in high school during the 80’s (graduated 1989)and we were pushed to go to college and get education. I don’t even know if women were pushed to consider being a housewife anymore in school. Unlike during my mom’s era girls were not required to take home ec anymore and we had many sports to play which I enjoyed being as athletic as I am.

So then me and my female classmates got an education, a career and then something strange happened. Many of my classmates, the ones who wanted careers like lawyers, doctors, and CEOs had their first babies and quit to stay at home with them. These were not unskilled women, in fact one childhood friend was at one point a news anchor at a La Crosse television station and eventually became the pr director for the state of Wisconsin. Another person I knew was a radio personality. In fact many of the women I worked with in radio ended up becoming stay at home moms. Why? I don’t understand it but in a way I do and I wonder if it goes back to the way we were socialized or maybe the way it’s always going to be. Maybe they got tired of competiting with the big boys knowing being female they will never be equal in the corporate world. Maybe the idea to be a mom is a stronger feeling than having a career.

Interestingly there is a certain demographic I have seen the opposite and this is my black classmates. Most of them did attend college like my white coworkers, and many have degrees. However not as many are stay at home moms and many are single moms. Contrary to popular belief while many are raising kids they had or adopted out of wedlock very few are on welfare. Most are career women who didn’t want to marry or never met mr right.

This all ties into me. I never had the desire to be a stay at home mom, though in the last couple of years it’s something I have considered.  While I may have considered being a mom, most of the guys I meet still expect their wife to do most of the childcare and housework, even men who want their wives to work. I find this hypocritical of men but at the same time being that men who have careers tend to go farther than women I understand this. While I know I would prefer to be married and have a career my choices might be limited to never finding work again and never marrying or never working again and being married and perhaps being a mom. I am striking out with jobs but am having a little better luck with men. Then again I may get a dream job and decide not to have kids but to be honest never having or adopting kids kind of saddens me. My biggest fear is being a crazy cat lady who yells at the kids to stay off my lawn while I am eating tuna fish out of the can. Being unemployed and single just seems the saddest thing. I have met women in their 50’s who concentrated on a career only to have it go away and that scares me because at that point being alone might also be without my family or elderly parents. Then again my parents are still healthy and until a few years ago so were my grandparents.

To sum all of this up I really don’t know what is the best thing for women in our culture. I am glad we have choices not available many years ago but is it good to have all these choices? does it affect our futures? will those women who never have kids regret it years later? will those women who gave up careers resent their kids and husband? why don’t men have these same issues is it because men are in control more than women? there’s so many questions to be asked about all of this.

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

29. April 2012 by new_wave_princess.

Last night I dreamt of all things about the old show Head Of The Class. For those who don’t know this was a sitcom mid-late 80’s about this smart class. It has been rarely seen since it went off the air in 1991 I believe except briefly about 10 years ago on Nick At Nite. Why I would dream about it seems odd, considering I haven’t even seen it for about 10 years, except to say it got to me think about how smart kids become smart unemployable adults.

More than most of the shows I watched in that time this show related to my high school experience. That’s not to say it was my favorite show, I probably liked a few shows better, just that it dealt with an issue close to me: smart kids. See, in high school I was in honors courses myself and a few others I could have been in but chose not to. I had low self esteem back then and was convinced I was stupid and ugly though in reality this wasn’t the case. However it was discovered I had an extremely high IQ and needed to be with other smart kids. One of my classmates is now a plastic surgeon to the stars and another is a rocket scientist. However, for as many smart people in my classes and how many went on to be successful what I find interesting is how many didn’t. Many went on to menial jobs, others work in fields that don’t require degrees and quite a few women went on to become stay at home moms. I’ll discuss this topic in another thread.

Getting back though to the smart kid issue and what disturbs me is how as a society we do not value smart people, especially women. We make fun of smart women who aren’t attractive. Smart men are not picked on as much but in movies they are often the blunt of jokes. However when it comes to employers they often don’t want smart people. When I hear the word “overqualified” my first thought was “too smart”. There was a case where a cop wasn’t hired because he had a higher score than the police department wanted. I personally know far more unemployed lawyers, PH.Ds and people with Masters than I do high school dropouts. They use the excuse “they are too qualified” but it’s really they want people they can control. Smart people aren’t as easily controlled. This is also why they give psych tests to see those people they can control. Employers claim they can’t find skilled people but this is a ruse to bring in people from other countries.

I wonder if the these fictional students were real students would they be in the same situation as someone like me, competiting for the few skilled jobs with morons (who get the jobs)or the unskilled jobs, or would they be successful? I would place a bet that they would be like me or the majority of my smart classmates who are either working for themselves or unemployed/underemployed. Losing jobs to a stupid frat boy who happens to be the son of a rich guy. We had one of these for president and look how well things turned out (sarcasm)and currently have another one running for president and could win if the economy stays terrible.

It says a lot about our society when we have highly qualified people being rejected for people who barely graduated high school or college.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

27. April 2012 by new_wave_princess.

I don’t think anyone likes them but I have gone on more than most people. I once heard that is usually takes an average of 5-6 interviews before a job but I bypassed that many years ago. I have probably been on easily 100 interviews or more just in the last few years.

I think what bothers me about interviews is how often my skills take a backseat to my “fit” in a company. I don’t get this idea because my last job went strictly on skills not fit. In hindsight if any job wasn’t a fit it was that one because I was completely different from most of my coworkers. Most of those who were there when I started were older, white, male, and high school graduates at best. Later on a few were around my age, but still white, male and high school graduates except the higher lever trainers who all had masters.

But anyway, enough about my former job, but my point is the whole thing about fit is another way of saying “you are too old, too fat, etc” for our department. I get the idea of for example only wanting people with masters degrees in communications, I don’t get the idea of only wanting thing, young white males in a department (or whatever the desired demographic is). I am 41, decent looking, not fat, young looking and very up with latest trends. Going by my skills I should have been hired by one of these jobs, but always get rejected. It doesn’t matter whether I am too good or underskilled both choices result in my rejection. I can only assume my “fit”. Maybe it’s because I am more of an introvert? I try to hide this by appearing outgoing.

I just hope and pray  get this job because I am so tired of this. I am tired of hearing “your skills are impressive but we will hire someone else” and want to hear “you are the chosen one”. Oddly I think I have a better chance of winning the lottery than I do a decent job.

Posted in job hunting | 4 Comments »

20. April 2012 by Dude wheres my job.

NWP’s last thread inspires this thread.

About a year and a half ago, in the op-ed section of the New York Times was a piece from a fella who tried out for a copywriter’s job, took the company’s copywriter exam and then sent the entire schmengie and megillah and kit and kaboodle to the company, as required.

The gent did not hear back from the company.

He took the bull(shit) by the horns and fired off a letter to the head of HR that went something like “I ACCEPT the copywriter’s position. The benefits and salary are delightful. I will see you Monday” signed his name and hit SEND.

Within virtual moments, he got a reply back from the head of HR…and you are right if you guessed the head of HR had her Hahne’s in a knot over his acceptance letter.  He let them hang for awhile and then he finally fessed up to what he did…and WHY he did it.

I tried this myself, a few times.  This is all on principle — one guy replied to me and CC:ed a member of the company’s board of directors. Ha…. he went on and on to tell me “oh by no means was that an offer” and I replied back to him — and the board of director he cc’ed — why I did what I did. I got no reply back after that.

Guy #2 wanted to know What Job and I never offered you a job…you seemed like nice lady, though. Ha.

 The other 2 people? One called me and wanted to know what was what…and I got no reply back from the other 2. They duly ignored what I sent.

I wish I had the link to the article; when we were still on the BE board, I posted about my little experiment and included the link to the op-ed page.

I don’t know if NWP wants to try it, or if any of you do, just to see what happens… and just to prove a point.  THese people think nothing of just playing OUt of Sight Out Of Mind — come ON — how tough is it to send a 20 word email telling us “thanks but no”?????

To keep somebody hanging — particularly after they have completed a skill set test or have spent the entire day at the second interview — is just plain vulgar, crude and small minded. Get a GRIP, people — time is money and maybe we are only schmucks you rejected but do the right thing and send a rejection.

Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments »

20. April 2012 by new_wave_princess.

Ok in February I got an interview for a company named one of the best in Chicago. The benefits were amazing and the job sounded wonderful. I was surprised to get a second interview and it was a serious of interviews lasting all day.

Today I get a rejection letter after once again getting me severely depressed. I know better than to get excited but this time I was sure.

Honestly I think it’s because of my former employer and I will out the crooks they are: Metra. The Metra’s HR department is run by James Meeks and his cronies at Salem Baptist. Meeks is in cahoots with Jesse Jackson Jr.

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments »

20. April 2012 by admin.

My parents were lifelong Democrats, and I’ve always been a registered Democrat.  While I’ve been bitterly disappointed with the party of late, and considered the alternative, I can’t bring myself to change to the other side.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from the Democrats, offering me a bumper sticker:

Is the Democratic party totally incapable of identifying one positive characteristic about the party, its platform, or its candidate that people would want to post for the world?

In 2004, Bush’s campaign promise, in a nutshell, was ‘I will keep you safe.’   Kerry’s was, ‘I am not Bush.’  Kerry lost.

The Democrats will have to do better, or else they’re toast.

Posted in Politics, George Bush (43) | 1 Comment »

18. April 2012 by admin.

A New York State legislator has introduced a bill that would enable bus drivers and train crews on the subway and commuter railroads to carry Tasers to deter assaults.

The news report struck a nerve for me: a long time ago, when crime in New York City was at least twice as bad as it is now, I was a subway conductor.  At the time, conductors were required to watch the outside of the train move out of the station for a distance of three car lengths.  Many people cringed at that aspect of the job: you’re hanging out the window, uniformed, a target.

I had the job for a year, traveling under some of the worst neighborhoods in the city, and emerged from the experience pretty much unscathed.  I got spat on a few times, and simply washed it off at the end of the trip.  Someone tried to swipe my hat once; they failed.  And the most painful experience came when someone threw a pad of postcards at me.  Back then, some ads in the subway included pads of postcards for prospective customers to write in for more information.  When someone throws one at you while you’re on a moving train, it stings.

It was fun to do for a year, although I wouldn’t have wanted to spend the rest of my life at it.  Perhaps it was just because I was in my early twenties and felt indestructible, but the job didn’t seem very dangerous as long as you kept your wits about you.

Would I have wanted to be armed?  Absolutely not.   I don’t believe anything good would have come of it.

If transit workers had Tasers, for every bad guy subdued, there’d be at least five frazzled passengers zapped because their bus driver was having a bad day, ten fellow workers Tased in crew room hijinks, and probably a hundred passengers intimidated into silence.

It’s a bad idea.  Unfortunately, it’s been introduced in the New York State Legislature, where bad ideas never die.

Posted in Mass Transit, Occupational Danger, Dysfunctional Government | 4 Comments »

15. April 2012 by Dude wheres my job.

“What are you in for?”

I know of all of you but I don’t know how it came to be that you are jobless.

What happened to you and how did you wind up losing your job? What happened?

My story:

5 years ago, I was hired by a company that imports goods from overseas. 

About 3 months into the hire, there was an assignment that the boss needed to be done; she asked me to inquire and find outside contractors that could do the job that sne needed.

I looked on the interwebs and found about 15 companies that were willing; the 15 companies tricked down into 3.

One company decided the job was not his cup of tea, Company#2 wanted too much money to perform the task and Company #3 decided that he didn’t have the time.

In the meanwhile, throughout this endeavor, I kept a paper trail of everything: who I sent emails to, what happened when I called the contractors, what their response was, how much they’d charge her for the job, etc.

The boss knew this — she knew where she stood with each and every single one of these companies throughout the entire paper chase/phone call blitz/email contact that I made with them.

She told me she didn’t like the way I handled the assignment and she sniped at me for a good half hour. I told her over and over again I had a paper trail and she knew what was what…nope, she still insisted I did otherwise.

I showed her the paper trail. Still not proof for her.

The morning after the last contact that I made with Company #3, my intercom buzzed — it was Boss. She requested that I stop into her office and meet with her and Office Manager.

I got to her office; Boss asked me to have a seat. She started talking about the contracting job and who i contacted, etc — at first, I couldn’t figure out why in ‘ell she was bringing this up again, since it was more or less a closed case and now she was back at Square One: nobody to do the job she needed the outside contractor to do — but wow and God Almighty, she sure got to the point FAST.

She started in again on where we ah — left off — as far as that same assignment went.

I was told in no short terms that I had no responsibility, blah blah etcetera — and that I did NOT follow up with any of the companies I contacted for the job!!!

I had a plain as day paper trail — I stated this at the start of this post — but she insisted that I did NOTHING she asked me to do and that I blew the assignment!!!

I told her “I have a paper trail; you knew full well what was what each step of the way! I have names, telephone numbers and who i spoke to — you saw it” and she still insisted NO.

So you’re gonna tell me it was NO when you knew bleeping well it is YES?! Gee, welcome to the Third Reich Redux! 

I got screamed at; she melted down — she railed on and carried on and told me how disappointed she was in me — I in general got holy hell — and after that, Boss did anything she could to micromanage me and harass me and pick a fight with me.

I got the idea real quick after that conversation that I was a fifth wheel and taking up space there.

I got hell for a year — I would go up to her with proposals, information she needed — and 2 more times she turned it into a donnybrook.

We had a very small staff: her, her partner, Office Manager, me, a clerk, a part timer who came in one or 2 days a week and 3 sales gents.  Whenever she chewed me out, she did it in plain hearing of everybody else. Imagine how this hot mess made me look or feel —I was made to look like I could do NOTHING — in short, she turned me into the village idiot.

To this day, I can’t figure out what set her off with that first nonincident. As far as I am concerned, you made it clear, Boss, what you wanted — and I followed your directions to a T — and it was “wrong” in your estimation.

There were 2 more incidents after that that were bigger blowouts and hellfire than the first one I just cited.

And she’d also say horrible things about the guys and the clerk who worked there. (she eventually shitcanned the clerk; I don’t know what happened there; all I know is she railed away at him all day in their language, he was sticking around after 5; I said goodnight, he said goodnight to me and I left…. and when I came in the next day, OM told me that he was gone. “He was supposed to resign in a few months but the boss felt it better he leave now.” Excuse me??? No, he was shitcanned and who knows what happened that provoked the shitcanning?) Again, all of this within earshot of the scapegoat she was directing her retarded divisiveness at.

I got hell for a year and then I was let go. That’s a whole other story in itself. (I personally say she set me up just to have an excuse to get me out of there…)My work in general started to drop off in the late spring.  The work stagnated for sure about the start of July — I got the idea that Boss or OM would only talk to me if they wanted some kind of peon assignment performed.

And you know that when your gut tells you something is wrong, it usually is. Call me paranoid or somebody who needs a damn tin foil hat but I got the idea I was very closely being monitored by Boss and OM and every move I made was under a microscope.

The deal was that I was being laid off due to bad business — we had a canned clerk and a salesguy that eventually moved out of the area; he resigned — so you have 2 less bodies taking up seats here.  You never hired out for either person. Their positions remained unfilled.

SO why is it “necessary” to remove me, as  cost containing effort???

I was making the least amount of money out of the staff that was left. So what’s the deal here?

I got the usual “I didn’t want to do this” speech — the hell you didn’t — and I was sent out the door with the checks.

I got severance pay — big deal — and that lasted me about 3 months. After that, I filed for unemployment. That was start of November 2008.

And here I still sit, trying to find something. If I had known what kind of mess I’d be in now, I’d have fought her tooth and nail on this “layoff.”

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

15. April 2012 by Dude wheres my job.

I feel nothing but lost.

The last interview I had was a month ago. This was no small company; it’s a world wide known skincare company.

I don’t think the interviewer knew what she was looking for — either that, or she simply decided I was not her cup of tea. I didn’t even get a second interview out of the bargain.

What exactly do you say now that will ensure you get at least called back for a second interview? She asked me where I wanted to be in 5 years — this always strikes me as a question you ask somebody fresh out of college or with mimimal experience. I’m somebody her age or a tad older. (this is why I don’t think she knew what she was looking for)

I told her I wanted to be working with the division with products that were geared to the baby boomers; that is one of the growing demographics. It’s also the demographic that has the most money.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe my answer just sucked. Or maybe I did.

Perhaps I should have told her “working in your company’s R&D division and getting my masters’ in bio or higher” — what DO you say to somebody when they ask you a question like this? And why are you asking a 54 year old a question like that, anyway???

And how do you guarantee your answer will be what they need to hear?

That interview was a month ago. I never even got a hollaback from her that said Thanks But No. Dead air as usual.

Then there was the “interview” for the bartending job; that was a no go also. The person who was in charge of the apps told me “I will show this app to my partners and they will decide by these apps who will get the job. That will be at the end of the week.” This “interview” took place at the end of February.

As far as I am concerned, she rejected ME — whether this was rejection of my appearance or what, I don’t know — the owners of the bar are older; the woman who spoke to me is no spring chicken herself. So what happened here?

I tend to think she rejected ME and how I looked. What else could it have been?

(My looks are hardly the kind that frightens horses, other animals and young children. So what’s her point here? She wasn’t much to look at herself so yes, what’s the deal?)

The bar and restaurant itself is a small establishment. I don’t know what they are shooting for; the patrons who eat there and drink there are town residents. If the new proprietors are looking to attract as patrons a mostly younger crowd or an or an upscale crowd, I don’t know — if that’s what they want and expect, they’re in for a surprise.

About 3 weeks after I went down to the bar, I popped in again. She was nowhere in sight but the 2 owners were. They told me nobody was hired since they hadn’t gotten full ownership of the bar yet and that the paperwork for ownership was still hung up.   At that point I concluded that this bunch didn’t know what THEY were doing and I decided that the bar wasn’t for me, after all. Disorganized? Perhaps.

And the bar is open now. And no, I never heard from them.

I am at the end of my rope. I’ve had close to 90 interviews and easily 600 or more resumes/cold calls that I submitted. And I spent many an afternoon going from one commerical office building to the next, armed with resumes, asking if the companies within are hiring on.

I also rang back quite a few companies I interviewed with, to see if they were hiring again. No dice.

2 weeks ago I took a week off from looking for a job. I purposely skipped looking at the job ads, both in hard copy and on line. 

I decided I needed a break from the madding crowd; it was all getting to be too much for me. 

At the end of the week, I had a look at the ads that I “missed.” Nothing much was available; there were 5 companies and all of them turned out to be very small mom and pop establishments. One of the women at one of those companies who got the phone — I applied for her job last week — told me that “all we want is just an admin; it sounds like you have a lot of corporate experience. We are only a small family owned company.” Yet their ad “read” like one that was a corporate company. You’ve just wasted our time. Maybe we don’t want to apply for a job that’s a small mom and pop company.

I am guessing they nicked the ad from some other Craigslist job ad and fine tuned it a bit so it met their requirements.  Nothing wrong with that per se but for love of the deities, how about being more concise??? “Office assistant needed for small family owned landscape company” and then describe the skill set you need — that would have been a more accurate job description to place in an ad.

The people who don’t “get it” don’t help. “Go to WalMart! Go to Kohl’s! Try the new bagel place downtown. There is a big sign in their window….” Jam MalMart, Kohl’s I never heard from and I spoke to the bagel place already.

As per the bagel place guy from a month ago, he told me they’d be opening at the end of April. Yeah, well, he still doesn’t get the phone — my guess is that they may be waiting on contractors or wow, who knows what else, and they aren’t ready to open at all.

What do you do when you need a job? when you direly need the money? (I have a plateful of woes that I won’t dare go into here — all I’ll say is that my situation is desparate) Where do you go? What do you do? How do you get money to come into your pocket so that you can pay bills the way you should, and do so without any trouble or delay? How?

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

6. April 2012 by new_wave_princess.

As I get older I realize one strange oddity and that is how my much younger self would hate my older self. Things that seemed so dead set are on opposite ends now.

I look back to my early 20’s and how I would protest (yes protest)things I thought were wrong. I started an anti censorship group when I was 20 and fought for many things besides censorship like abortion, religious groups, welfare, affirmative action, and so many more. I was very far left, definitely close to communism and yes I called myself a socialist. I worked with the Democratic Party hoping they would become as far left as me. After all the Republicans were the enemy and they hated far lefties like me.

What happened? I slowly did a turn more right. I started to see things that bothered me. I lost a job due to affirmative action and realized that while people are discriminated against, that sometimes with affirmative action other people are discriminated as well. I started seeing people I know abuse the welfare system and my old belief that it’s fine to have kids out of wedlock and on welfare disappeared. I saw people abuse the abortion choice and while I support it I realize the pro life movement isn’t completely wrong either and that for me personally I would not do it. Not to mention taxes. In my early 20’s I was in college and didn’t pay a lot in taxes or it didn’t appear I did. However once I started going into the real world I saw I often paid taxes the more I worked.

While all of this started me turning right, the event that really switched my views on a lot was my long term unemployment. When I started unemployment I was so sure I would be employed eventually. 4 years and counting I am still unemployed and while I still apply for jobs and still get the random interview I know I am pretty much useless to a lot of employers. Anyway you would think this would turn me left but instead it opened my eyes and I saw that neither main party cared about us and in fact were in cahoots to kill the middle class. While I voted for Obama I woke up to the fact that he lied about his intentions. At least as awful that Bush was we knew he would be for the rich. Obama claimed to be for us and has proven he is not.

Finally another interesting twist to all of this and that is I went back to church. Yes remember in my early 20’s I hated religion? now I wish some religious aspects could come into play in politics. Now I am not saying I want a religious society but many aspects are ones that would help us, such as cut down on teen pregnancies, executions, and more family time and less work time. I came to a powerful realization a few years ago and that is I regret spending all this time being work obsessed when I could have had a family. Now at 41 I find myself unemployed with no end in sight and single and childless. The idea of me being a crazy cat lady living in my parents house when I get old scares me. What if it’s too late for me to have kids or find a husband? Scary and I blame the radical feminists for brainwashing me that to have a great career I needed to repress other needs. However I am not giving up on having a career again along with a husband and a family.

Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments »

6. April 2012 by new_wave_princess.

This is something that is so unreal it feels like bizarro world. So Sallie Mae screwed up my loan account and they called me. Sallie Mae for those who don’t know is a FEDERAL loan program and this part is important to remember. Anyway the person I spoke to was from India I believe and she said yes it was overseas. I asked to speak to a supervisor and he too was overseas and there were NO Americans I could speak to. Yep so not only do they get tax money but people overseas get the job. Did I mention Sallie Mae used to be in Kansas or somewhere like that until recently?

So then I called the Democratic Party to complain about this since they are supposed to be the party of the average person (ha!). The guy LAUGHED at me and said they didn’t care that more jobs are going overseas and Obama will be re elected anyway even if I don’t vote for him which I won’t (I am voting third party).

I am so disgusted about this. He claimed he would bring back jobs and instead more jobs go overseas. Meanwhile I haven’t worked in 4 years, and I have two worthless degrees.

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

28. March 2012 by Dude wheres my job.

It’s just another day in the job hunting world.

Yes, I’m still at it.

Last week was pretty interesting; the company that had the open position turned out to be a one office hole, operating out of a newish McMansion home — the office was in the corner of a basement; it did not look like there were tenants in the home.

The company touted themselves as a “trader for the high tech industry.”  Turns out that translated into “we sell computer parts to our home country.”

The company didn’t even have a website. How do you figure that? Everybody’s got a website now, if they’re a business — and if not a website, at the very least, a webpage. Corner bars and neighborhood delis and the tiniest of businesses have websites and webpages; this “company” couldn’t even manage that much.

To be a somewhat credible company, you must have a website.  The moral to the story here: if there is no website attached to the company, move on. Don’t apply for their “job.” To me, this is not a company at all, if no website exists.

Is this what job seekers have to look forward to: jobs being offered by  nonentity self-appointed and self-proclamed “companies” that are not even companies at all?

Posted in job hunting | 6 Comments »

28. March 2012 by itsallmadness.

Someone named “chemietoiletten” responded to my post with a post in German, but with an English lead-in.  The name means roughly “chemical toilets”.  Call me racist, but if you can’t post in English, your post goes down the memory hole.

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

25. March 2012 by itsallmadness.

I moved from Germany to Colorado a couple of months ago, and have been buying a house and getting settled.  One of the disappointments of my house was that I had to replace the bathroom floor.  It cost me $800, including a new flange for the toilet.  Carpeting in a bathroom is a huge mistake, particularly when one of the residents uses a commode.  I’ve been tearing up the carpeting to be sure that there are no more surprises.  So far, so good.

Did I create a job?  I hired two people to do the work, one for the plumbing and the onther one to put down linoleum, which made me think that jobs are not so much created as demanded, and companies are not willing to keep a stock of people on hand for work that MIGHT need to be done. The “nice to have” tasks are falling by the wayside, and this can be tracked in many occupations.  The one that I see most is the decline of adminstrative personnel. Had I had the time (and another bathroom to use while I made the repair), I could have done the work myself.  I might have saved $400 or so, but I didn’t have the time to do the work immediately, because I had to pick up my car in St. Louis.

Another point about hiring people is that I took referrals, because I didn’t know anybody in town who did such work, and I may well have gotten hosed on prices.  No matter.  What I do know is that the sinking feeling when I sit on the toilet is now gone.  I won’t end up in the crawlspace under my house unless someone puts me there or I go there voluntarily.

When one moves from overseas, their vehicle goes to a “vehicle processing center” (VPC) , and there are about 10 around the country.  I was told that the closest one is St. Louis, but it’s in Dallas. I could have had my car shipped to me for $650, but I was given a week off to get the car, so I went to get it. The St. Louis VPC is in Pontoon Beach, IL, which gave me the pleasure of getting from the St. Louis airport to there, which required a train, a bus, and a taxi ride.

I usually bring something to read wherever I go, and one of the statistics that I came across is that we have on average 150 things that need to be done. I came up with 50 things for my “things to do” list when I first arrived. I know that I missed a lot of things, but these were the tasks of highest priority. I don’t believe that it is possible to multitask. We can be aware of certain things and that gives you an edge in getting things done, but that isn’t the same as doing them.

I consider “economic stimulus” to be the big lie of our time.  I paid cash to get my bathroom floor fixed, and we can argue about what the multiplier effect will be of the money that I spent.  The only money that gets spent that has a positive economic effect is money that comes from savings, not money from debt.  It takes over a dollar of debt to get an increase of a dollar in GDP.  Withdraw the stimulus and GDP collapses by the amount of the stimulus.

Posted in Things Falling Apart | No Comments »

25. March 2012 by admin.

Last week, I was having a chat with a conservative friend.  He was my boss, years ago, and since retired.

“The conservatives say that one of the reasons we’re not doing so well is excessive government regulation,” I said.  ”Supposedly, if we ditch all these rules, we’ll unleash growth and create jobs.”

“Right.”

“But there are vast enterprises, with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of workers, associated with these regulations.  Not just the government bureaucrats, but private-sector consultants and others, all associated with the maintenance of and compliance with these regulations.  What happens to them?”

“That’s not my concern.  They’ll just have to find work for themselves in the new environment.  Did you expect the government to help them?”

No, I really didn’t expect the government to help them.  In fact, however onerous and pointless they may seem, most government regulations have a political constituency behind them, which will make them hard to get rid of.

But as much as I’d like to believe otherwise, it seems more likely that cutting government regulations will destroy more jobs than it creates.

Oh, bother.

Posted in Politics, Dysfunctional Government, Things Falling Apart | 1 Comment »

23. March 2012 by collegeguy.

Sadly it may be a lost cause. People in the US do not want to hear the facts. Taxes must go up on everyone. Services must be cut as well.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

19. March 2012 by admin.

When Barack Obama was running for President, he had the entirely reasonable idea of letting the Bush tax cuts expire for those making over $200k/year.  In December 2010, he caved and signed on to an extension of the tax cuts for two more years, even though the government was (and still is) running huge deficits.

What happened?

Allow me a somewhat fanciful explanation:

Sometime after he was elected but before he was inaugurated, President-elect Obama was briefed on the realities of our world and the Presidency.  He was told the truth about terrorists and UFOs, the proper way to order an ICBM launch, and the location of the secret White House Coke machine.

I’ll speculate further that he was also given a briefing rather like the ‘primal forces of nature’ speech from the movie Network about how the US was doomed, and how he couldn’t raise taxes on the rich, or tweak entitlements, or do any of the practical things that one might think of to actually address the problems we face.  He was also informed in grisly detail of the consequences for proposing such heresies, or telling the American public the truth about what we are facing.

And so Barack Obama, apostle of Hope and Change, became yet another politician.

But we didn’t get that briefing.  We’re outside the corridors of power, watching our country crumble around us, wondering, if not about our next meal, where our meals will come from two years from now.

If we set aside, for a moment, our notions of what is politically correct or feasible, how could we restore productivity and prosperity?  Or is it really a lost cause?

Posted in Politics, Dysfunctional Government, Money, Barack Obama | 1 Comment »

15. March 2012 by admin.

Once upon a time, when I started keeping a Web journal (we didn’t yet call them ‘blogs’) back in 1999, I had time pretty much every day to write something interesting about the world around me.  It was a way to vent, and while I hoped that some pretty girl would read my stuff and become enchanted with me, I recognized that it would be a long shot.  (I ultimately did find the pretty girl, though; we’ve now been married for 11 years.)

Now, in 2012, I have too many things to do, and too little time and energy to do them all.   I’ve been lucky if I can write two posts a month.  From time to time, I’ve considered pulling the plug on this site.

I’ve written about the Bait and Switched forum at the Barbara Ehrenreich Web site, and how it was beset by spammers.  More recently, the forum software seems to have crapped out: when one tries to write a post there, one is greeted by an error message.  I’ve offered this site as an alternate venue, and several members of that group have signed up.  I hope we’ll have some interesting discussions about the economy, and the state of the world, and maybe, just maybe, find a way to make this not such a Harder World after all.

I don’t know how this will turn out, but I’m hopeful.

Posted in Blogging | 7 Comments »

26. February 2012 by admin.

The other day, my pajamas wore out.  Time for a new set.

Once upon a time, actually not that long ago, I went to Macy’s and bought a set of pajamas, a top and a bottom, in a cellophane bag.  I think the last set I bought that way, admittedly made in China, cost about $20.

But more recently, most of the stores have stopped selling pajamas as sets: you buy the top and the bottom separately.  So my wife and I looked around:

At Macy’s, they had a selection of designer pajamas, with the pants costing $19 to $38, made in China or El Salvador.  (At least El Salvador is on this side of the planet.)  The colors were blah: blue, yellow (charming, but not $38 worth), pink (for the man who’s really sure of his masculinity), and grey (looking rather like a pinstriped suit fabric: I tend to think of pajamas and pinstriped suits as mutually exclusive).

At jcp (the department store formerly known as J. C. Penney), they had Chinese pajama bottoms for $12.  I found a blue/green plaid pair: done.

But what if I wanted pajamas not from China or El Salvador, but the dear old United States?  At Macy’s and jcp, I’d be out of luck.

There’s American Apparel, with little stores in my part of Brooklyn.  I’ve actually never visited one: from the outside it looks like mostly women’s items.  But their Web site has pajama bottoms for… wait for it… $38, the same as the designer brands at Macy’s.

There’s Red Flannel Factory in Michigan, that offers pajamas in red flannel (you were expecting lime-green Kevlar?) for $43.  I’d probably feel better if I could see the goods first.

Some further searching uncovered the Vermont Flannel Company, ‘dedicated to world comfort.’  A few clicks yielded pictures of a beautiful array of pajama sets in a selection of colors.  But a set costs $83.60… if they had any in stock.

And then there’s BedHead Pajamas, based in Los Angeles (but with a shop in NYC).  Pajama bottoms are $78 with most sets around $140.

Trying to support American manufacturing is all well and good, but I can’t bring myself to pay triple the price.

Posted in Made in USA (or not), Life Goes On | 1 Comment »

11. February 2012 by admin.

Walking down the street near my office the other day, I found myself contemplating New York City taxicabs.  A few years ago, the cab scene was a monoculture of Ford Crown Victorias; there are plenty of them still around, but there are Toyotas and Ford Explorer SUVs and Transit Connect vans, which are wheelchair-accessible.  (Nothing by General Motors, though.  Weird.)

New York City is under a court order to make all its taxis wheelchair-accessible.  On a practical level, it seems absurd: the proportion of taxi passengers who use a wheelchair is so small that the cost difference for a wheelchair-accessible taxis works out to over $100,000 per wheelchair-using passenger.  Drivers don’t like the boxy vans that are commonly used: besides the issue of maneuverability in city traffic, they’re less conducive to conversation with passengers, which leads to smaller tips.

But we have the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates wheelchair-accessible taxis and buses and countless other things.  OK: it’s the law, so we have to accept it.

For a moment, I contemplated the New York City I grew up in: the seat of commerce and finance of the most productive and powerful nation on Earth.  We had big Checker cabs that were almost wheelchair-accessible.  It wouldn’t have taken much redesign to make it happen, back then.

If the world had gone forward as we imagined it would in the 1960s, we’d probably have wheelchair-accessible taxis, buses, subways, and everything else by now.   We’d consider it a statement of our power and prosperity that we could make these simple amenities accessible to everyone, and we wouldn’t begrudge the cost.  And if the world had gone forward as we imagined it in the 1960s, I’d be planning my next vacation on the Moon.

But it didn’t happen that way.  After the novelty of visiting the Moon wore off, we stopped doing it.  We stopped being productive, because it’s cheaper to do productive things elsewhere.  The prosperity that would have made such things as wheelchair-accessible taxis effortless faded away.  In its place we have the enforced stinginess of the bean counters.

If we were truly a rich country, we’d have wheelchair-accessible taxis as a matter of the corporate pride of the taxi operators.

But we’re not really as rich as we imagine, so we have wheelchair-accessible taxis by government fiat.

Or, we’ll get them, eventually.

Posted in New York City, Dysfunctional Government | No Comments »

5. February 2012 by admin.

One of the Web sites I follow regularly is the Barbara Ehrenreich forum from her book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.  The book describes her unsuccessful efforts to secure a ‘middle-class’ job in corporate America, and the people she meets along the way.  The book came out before the financial crisis of 2008, and it was already clear that the corporate job that we once took as a mainstay of American life was going the way of the dodo.  When it came out, I had recently started my own business, and it was comforting to find out that I was not the only one who had been stomped on by my last employer.

There are about a half-dozen people on the forum who post regularly about the sorry state of employment in the US, and up until a month ago, that was OK.  But for the last few weeks, the forum has been taken over by ‘HicyacixGar,’ who generates useless posts about 50 times a day.  We’re down to one thread, as everything else is flooded by Hicaycix.

But I’m compelled to wonder: who or what is HicyacixGar?

OK, a spammer, but to what end?  The posts appear to be illicit ads for prescription drugs, but the Bait and Switch forum seems a thoroughly pointless target for a marketing effort.

Looking at the other fora on the Barbara Ehrenreich Web site, there is some spamming going on, but nowhere near as bad.  The Bait and Switch forum had been the most active, with the most interesting discussions.

So I wonder: is Hicyacix just a spammer, or does it represent a person or agency bent on suppressing discussion about the crappy state of the economy and employment?

Posted in Computers, Networking (computer) | 5 Comments »

30. January 2012 by admin.

In recent weeks, Congress has at least temporarily dropped efforts at preparing a law to address intellectual property (IP) and trade piracy: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) have been dropped in response to widespread online protests.

That isn’t to say that IP piracy isn’t a  serious problem: it is.  But SOPA and PIPA were the wrong way of dealing with it.  Essentially they gave the government the power to subvert the normal operation of the Internet by making Web sites unavailable, to require Internet service providers (ISPs) to support such efforts, and the ability to do so without due process.

Now we find out that, a few months ago, the President signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), that supposedly requires all these things.  It requires ISPs to be the copyright police, interferes with efforts to import generic drugs, and all other manner of evil.

Well, maybe.

I’ve read the actual ACTA, as it was agreed to by various countries of the world, twice.  (It’s not terribly long: about 30 pages.)  I didn’t find any reference to ISPs having to be the police, or of any of the other evils that I had read about.  All it says is that member countries shall have laws in place to deal with trade and IP piracy.  The requirements for these laws are eerily similar to current US law.

Earlier versions had more troublesome requirements, but they didn’t make it into the final version.  Our leadership may go and enact more Draconian restrictions, but they could do that anyway.

So, yes, Internet freedom is under attack, as a long-term trend.  SOPA and PIPA may return in some form later this year, and there may be future versions of ACTA that will require ISPs to function as police.

But the current ACTA, not so much.

Posted in Politics, Networking (computer) | No Comments »

24. January 2012 by admin.

The last month has been a blur.  I pretty much missed the holidays: too much work, and when Christmas finally rolled around, I could hardly get out of bed.  We didn’t have a Christmas tree, and after New Year’s, I had working weekends with 22-hour workdays.  But last weekend was more or less normal, and my wife is still putting up with me, so it can’t be all bad.

Just after New  Year’s, someone introduced me to last year’s Duran Duran album, All You Need Is Now.  It is a pitcher of icewater in the desert of allegedly popular music.  OK: it’s a blast from the past, but what makes it so good?

I usually trip over myself when trying to write about music, so forgive me if this is a little clunky.  But Duran Duran’s music–when they’re not trying to be something else–speaks of a place of achievement, where logic and reason carries the day, where things work.   It makes you want to set aside your pains and complaints and go out and accomplish something.

And for that reason, the title track, ‘All You Need Is Now,’ is my belated Song of the Year for 2011.

Posted in Holidays, Navel-gazing, Music | No Comments »

10. December 2011 by admin.

In 2010, I voted for Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate, in the New York gubernatorial election.  He was the Tea Party candidate, and a bit of a nut, but I couldn’t to bring myself to vote for Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic candidate, because he was just another politician.  (That, and his father had been governor before him.)

I doubted that Paladino would actually win, and I was right.

But I was pleasantly surprised with the first few months of Governor Cuomo.  He stood up to the rest of the government and was able to balance the budget with no new taxes.  Even though I didn’t vote for him, I was pleased to see him succeed.

Until this week.

In 2009, New York passed a temporary income tax surcharge on those earning over about $200k/year.  The surcharge is set to expire at the end of this year.  It’s the mirror image of the Federal ‘Bush tax cuts’ in that it’s a temporary increase in tax rates.

For the last few months, Governor Cuomo was insisting that he would not renew the surcharge.  But he’s apparently been worn down.  In the last two weeks, he has been talking about ‘using the tax code to create new jobs.’  I have no idea what that means.

And now this week, we have new income tax rates.  The highest rate is now 8.82%, well above the pre-surcharge rate of 6.85%, but below the surcharged rate of 8.97%.  For the rest of us, we get a 0.2% rate cut, or about 3-4% of the average New Yorker’s state income taxes.

Oh, goody: I got a tax cut.  It’s not enough to even pay for my daily newspaper, but I’m supposed to be all happy about it.

And if I earned millions, I could still say I got a tax cut, at least with respect to last year’s tax rates.

I still can’t see for the life of me how such tweakage will create one single job.

Posted in New York State, Dysfunctional Government | 1 Comment »

6. December 2011 by admin.

A limited audit of the Federal Reserve Bank, conducted as part of recent ‘bank reform’ legislation, revealed that the Fed had lent some $16 trillion to US and foreign banks between 2007 and 2010.

This shouldn’t really be a surprise: bits and pieces about how the Federal Reserve was throwing money around in an effort to restart the economy appeared from time to time.  But since it’s a story that requires more than eight seconds to explain, the media didn’t really say very much about it.

OK: the Fed did what it’s supposedly intended to: maintain the money supply as the cornerstone of a functioning economy.  But in September 2008, when we were told that the would would come to an end if the government didn’t allocate $700 billion right this instant to bail out banks and insurance companies, we were being played for fools.

If the government hadn’t allocated the funds, the Fed would have.  It would make their $16 trillion pot a little more risky, which would have tweaked interest rates up a bit.  But life, and the economy, would have gone on.

We won’t get fooled again… I hope.

But beyond that, the actions of the Fed reveal that it doesn’t really matter what the government does: the Fed, and the banks, will do what they want anyway.

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Money | No Comments »

4. December 2011 by admin.

One of my observations about the Occupy movement was that while it highlighted the growing disparity between rich and poor in this country, it didn’t have any practical suggestions for dealing with it.  But that wasn’t entirely true.  There was no agenda for directly addressing the problems, but there were two practical suggestions:

• Get money out of politics;
• Reform the banks.

These items were between the lines in a lot of discussions about the Occupy movement, and were a frequent subtext of many protesters’ placards, but never got much play in the media.

They’re worthy goals, although I can’t say that I agree with the methods the Occupiers would suggest to address them.

The essential concern of those who would want to get money out of politics is that, right now, we have politicians in the image of those who fund them: the very rich and the bankers.  I completely agree.

The usual solution is for government funding of campaigns.  But that won’t change the reality that politicians reflect their funding.  So instead of having politicians in the image of the bankers, we have politicians in the image of the previous government.  I’m not sure which is worse.

The bigger problem is the quality of political candidates.   In 2009, I was disappointed with Mayor Bloomberg.  He had finagled a change to the law enabling him to run for a third term.  He was actually doing pretty well, and had a decent shot at succeeding in a referendum to abolish term limits if it had been attempted in 2008.

But I voted for him anyway, because the other candidate, William Thompson, was worse.  Thompson represented the traditional approach to city government: raise taxes and pay off the unions.

A similar thing is happening now in the Presidential campaign.  The different Republican candidates all have their strengths and weaknesses.  But none of them is a compelling alternative to Obama, although some of them represent the lesser of two evils.  OK, maybe Ron Paul, but the party establishment seems to consider him an embarrassment.

Until we get better candidates, I’m not sure changes to campaign financing will help.

As far as reforming the banks, it sounds like a good idea: the regulated banks of the latter 20th century helped to make us prosperous, and when the regulations were removed, the banks promptly drove themselves into the ditch.  And indeed, new bank regulations were enacted into law this year.

But the regulations don’t seem to do very much, other than nibbling at the edges of minor inconveniences (like not having three weeks to pay one’s credit card bill), and making it harder for smaller banks to function (so that they can get swallowed by bigger banks).  Unfortunately, bank reform is in the hands of our… politicians.

Real bank reform, unfortunately, will have to wait for politicians capable of executing it.

Posted in Popular Discontent, Media | No Comments »

3. December 2011 by admin.

It’s December, and I’m getting nervous.

Not about getting people Christmas presents, or the vast pile of work at the office, although those are concerns.  It’s almost the end of the year, and I haven’t come across a single candidate for my Song of the Year.

Last year, it was easy: ‘Telephone,’ by Lady Gaga.  Yes, the record came out in late 2009, but I was first aware of the song in January 2010, which is what counts.  ’Telephone’ is exciting and propulsive, a good song to play in the back of your mind while bicycling.  I was thinking of disqualifying it after watching the music video of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé as mass murderers, but there was really no competition.

But this year… nothing.  A couple of times, the Song of the Year has been a James Bond theme, but the last James Bond movie came out in 2008.

This morning, I forced myself to sit through the new Lady Gaga video, ‘Marry the Night.’  The video is a pastiche of mental illness, physical fitness, and arson: spare me.  But, as with last year, I’ll give a pass if the song is good.

Which, alas, it isn’t.  There isn’t much of a melody, but it could have worked if it was presented clearly and assertively.  But there was more noise than music, and Gaga herself knew the words were mere poetic fluff (unlike ‘Telephone’) and couldn’t bring herself to sing them like she meant it.

The song might have gotten my attention with different lyrics, perhaps with a guy singing it, but not the way it was.  Not even close.

My first Song of the Year was in 1975, when I was 14: ‘Brazil’ by the Ritchie Family.  Through about 2000, there were generally several candidates every year.  But then things simply dried up.

I’ll find something.  Maybe.

Posted in Music | No Comments »

21. November 2011 by admin.

Last week, the Occupy Wall Street protesters were kicked out of Zuccotti Park, after an ‘occupation’ of two months.  They were allowed to return, but not to set up camp, a judge having determined that the First Amendment right to free speech does not include tents, sleeping bags, and generators.

On Thursday, they staged further protests, including a march into lower Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge.  I actually had a meeting in lower Manhattan that day, and passed right under the protest on the subway, totally oblivious to what was happening.  The protest march unfolded on the evening news, with people making their way slowly towards the bridge.

Beyond that, I don’t know what happened.  I suspect the movement had realized it was reaching the point of diminishing returns, but didn’t know how to deal with it.

For my part, the biggest problem with the Occupy movement was that it didn’t have any solutions.  They’re right: the richest 1% are sucking the wealth from the remaining 99%.  OK: what do we >>do<< about it?

The unions attempted to latch onto the Occupy movement for their own ends, but it never really took, from what I could tell.  Alas, the traditional left-wing approach (tax the rich and share the goodies with the rest of us) has its own issues: merely tweaking the tax rates would not raise enough revenue to make a dent in our problems.

Until someone can suggest a compelling alternative to the yowling from our elected officials, we’re stuck.

Meanwhile…

This morning brought word that the super committee formed after August’s budget brouhaha failed to come up with a plan to cut $1.2T over the next ten years.  The cut in question is hardly Draconian: it’s about 3% of overall Federal spending, and represents merely a dent in our enormous continuing deficits.

Alas, the yowling continues….

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

16. November 2011 by admin.

I’ve been travelling a lot in the past month: it’s why I haven’t been able write a post for a while.  (It’s not just the travelling, it’s the load of things I have to do when I get there.)  But I’ve been thinking about airport security, and the people who say that it violates their Fourth Amendment rights.

I can’t say that I’ve had a genuinely bad airport security experience.  I’ve never been groped or had my things maliciously searched, and I’ve never had an encounter with airport security staff–anywhere–that wasn’t completely professional.  On the other hand, it isn’t necessarily a pleasant experience.

Anyhow, the Fourth Amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

OK: does airport security, as it’s currently practiced, constitute an ‘unreasonable search’?

While I rail against the government doing lots of things, I can’t rail against the principle of airport security.  Besides terrorists, there are other things that people might bring on airliners that are troublesome.  Everyone wants to get to their destination safely, and airport security is part of making that happen.   Perhaps it could be done better, smarter, or less obtrusively, but from where we’re starting, I’m not sure there are practical alternatives.

So there’s an obvious public interest involved, making airport searches reasonable.

But going further:

• A US airliner is private property.  If there were no TSA, wouldn’t airlines still have the right to search you before flying, to make sure you weren’t carrying anything dangerous?  (Indeed, isn’t that what the airlines did before 11 September?)
• I’ve traveled to other countries, and I’m not sure they have laws similar to our Fourth Amendment.  If I object to being searched in the US on Fourth Amendment grounds, does that objection go away when I travel from a place without a Fourth Amendment?

Yesterday morning, at the subway station on my way to work, the police had set up a random search table, with a TSA guy in his electric-blue shirt brandishing some kind of detection instrument.  I expected to be stopped: there were four cops and one TSA guy, and they looked like they needed something to do.  But they let me pass.

Searching people before they get on airplanes is unpleasant, but reasonable.

Searching people before a subway ride?  That’s worrisome.

Posted in Travel, Dysfunctional Government | No Comments »

12. September 2011 by admin.

Saturday night at about 10:00 pm, I was roused by the sound of explosions.  I wasn’t sure what it was, at first, whether we were under attack or it was just fireworks.  I hadn’t read anything in the newspapers about fireworks that night, and it seems in questionable taste to hold a fireworks event on the eve of our Day of National… whatever.

I flipped through the news channels on the tube.  There were no reports of anything untoward, although the Weather Channel showed a few seconds of live video of fireworks over the city.  OK, it’s fireworks, not terrorists, so I can relax.

Sunday morning, I was curious if there were any news reports of the fireworks the night before.  I searched around, and came up mostly empty.  I did find that the City had issued a permit for fireworks from a barge near Red Hook.  That explained the volume of the explosions (I live near Red Hook) and confirmed that the event was not my imagination.

The permit had been issued to ‘Kaynelive LLC,’ an event coordinator, but a visit to their Web site turned up nothing.  So the fireworks were a private event that had been contracted for.

Meanwhile, nothing appeared in Sunday’s papers, nor the newspaper Web sites this morning.

So who arranged for the show?

• Party promoters, staging an event where people pay to go to a party and hear music;
• The parents of a spoiled kid, throwing a Bar/Bat Mitzvah / quinceañera / sweet sixteen party;
• A radical Islamic group, thumbing their nose at the rest of us.

At this point, your guess is good as mine.

Posted in 11 September | No Comments »

7. September 2011 by admin.

The news media are bursting with reports reminding us that this coming Sunday is the tenth anniversary of 11 September 2001, a date which will live in infamy.

But for what?

Of course, I know damn right well what.  I was working in Manhattan that day, and had to walk home, across the Manhattan Bridge, seeing the column of smoke in the sky.  I still react to the video of the airplane slamming into the South Tower as a punch in the gut.  I remember the smell, the dust, the eerie quiet in the weeks that followed.

But there is one small question.  At times, I thought I knew the answer, but now, I’m not so sure:

How is it that three modern steel buildings all collapsed into neat little piles, dropping at near free-fall speed, covering little more than their own footprints?

I’ve always believed that it was within the power of our leadership to forestall the events of 11 September, but that they allowed it to happen in order to advance their own political agenda.  But if, for a moment, we ponder that small question, and set aside the official answer of jet-fuel fires, what comes out is horrifying.

If the Twin Towers and 7 WTC did not simply collapse, then our government took an event that might have killed hundreds and amplified it so as to kill thousands.  And if our leadership could kill thousands of Americans to score political points, what else are they capable of?

OK: that’s one alternative.  But if we step back from that, and return to the official version of what happened, then we have a government that in spite of clear warnings was simply asleep at the switch.

In other words, our leadership is either evil or stupid.

And that’s the tenth anniversary that we’re really observing.

Posted in 11 September, World Trade Center | No Comments »

6. September 2011 by admin.

It rained all day today; the high temperature for the day was 69 degrees after midnight, and then it got colder through the day.  That means that today is officially Retro-Rockets Day, the first genuinely cool day of the year.

I started using that expression to myself in high school: I got genuinely lazy during the summer, and when the first cool day arrived, generally some time in late August, I knew it was time to get out of my lazy summer orbit and prepare for school.

Many years ago, I worked as a subway conductor.  When the first cool day came around in August, my immediate reaction was to pull out the cool-weather uniform (long-sleeve shirt and jacket), perplexing most of my colleagues.  Even though my work didn’t really change with the seasons, I was still happy to see the first hint of fall.

Alas, I don’t have the luxury of lazy summers anymore, but I still celebrate Retro-Rockets day, at least within my own mind.  It’s better being productive when you’re not fighting the weather.

Posted in Weather, Navel-gazing | No Comments »

30. August 2011 by admin.

During the storm last weekend, the old song ‘Windy’ by The Association came to mind.  I remember it as a happy song from my childhood; I think one of our music teachers had the class sing it once.

Yesterday, while Googling around, I discovered that I have misunderstood the song for all these years.  Apparently, it’s really about a drug dealer.  And all the clever but flawed references to meteorology were actually references to a drug dealer and  the effects of his (her?) wares.

I doubt that I’ll ever be able to ask the songwriter’s intent, so I’ll go by the music.  There is music of druggies and music of achievement.  ’Windy’ is definitely the latter: it is propulsive, energetic, and has a real melody.  So I’ll believe that it’s a song about a pretty girl who enchants the beholder and doesn’t take crap from anyone.

And if you still want to believe that it’s about a drug dealer, I guess that’s your privilege.  It’s still a free country, at least in that respect.

Posted in Navel-gazing, Music | No Comments »

29. August 2011 by admin.

I know that Irene caused flooding and wind damage elsewhere, but in my little corner of Brooklyn, it was generally a dud.

It rained late Saturday night through most of Sunday morning, but with much less wind than I had been led to expect.  The power even stayed on.  It seemed like any of a hundred storms with no name and no press agent.

At 9:00 am yesterday, I put on my rain slicker and headed out.  There was moderate rain and some wind, and the Gowanus Canal was about 5′ over its normal level, causing some local flooding, but nothing dire.

In the afternoon, the report came that the subways might not be running for Monday morning.  The MTA posted pictures of flooding of their train yards near Coney Island and in Harlem.

In the evening, I went out for a walk with my wife.  The setting sun was finally breaking through the clouds, and it was windier than earlier in the day.  Weird.

And as I write this on Monday morning, the news reports that the subways are running again.  Let’s hope….

Posted in Weather, New York City | No Comments »

27. August 2011 by admin.

I missed writing about the earthquake earlier this week: I was on a business trip in the middle of Pennsylvania, when the room vibrated for a bit, as if there were a subway train passing underneath.  I suspected that it was an earthquake, but the power stayed on, nothing actually shook, and nothing further happened.  It was only afterward, when I watched the evening news, that the dimensions of the event were clearer.  My wife, in Brooklyn at the time, was unaware of it.

Anyhow, if the debt brouhaha and an earthquake were not enough, today we await the arrival of Hurricane Irene, which is now pounding North Carolina and headed north:

• The City has ordered the evacuation of locations in Zone A.  The zones are part of the citywide coastal storm plan, but there is no simple logic to them: it’s not like ‘five blocks from the water.’  You have to look it up on the map, or through the City Web site.  And while the map has been printed in the newspapers, it isn’t clear enough to resolve the details.  I live in Zone B: if I were two blocks south, I’d be in Zone A; if I were two blocks north, I’d be in Zone C; and if I were three blocks north, I wouldn’t be in any zone, and presumably safe from coastal flooding.  We live in a stout building, with windows high enough to escape any downed trees; we’re staying put.  I’m sure there will be plenty of confusion about evacuations today.
• Mass transit, including subways, buses, and commuter trains, will be shutting down completely after noon today.  It’s the first time that I can remember a total shutdown because of weather.

The latest reports suggest that the storm is weakening somewhat, and will probably hit the city as a tropical storm.  I figure that we have about a 50% chance of losing cable TV, and 30% of losing power.

Well, we’ll see.

Posted in Weather, New York City, Fearmongering | No Comments »

22. August 2011 by admin.

The Republicans, who consider the entire concept of taxation to be evil, have found a tax increase that they actually like.

Last December, in an effort to stimulate the economy, Congress passed a one-year reduction in the payroll tax.  The actual rules are a bit complicated, but basically, the roughly 8% Social Security/Medicare tax that every working American pays (including the nearly half that don’t earn enough to pay Federal income tax) was reduced to about 6%, a little more than a 25% reduction.

Now we’re looking for ways to cut spending, and the Republicans are proposing not to extend this tax break for another year.  If this were a package deal, together with ditching the Bush tax cuts, I’d be OK with it.

To be fair, the Republicans have a point: putting a few hundred extra dollars into the pockets of ordinary Americans (who don’t create jobs) won’t do much to pull the economy out of its slump.  On the other hand, putting thousands of extra dollars into the pockets of the richest Americans hasn’t helped much, either.

For my part, I’m not sure that tax cuts do that much to stimulate the economy, and I get annoyed with politicians of either stripe who push for tax cuts just to score votes.  But the underlying argument of the Republicans is mean-spirited: rich people’s money is valuable to the economy and not to be taxed, while poor people’s money ‘doesn’t create jobs,’ and therefore fair game.

Posted in Politics, Money, Barack Obama | No Comments »

20. August 2011 by admin.

A conservative friend of mine send me an essay railing at President Obama for being, among other things, a liar.  While I’m sure it was satisfying for the author of the essay to write it, and for many conservatives to read it, I wondered.  My mother taught me to be very careful when calling someone a liar, and while I can think of oodles of things that our President said that turned out to be not quite true on further inspection, I was hard-pressed to identify a real lie.  So I turned to the Web, where I found lots of help.  There was an article in Human Events listing the ‘top 10 Obama lies.’  So let’s have a look:

1.  Americans want higher taxes:  During the debate over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama said that 80% of Americans support including higher taxes as part of the deal.  But a Rasmussen poll taken the same week showed that only 34% believe a tax hike should be included in a debt-ceiling agreement.

I remember news reports that indicated that a majority did favor higher taxes.  And in fact, there was a Quinnipiac poll that reported 55% in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations to help address the debt.  Not quite the 80% reported by our President, but close enough by politician standards.

2.  Mother denied health insurance:  During his presidential campaign, Obama said that his mother died of cancer after being denied coverage for a preexisting condition…. But [she] had health insurance through her employer and was only denied disability insurance.

His mother was denied some form of insurance.  Again, close enough for political work.

3.  Tax restraint for middle and lower class:  Obama pledged during his campaign and throughout his presidency not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000.  But ObamaCare’s individual mandate… a higher federal cigarette tax and countless other “fees” in the health care law… hit the middle and lower class.

The usual context of this statement is the Federal income tax, and in that context, Obama has been true to his word.  ObamaCare is a special case, about which I have more later, and if you don’t want to pay excise taxes on cigarettes, then don’t smoke.

4.  Shovel-ready jobs:  When Obama was selling his $787 billion stimulus package, he consistently bragged about how shovel-ready construction jobs would be funded across the nation.  Even the President later admitted…:  “There’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

In my professional life, I’m involved with public works projects, and I know that there is no such thing as a ’shovel-ready’ job.  At best, there is a nearly-complete design on the shelf that is waiting for funding, and it would take a bare minimum of three months (and more practically 6-9 months) to finish the design, bid and award a contract, and start work.

But Obama is a politician, not an engineer, and if he hears from state and local politicians about all these projects they’d like to execute, but just need funding, he’s inclined to believe them. Alas, even allowing for a few months’ latency, there was no bump in employment as these ‘not-quite-shovel-ready’ jobs took hold.  So I’ll score this as one that he had to learn the hard way.

5.  Keep your doctor:  President Obama repeatedly pledged that under his health care measure, Americans would be able to keep their doctors.  However, with rising costs, many employers will dump their health care plans….

ObamaCare is an abomination for a variety of reasons.  But Obama is correct in noting that there is nothing in the health care legislation that will prevent you from seeing your current doctor or maintaining your current insurance.   (Whether you will be able to in real life is another matter, as many have pointed out.)

6.  No lobbyists:  During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama said:  “We have the chance to tell all those corporate lobbyists that the days of them setting the agenda in Washington are over….”  At least a dozen former lobbyists got top jobs in his administration at the beginning of his presidency….

Every politician rails at lobbyists, and ultimately does nothing.  So what else is new?

7.  Foreign money in campaigns:  During his 2010 State of the Union address, and again during the 2010 midterm elections, Obama railed against foreign money influencing U.S. elections.  The only problem was that there was no evidence to support the charge….

Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address came a few days after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision ruling that allowed corporations and others to present ‘issue’ advertising during the political campaign cycle.  While such advertising cannot identify candidates by name, it can be readily associated with candidates.  And a foreign corporation could indeed present such advertising, if they really wanted to wade into the cesspool that is American politics.

8.  Arizona immigration law:  During the battle over Arizona’s immigration law, President Obama said:  “Now suddenly if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you can be harassed, that’s something that could potentially happen.”

Well, if you were speeding on the way to the ice cream parlor, you might get stopped, and then you could get in trouble for not having your papers.  I don’t know if Arizona has a law (as in New York) enabling the police to stop and ticket you if you aren’t wearing your seat belt, but if it does, that would be another ’show me your papers’ moment.  The threshold is any infraction where the police would stop you and ask questions, not necessarily a crime.

9.  Transparency:  Obama pledged that transparency would be a top priority, but his administration refused to grant one-third of the Freedom of Information Act requests, according to an Associated Press analysis.  He also was dishonest about transparency when he said that health-care negotiations would be televised on C-SPAN and that he would wait five days to sign a bill so people would have a chance to read it online.

Stupid naive campaign promises, nothing more.

10.  Constitutional oath:  During his January 2009 inauguration, Barack Obama pledged to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” yet he has consistently ignored the 10th Amendment giving powers not enumerated in the Constitution to the states.  Exhibit No. 1: ObamaCare.

ObamaCare relies on a twisted interpretation of the Commerce Clause (’Congress shall have power to… regulate Commerce… among the several States;’) to require people to purchase insurance.  As far as the Tenth Amendment, I’m sure it isn’t the first time that the Federal government has imposed uniform standards on something across the states.

To take another Tenth Amendment example, consider Arizona’s immigration law.  The President can rail against it; he can have the Justice Department sue the state of Arizona in pursuit of what he believes to be right; but he can’t force Arizona to abandon its law.

Our President may question whether the Constitution allows him to do this or that, but I can’t identify any time where the President has simply disregarded or violated the Constitution.

*          *          *

My point in all of this is not to defend President Obama’s performance: he has been one of our most inept Presidents in a long time.  Yes, he’s more inept than President Carter, who had decent policies but couldn’t present them well.

But he’s no more a liar than the average politician.  Every politician overlooks inconvenient facts, makes pointless promises he has no intent in keeping, pontificates from ignorance (’shovel-ready jobs’), or engages in creative over- or understatement to advance his agenda.  Moreover, every President lives in a bubble, surrounded by advisors who tell him what he wants to hear.

I’m bitterly disappointed in President Obama.  I disagree with his policies, and I’m horrified by his non-leadership leadership style.  But if I call him a liar, I would also have to call almost all of his modern predecessors liars too.  The last President who wasn’t a liar was Jimmy Carter: it was perhaps the root of many of his problems.

Posted in Barack Obama | No Comments »

6. August 2011 by admin.

I’m sitting in the park on the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge.  It’s a pleasant summer afternoon, I’ve been riding my bike, and the endorphins are flowing: it’s all good.

When I was a kid, I lived near here, and my parents and I would go out on our bikes on Sunday morning.  It’s good to see that the park is, if anything, a little nicer than I remember it.

It’s been a crazy week with the alleged resolution of the debt brouhaha:

• Each side is now yowling that it was taken advantage of by the other.  Obama sold out to the Tea Party, while the Tea Partiers wimped out.
• On Wednesday, the government borrowed nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, apparently making up for lost time.
• Some Republican (mainstream, not Tea Party) noted that the GOP was more than willing to let the deadline pass, until they considered that the Treasury, having to prioritize spending, would short the things that would make the public the angriest (like Social Security) so that they could blame the Republicans.  I find it hard to believe that the Obama administration would do that, but I suspect that a Republican administration would.
• After a 500-point drop on Thursday, the stock market had a barf-bag day on Friday.
• On Friday afternoon, after the markets closed, Standard and Poor’s downgraded US government debt from AAA to AA+.

But where does that leave us as far as the rest of the economy?  Sadly, not too well.  But that’s not really new.

The national government is a one-trick pony: there is only one thing it can do to address a sluggish economy: deficit spending.  Whether this takes the form of tax cuts or new spending programs, the goal is the same: provide loose money to encourage commerce and tide people over until new growth takes hold.

But in fact, the government spigot has been stuck on ‘loose’ for many years now.  Between the bailouts, the stimulus, tax cuts, and the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, we’ve delivered enough stimulation to launch the Empire State Building into orbit.  It hasn’t worked.

Now is the time to re-examine our premises and seek a new way forward.  It won’t be easy, and some of it will certainly be painful, but it’s still better than the alternative of yet more debt.

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Life Goes On, Money | No Comments »

3. August 2011 by admin.

Yesterday, the Senate passed and the President signed into law a measure increasing the debt ceiling, and making present and future cuts in Federal spending–but no new taxes–averting the immediate crisis of a government unable to satisfy its $4 billion daily borrowing fix.  Everybody hates it, but then a good compromise leaves everybody mad.

Except that the plan doesn’t actually cut spending by a meaningful amount in the near term, and anything further in the future can be undone by the next Congress.

Moreover, it sets a dangerous precedent in that the next stage of spending cuts will be determined by a joint committee of Congress, with input from the President, and then be voted up or down with no debate or possibility of amendment.  On one level, since politicians don’t seem to have the intestinal fortitude to vote for serious spending cuts, this seems a practical necessity.

But the committee–called ’super Congress’ by some–has no constraints on what it can include in its ’spending cut’ package.  If they wanted to require all of us to wear lime-green underwear, they could.  For now, we can only hope that they’ll limit their concerns to things that will help the government’s finances.

OK, now that the circus is over, how about going back to the economy and creating jobs?

The economy is languishing, with growth in the first quarter restated at a 0.4% annual rate and the second quarter  at a 1.3% annual rate.  If you exclude banking/finance, and perhaps the oil companies, the rest of us are in a recession.

The government has one thing, and one thing only, it can do to stimulate the economy: it can make money looser.  It can do this by tax cuts (the Republican method) or new spending (the Democratic method), but either way, the intent is the same: to provide new money to encourage the private sector to invest and hire, or at least to tide people over.

But in spite of partisan bickering, the spigot has been stuck on ‘loose’ for a long time now.  Most Federal spending is preset before the budget process starts: Social Security, Medicare, and interest payments.  And the new plan is supposed to tighten things up, even if only incrementally.

So what can the government actually do to create jobs?

For my part, I have no idea.

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Money | No Comments »

1. August 2011 by admin.

When I was four years old, something happened–I don’t remember exactly what–that led me to consider the fact that I would ultimately die.  I fretted about it for a couple of days, and then realized: people live to be 100, right?  100 is way more than four, so I have lots of time left.  I then set aside contemplating my own mortality for a long, long time.

Today is my fiftieth birthday: I’m halfway there.

I thought there was something witty that I was going to write about this, but now that I’m here in front of my keyboard, I’m drawing a blank.  Perhaps I’m getting flaky in my old age.

Anyway, it’s been an interesting first half, and as I sit here in the morning contemplating the day ahead, the second half should be interesting as well.

*          *          *

Last night, our alleged leadership came to an agreement on the debt ceiling.  I’m not sure I like it, but that’s a subject for another time.  In any case, the immediate emergency has been forestalled.

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30. July 2011 by admin.

Yesterday,  the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling, begin to cut spending, and attempt to address the nation’s fiscal problems.  It was voted down in the Senate in less than two hours, with no serious debate.

Meanwhile, Our Fearless Leader, true to form, has left the details of the Democratic plan to Congress.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is working on such a plan, but the details aren’t there yet, and the House Republicans have already resolved to vote it down.

The headline on today’s Daily News reads ‘Bam: Call Your Reps.’  I would call my reps if I thought it would do any good.  Alas, they’re all solid Democrats, and won’t care.  Or my position will be swamped by many of my fellow constituents.

We’re in trouble now because our government made promises in the past that it now cannot keep.  This happened because the productive capacity of the country was left to rot.  We’ve been working around it for a couple of decades now, telling ourselves lies about ‘the service economy’ and blowing bubbles, but we’ve burned through our savings and our credit and now find ourselves no better off.

A limited government like ours cannot simply will productive capacity into being.  It can’t construct productive enterprises for itself, and it can’t force the private sector to create jobs.  Under the circumstances, the only alternative is to cut spending and find a way to back away from its promises while causing the least damage.

The Republican plan is an effort to do that.  I disagree with the Republican orthodoxy in that I believe that new, higher taxes will be necessary.  The Republicans will say that higher taxes merely encourage higher spending, but one of the lessons of the Reagan administration is that politicians will spend anyway.

If we can’t expect some adult leadership from our government, then we’re really done for.

Moreover, if you want to ask where our productive capacity went, part of it got crystallized into the wealth of the very. very rich.  If the government can return some of that through taxation into the circulating economy, that can only help the rest of us.

So while I don’t completely agree with the Republicans, at least they’re trying.

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27. July 2011 by admin.

Yesterday, my tasks at work were more graphical than verbal, and I found myself listening to talk radio again.  A while back, I had subscribed to XM, which got swallowed by Sirius (or was it the other way around), so I can access the XM/Sirius radio channels on my computer.  I had a choice of listening to left-wing talk radio or right-wing talk radio, and so spent about an hour with each.

The left-wing guy railed against the big corporations that are taking over the world and leaving nothing for the rest of us.  He had a guest with an opposing position.  The guest shouted; the host shouted; there was plenty of heat but no light.  It was a perfect mirror image of Sean Hannity.

The right wing guy bemoaned the freeloaders who were looking for the government to solve their problems, and the widespread lack of personal responsibility.

But I have to wonder: I’m sure that there are conservatives who worry about corporate overreach (many of our founding fathers had the same concerns), and I’m sure that there are liberals who are ticked off with the freeloaders who take no personal responsibility and abuse the system.  On a practical level, there’s probably more common ground than most of us care to admit.

Meanwhile, the circus continues in Washington.  A couple of plans to stave off default seem to be emerging.  Both are of the kick-the-can-down-the-road variety, with the Republican version (which seems more likely to pass at this point) having us do it all over again in six months.  But the Tea Party Republicans still consider it as cutting the government too much slack.

In my guts I feel like one of these proposals will get passed, and we’ll all allegedly heave a giant sigh of relief.  For my part, I’m not sure that ‘default’ is necessarily a bad thing.  First, it won’t be a real default: we’ll still pay interest on our debt, and almost certainly will continue to pay Social Security and the military.  Government contractors will probably be told to wait for payment, and parts of the government will get shut down.

But at that point there will be an actual, instead of a potential, problem.  We will have to face the naked reality of the situation, and actually do something.

If we’re worried about the country’s credit rating, the damage is already done, and will get worse if we kick the can down the road.  But a ‘default’ might actually help the situation because we’ll have to do something about it.

A ‘default’ will be disruptive and unpleasant.  But among the alternatives before us, it may be the least painful in the long term.

In any case, we’ll know in six days….

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23. July 2011 by admin.

The phone just rang a moment ago.  I checked the Called ID: an 866 number.

I let the phone ring.  After the fifth ring, it stopped.

In another time,  I looked at Caller ID as a convenience, and the thought that I might not answer the phone because of the incoming number seemed, well, cowardly.  If someone calls me with something unpleasant, I would take the call and face the music.

But now 95% of the calls on my landline phone are junk.  Sometimes, I’ll pick up and hear the other end of the call disconnect.  Or I’ll get an announcement from a machine.   My response is to blow into the phone.  A person will stop, believing that the line got noisy.  When the voice goes yammering on about how I can save money on my mortgage or get out of debt or whatever, I hang up.

If nobody speaks, I suspect that the machine has called me, and will now connect me with a representative.  If no voice comes on in two seconds, I hang up.

It turns out to be very rare that there’s actually a live voice at the other end that has placed the call and is waiting for a real answer.

My son has suggested that I ditch my landline phone and just use the cell phone.  He may have a point.  But having a home phone number always seemed to be part of the basic package of being an adult in this society, and I’m not quite ready to let that go.

But in the meantime, if it’s from a toll-free area code, or a place where I don’t have any relatives, I won’t answer.

OK, it’s cowardly.  But it works.

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