The Jobs Bill

Obama asked the Senate to put aside their rancor for a moment in order to try something that might help get a coupla million Americans a little help finding work.  And the Senate replied:

Tech Solutions For The Revolution

Whenever the rabble get a little riled up and start to do that icky and unsanitary thing called "a protest", the establishment (or powers that be, or whatever you choose to label them) always try to tamp the thing down by interfering with the crowd's ability to communicate.  In Iran and Egypt and practically every other arab state where protests sprang up, the governments took down the internet, or they suspended cellphone service or they blocked twitter - they did whatever they thought would be the most disruptive to the protestors' need to communicate and coordinate.  It's a primary tactic in every conflict, and every government does it whenever they feel threatened.  Remember that the USSR banned fax machines for years, and when they finally allowed them, each machine had to be registered and each transmission was monitored and recorded.  That's how threatening free and open communication is to any government, including here in the good ol' USofA.

Occupy Wall Street has struggled with NYC's prohibition on the use of amplification in public spaces.  Their work-around has been to use humans to relay the speakers' words out to the crowd by simply repeating what the speakers are saying.  Semi-brilliant in that it's organic and cheap and very "community-ish".  I imagine it also tends to work in favor of keeping the oratorical blather to a minimum.

I'm wondering, tho', if maybe there's a better solution that serves the purpose and stays within the law.  What if you just put together a conference call?  One quick pass thru Google and I found a company offering "free" conference calling, allowing up to 1,000 listen-only participants.  If you had a thousand cell phones scattered thru the crowd (on external speaker), it'd be like one of those church services at the old drive-in theater setups.

There must be other tech solutions too.  Get thinkin', you guys.

This Is What You Call A Recovery?

To go along with Bush's Jobless Recovery, now we get Obama's Wageless Recovery.  And it kinda makes sense in a weird, Compendium-of-Official-Horse-Shit kind of way.  We already have the Non-Denial Denial, and the Non-Apology Apology - now we can add the Non-Recovery Recovery.

NYT

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

It gets harder and harder for me to justify voting for Obama again.  I'll probably stick with him because the alternative (so far) just seems too terrible to contemplate.  That could change tho'.  Everybody has to decide; at what point are you willing just to let the fuckin' thing burn?

OWS Statement

Oo-rah

And what would you like to say to Sean Hannity?

Megan And Me

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic:

I spent quite a lot of time on the "We are the 99%" website last night and this morning. There's been a considerable amount of carping about it from the conservative side, and to be sure, some of the stories strain plausibility (the percentage of people in the sample who have either taken up prostitution, or claim to have seriously considered doing so, seems rather high, for instance, and as far as I could tell, not a single person on the site had been fired for cause). Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive "fun" degrees, and so forth.

But quibbling rather misses the point. These are people who are terrified, and their terror is easy to understand. Jobs are hard to come by, and while you might well argue that any of these individuals could find a job if they did something different, in aggregate, there are not enough job openings to absorb our legion of unemployed.

When the gap between the number of job openings and the number of people who are out of work is so large, there are going to be a hefty number of unemployed people. Maybe these people individually could have done more to get themselves out of their situation, but at the macro level, that would just have meant that someone else was out of work and suffering.

I think it's hard to read through this list of woes without feeling both sympathy, and a healthy dose of fear. Take all the pot shots you want at people who thought that a $100,000 BFA was supposed to guarantee them a great job--beneath the occasionally grating entitlement is the visceral terror of someone in a bad place who doesn't know what to do. Having found myself in the same place ten years ago, I can't bring myself to sneer. No matter how inflated your expectations may have been, it is no joke to have your confidence that you can support yourself ripped away, and replaced with the horrifying realization that you don't really understand what the rules are. Yes, even if you have a nose ring.

I'm not sure that this constitutes the seeds of a political movement, however. For all the admiring talk about bravery and perseverance, it's not really al that difficult to get young, unemployed people to spend a couple of weeks camping out somewhere. They have a low cost of time, they're in no danger, and yes, I have to say it, demonstrating is fun. No, don't tut-tut me. I was at the ACT-UP die-ins, the pro-choice marches, the "Sleep Out for the Homeless" events and the "Take Back the Night" vigils. It's fun, especially when you can see yourself on television. This is not the Montgomery bus boycott we're talking about here.

So my question is, how does this coalesce into a broader platform? Does someone have a coherent, plausible answer for someone whose pricey liberal arts degree has not equipped them for a tough job market? And is it a coherent, plausible answer that they will believe? I don't think those kids in Zucotti park are waiting to hear about QE3 and the American Jobs Act.

My posted comment:

Nice try, Ms McArdle.

Was this supposed to make yourself sound almost human? ("Many of the people complaining made all sorts of bad decisions about having children, getting very expensive "fun" degrees, and so forth.") 

And almost kinda bright? ("When the gap between the number of job openings and the number of people who are out of work is so large, there are going to be a hefty number of unemployed people.")

They pay you for this?

Let's be really clear on a couple of points. First, the people who do the hiring and set the policies in practically every business are not overly troubled at the prospect of having 15 or 30 or 100 applicants for every job posted, because it means they can pick up some pretty great talent at ridiculously low prices. It's called Free Market Economics, and it's exactly the kind of Labor Market most of the big players have been working towards for at least 30 years. Do you have any research help at all, or do you simply choose to ignore it?

Second, your little puff piece here is a classic example of how you Press Poodles have become completely disconnected from what's happening. Mocking the choices people make does nothing about the effects of those choices. You say you don't want to sneer at these people, and then you sneer at them anyway. Typical of the snobbery of Corporate Media, you build a false reality by trying to substitute 'what if' for what actually is.

Also typical - your reporting is so lousy that your analysis has no credibility at all.

Strategy Revealed

It feels a little paranoid, but given the fact that beating Obama in 2012 has been identified in public and on the record by more than one prominent Repub as pretty much the only thing that matters, I think it's not unreasonable to put a couple of things together, and to reach a conclusion (or at least postulate) that Repubs are willing to fuck us all over just to have a shot at getting Obama out of office.

The simplest explanation is that while Obama's signature measure to boost the economy has had fairly significant positive results in terms of Net New Jobs, the Repubs (who control enough State Governments to make a difference) have been busy laying off enough public sector workers to make the gains in the private sector look far less impressive.

What Reagan Said

USA USA USA

A return to the bad old days of Protectionism, and of Unions that were too big and too powerful isn't a good idea either.  So don't try to play that binary bullshit on me.  What I'm talking about is making an effort to get some sanity and balance back into the system.

Legislative / Judicial / Executive

Management / Labor / Government

Company / Customer / Vendor

Ya gotta have balance.  If you let any part(s) of any system overwhelm the other(s), then the system becomes unstable.

The guiding principle is that when anything becomes too big and too powerful, it has to be beaten down and brought back into balance.  I'm pretty sure that's what American Exceptionalism is supposed to be.  All of history before the USA was about playing and replaying all that imperial crap; "we're God's chosen people"  Well shit, how many empires were "chosen by God" before us?  How many of them are still around?  Is God just really lousy at choosing empires?

I'm pretty sure the people who started this country had the same ideas that occur to me, and they tried to set up a system aimed at resisting the temptations of power; to make it as hard as possible for any one entity to dominate the others; to ensure that we'd at least have the means to prevent the ruinous drift back into monarchy and empire if only we could muster the will.

Over time, of course, people forget.  We get sold on a different idea of how it's supposed to be.  Politicians and Marketeers blur the lines and turn meanings upside down.  We end up believing it's our patriotic duty to support policies that do damage to our founding principles.

And now we have giant multi-national Mega-Corporations taking the place of the old lines-on-a-map Nation States.  (This is nothing new, btw)  People who sit at the top of these Mega-Corps are not called Barons or Captains or Kings for the hell of it, or because it makes them seem quaint or whimsical.  We call them Barons and Captains and Kings because that's how their organizations function, and that's what they are.

300 years ago, Nation States were family-owned private enterprise military organizations that subcontracted out for food, clothing, shelter and trade goods in exchange for protection.  Whenever one of those contractors pushed a little too far into somebody else's territory, the Crown would try to hold up its end of the bargain by invading or otherwise making war on somebody to protect the interests of the merchants, which were in turn, the interests of the Crown.  Government and Business both gradually morphed away from the Inherited Entitlement System towards a more egalitarian system, but there's always a kind of gravitational pull; always something inside us that wants us to return to what our faulty and selective memories perceive as a better time; fueled by the relentless energy of profit-at-any-cost (an oxymoron if ever there was one).  We have to resist that backslide, and remember always that good people continue to fight and bleed and die - sometimes for the noble cause, but mostly for the good of the multi-national companies, and to further the interests of an Entitled Aristocracy that is again coming to believe it owns the government - and owns it by God-given right.

If you want the power, you have to take the power.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

I try never to be unaware of boobies, but I truly appreciate the concept of a whole month dedicated to them; when it's more or less OK to tell women how much you love those beautiful secondary gender characteristics.