Daily Archives: June 4, 2012

Sad, pathetic jobs

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Just got a call from someone who has not been taught manners. When telephoning someone, especially someone you don’t know, the general guideline is that the caller identifies himself first, then asks for the person being called.

This was an unsolicited call from some company. What company? Still don’t know. [Name offered, possibly not his real name] said he was calling from the “Auto Processing Department.” When asked “of what?” he didn’t seem to understand the question. Pressed for the name of the company, he repeated “Auto Processing Department,” then adjusted slightly to “Auto Processing Center.”

Never did get a company name; have no idea what product or service was being offered. Caller–a young guy located in California–probably didn’t go to college for this, assuming he went. But this–telephone soliciting–was in all probability the only job he could land. Usually I try to be decent to cold callers, when I make the mistake of answering the phone, but this time the caller gave up, courteously, signing off wishing me a good day. Irritating though the whole thing was, I hope at least the job is just for the summer. It’s still a waste of everyone’s time. But our anti-regulation types on the whole won’t hear of protecting consumers against waste of time, waste of money, product malfunction, service misfeasance, or outright fraud.

We need our Do Not Call list capabilities again.

More fundamentally, we need to invest in our country, so our young people will have something to do besides telephone soliciting, waiting tables and bartending.

Rep. Boehner and Sen. McConnell seem unlikely to come through any time soon, since their place in Congress depends on preventing the Obama administration from accomplishing anything further positive. But at least the larger media outlets could report and explain the difference between debt and deficit, and the tax differential between income tax and capital gains, and the place of hedge funds and holding companies in the larger picture of wealth and income disparity in the U.S.

On related matters

Speaking of California–one of the unspoken truths in our century is that real estate in California costs too much. California is not Hawaii, certainly is not Hong Kong or Tokyo. California does not have to import almost all of its manufactured goods and most of its food. For a house to cost five times as much, or more than five times as much, in California as on the East Coast is not economically rational. There is no objective necessity for the gross difference. People should not have to finance a move to California as though they were about to rent on Saturn.  The gap between California and the rest of the nation is a drag on the entire housing industry.

[Update]

Re-reading the above, on second thought I do not lump in waiting tables and bartending with telephone soliciting. Waiting tables is honest work. Telephone soliciting is often not. This is not to blame a young guy for taking whatever job he could get. The fault lies with his employers, among others: He has the thankless task in the first place of calling strangers who do not want to hear from him. To perform this task, he is given no job training except on reading from a script. Probably they bestowed on him a fake name to identify himself with.

The script is a bunch of malarkey, and to have to read from it is demeaning, comparing unfavorably with reading from scripts (TV/radio commercials) pitching embarrassing body products.  At least commercial voice-over pays well, something not said for telephone soliciting.

The kicker is that all the time spent by this employee on the job is subsidized through our federal tax policy; his wages or salary are a business write-off for the employer. Any time misspent or message misdirected, owing to lack of training or lack of demand or lack of good business judgment, falls under the same heading of business expenses. My time wasted, au contraire, or that of any other unwilling customer, is of course not a write-off.

Meanwhile, we’ve got GOP legislators and candidates screaming about ‘government jobs’–meaning teachers among others (firefighters, police, emergency response). These guys are perfectly willing to support half-trained telephone soliciting on behalf of possibly fraudulent products–most of these calls turn out to be about refinancing mortgages or some other form of lending, which is seldom offered via cold calling by any reputable company. They’re considerably less willing to support education at any level, in the public interest, by genuine teachers at genuine schools.

It’s the scandalous set-up for-profit diploma-mill online ‘universities’ all over again, on a smaller scale.

Trump, birtherism and the GOP race 2012: The more things don’t change, part 3

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The more things don’t change, part 3

2012 from primary to election

 

The dynamic that shaped the Republican primaries is now shaping the Republican campaign for the White House: Future nominee Mitt Romney is continuing the Rick Santorum strategy of going for the leftovers.

 

Romney supporters in Tennessee

As we know, the GOP primary season from summer 2011 to May 2012 shaped up as a contest dividing the voters from more populous counties, in general, from the voters of less populous counties. The GOP primary race was never between ‘moderate’ and ‘conservative’; all the candidates except in some ways Ron Paul support the same rapacious policies. The primary race was between Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul on one hand and Santorum on the other, the fault line being metropolitan/suburban appeal versus rural appeal. Santorum took most of the less populated counties, and he took states where rural and small-town counties and congressional districts outweigh metropolitan areas and suburbs. In this metric, as previously written, Santorum had the advantage of a divided field among his opponents and the leftovers to himself. Romney, Gingrich and Paul divided the more populated areas.

 

Romney with Nikki Haley

Now Romney has the Republican electorate all to himself—an electorate dependent on voters in regions where population density is not high, where communications are not good, where newspapers are not strong, and where per capita wealth and computer literacy are most lopsidedly divided between highest and lowest. Meth lab country. ‘Safe states’? The only respectably safe state for Romney is Utah. Romney is inordinately dependent on states that gave Rick Santorum victories—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee—or that would have boosted Santorum if he could have lasted longer or if he had gotten his electors/delegates on the ballot—Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Texas, West Virginia.

Of the states just mentioned, Texas comes closest to being Romney territory. (Texas also comes closest of these to being Obama territory, but so far the Dems have successfully kept that secret.) As written last week, however, out-of-the-race candidates Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and others pulled several thousand votes in the May 29 Texas primary won by Romney. So did “Uncommitted,” on the GOP ballot: More than sixty thousand voters turned out, in an uncontested Republican primary, to vote NOT for their party’s overwhelming favorite and frontrunner, rejecting even the cachet of putting the nominee over the top.

 

Trump

Enter Donald Trump, with his version of support for Romney.

Trump’s support is hardly intended for ‘swing states’. There is no evidence that Trump has wide popular appeal in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin. Even in Missouri he looks iffy. Trump’s ‘birth certificate’ ploy is not part of a grand strategy to soften antagonism to Romney among people who work in the automobile industry in Michigan or even in Indiana. No, Trump’s support, his ghastly pitch for birtherism, is a straight-out invitation to the most ignorant counties in the U.S. Grabbing headlines big enough to reach people who don’t read and who distrust the ‘liberal media’ so intensely they refuse to read newspapers or to watch any television news except Fox, Trump is going openly for the voters in the 91 of 95 Tennessee counties won by Santorum.

 

The brighter side of factories closing

Regrettably, automobile workers in Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina are seldom allowed to know about Romney’s policy positions. If you want another trillion-dollar war and another trillion-dollar tax cut for speculators and hedge fund managers, Romney’s your man—video clips widely available. But the dearth of newspapers in places that need them most seals up policy discussion as though it were national secrets. The result is ongoing harm to U.S. manufacturing and to working families.

 

Back to the birthers—

Theoretically Romney came out of the Texas primary as undisputed top dog and all-round GOP winner, safely in a position to train effective opposition against the Democrats and the president for the next five months. No more press hype boosting minor opponents like Tim Pawlenty (see here and here and here). No more unappealing candidates like Bachmann, Gingrich and Santorum trying ham-handedly to swipe at Romney. Right? No more para-candidates like Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin and Trump to distract attention from the nominee. Uh. No more specter-candidates like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush as embarrassing reminders of how many GOPers hoped for more latecomers in the race—at least, not yet this week. No more speculation in the political press as to whether Romney will be downed by a much-hyped ‘Christian right’, Tea Party, and ‘rebellion’ in the ranks. Hm.

Theoretically Romney has massive advantages.

  • He was a primary candidate who did not flunk the one-look-from-across-a-crowded-room test.
  • He presumably has political infrastructure intact at the state level, remaining from a front-loaded primary schedule, copious early money and longstanding organization.
  • He will have unprecedented funding from everyone from Karl Rove to the Koch brothers and the Chamber of Commerce in between.
  • His campaign has five months to benefit from expensive and misleading television ads.
  • He can count on intransigence from Republicans in Congress, to prevent any legislation that would improve the condition of ordinary Americans.

And yet, and yet—he still faces, as previously written, the prospect of some voter sectors not finding a ‘top-tier’ candidate ugly enough for their tastes, and wishing they could have replaced him with someone more transparently unsavory. These are the Manchurian-candidate voters to whom Trump appeals.

If an obvious falsehood triumphs anywhere, it is most liable to triumph in wide-open stretches where mass communications are poor, where former farms produce hay and timber if they’re lucky, and where meth labs start looking like a good way to make a living. Even the most declined neighborhoods in the large industrial states do not tend to be hotbeds of birtherism. Susceptibility to Romney’s claim of being an effective manager is still found more in suburbs than in cities.

Perhaps by now we should all be used to wild claims, and used to the political press reporting wild claims as though they were substantive. Look at the way quintessential Washington insiders and career politicians typically claim to be outsiders, a new start, a fresh face—like Herman Cain, and Santorum with his lobbying career, and Gingrich with his contract with Freddie Mac. To some extent the discrepancies are aired by the national political press, though not as much as they should be and too often as though they are equally endemic to both sides in a national election.

Worse, such factual reporting as survives the filter of the national political press is jeopardized by continuous undertow from the business press. All the major GOP candidates, regardless of stylistic differences, are essentially corporate mouthpieces. Personality differences notwithstanding, the core fiscal trickle-down policy remains intact: it’s rich-get-richer. It’s always there.

They don’t put it that way, of course. The obfuscation is protected by the business press—the same commentators, analysts and journalists who failed to notice the impending mortgage-derivatives crisis and who almost unanimously supported ‘deregulation’. Still do.

It’s the same gang that keeps giving us Orwellianisms about ‘austerity’, ‘debt’, ‘energy’ and ‘jobs’ while doing everything it can to siphon off value from the many and convey it to the few, and a highly unqualified few at that.

Once again, a recent example—U.S. Treasury bills last week sold at a remarkably low rate of interest, yield, meaning that 1) U.S. Treasuries are regarded as rock-solid investment, and 2) their sale saddles the Treasury with little to no debt. But in all the hoopla about ‘the budget’, when was the last time you heard a GOPer in Congress mention the fiscal benefit of issuing U.S. Treasuries at a lower interest rate, to pay off bonds with a higher rate?

Once again, there is an analogy here to refinancing your mortgage. Most people understand the value of refinancing their mortgages if they can get a significantly lower interest rate. It would be illuminating to know which members of Congress have refinanced their houses, just to check on which members understand the same idea. Unfortunately, that information is not publicly available. Residences of congress members are exempted from financial disclosure.

Publicly, in any case, they all go the pro-corporate line of harping on ‘debt’ and ‘deficit’ anyway—except when it comes to discussing corporate debt.

 

More on Trump’s version of birtherism later