Hate, American Style

One of the most interesting results of market volatility on economies is the security/insecurity that workers feel about their jobs. While professional traders – generically referred to in the United States as “Wall Street” – prefer economic ups and downs (they make money on market movement these days, not long-term growth), such extremes aren’t so great if you have a job that doesn’t require such market movement.

When workplaces are downsized after a merger or the economy contracts, the ability to change jobs to avoid a bad boss, a stagnant job without advancement opportunities, boring repetition or low pay simply becomes that much more difficult. Looking at those drifting in a sea of unemployment or under-employment, or sitting in new jobs without job-protecting seniority, thinking you should go out looking to “do better” just comes off the list of options.

Canada is one of those few developed nations that never bowed to “free marketers’” demands – and when you think of special U.S. laws and tax rates favoring those who trade for a living, inside information, flash trading with those big financial computers with uber-sophisticated trading programs, do you real think there is a free market here? The great northland seems to have happier workers, who seem to miss that fear that keeps to many Americans in jobs they hate. Canadians have always regulated their financial institutions and transactions to foster stability over volatility. So let’s look at the numbers.

“Monster.com and market research company GfK conducted [a job satisfaction study of 8,000 workers across the United States, Canada, India, and Europe], which revealed that only 53% of Americans actively enjoy their jobs, and 15% actively dislike them. Canadians, meanwhile, took top prize for having the cheeriest workforce: 64% of Canadians like their jobs, while only 7% hate what they do.” FastCompany.com, November 18^th. Canada is the only economy in that survey mix that has not had major recessions or depressions in its nation’s history. Not the last mega-recession or even The Great Depression. And as our educational standards plummet, the kinds of jobs Americans are getting these days are falling in quality (Canada isn’t cutting their educational budgets either, by the way).

Canada has far and away the happiest workers, the United States was in the middle (although it had the greatest number of people who hate their jobs – 15%), but the United Kingdom, France and Germany had the smallest number of people who really enjoyed their work, with Germany falling at the bottom with a mere 34% very positive about what they do. Most of them just like it… enough.

But it is that hate number that should have Americans concerned. We’re number one, we’re number one! With double the hatred factor of Canada and even triple that number in impoverished India, Houston, we have a problem. Why? Some speculate that it is just because we work so hard, have less time off, and define ourselves too much by the work we do.

“‘There’s been lots of studies done about how Europeans have more vacation days, or have better work-life balance. The other side of it is that there’s a lot of information about Americans working too many hours,’ Joanie Ruge, senior vice president at the job search site Monster Worldwide, Inc. said. ‘More companies are trying to get more work done with less people.’… This doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, given that the United States has some of the most backward labor practices in the world. It’s one of the few countries that doesn’t require paid annual leave or paid maternity leave by law. The highest earners in the U.S., and overall, the U.S. has some of the longest working hours among developed nations.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re more productive, however. Germany, for example, averages a 35-hour work week but also maintains the fourth largest economy in the world.” FastCompany. But with only 34% of Germans really liking what they do (54% say it’s good enough, as compared to 31% of Americans in the same category), the notion of volatility and the concomitant lack of alternative job choice really need closer examination.

This is the side of American financial regulation – which is a whole lot less than what Canadians have done and what Europeans are now doing – that just isn’t discussed among our legislators and regulators. For reasons based more on tradition than common sense, Cowboy trading appears to be a sacred right to too many Americans who have been slammed by the relative lack of financial regulation and the resulting volatility. Even when statutes are passed – like the watered down Dodd-Frank bill – conservative Cowboys simply have refused to fund the implementation of that statute as the bill required. Isn’t it time to put these rather obvious negatives on the table as regulators and legislators consider how to benefit most Americans? Oh, I forgot, the folks with the money who determine what law get passed won’t let them.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I guess when Americans simply let a plutocracy replace democracy, you get what they let someone pay for.

On Staying Fired

I’ve blogged about different sides of unemployment and underemployment. I have shown how the vast majority of new jobs are at the bottom of the pay scale, focused on food services, hospitality and other minimum wage sectors or blending short-term contract and part-time jobs. I’ve drilled down on the number of Social Security-qualified older workers, having given up finding work to sustain their existing lifestyles, have opted to retire, stopping letting those benefits accrue to a higher level, and simply accepting that they are unlikely ever to find meaningful employment again. Today, I want to focus on that job segment that suffers from long-term unemployment but is either insufficiently skilled (or over-skilled) to find work in this job market, or are too old to be attractive to employers and too young for social security.

According to the November 16^th New York Times, “The unemployment rate has fallen to 7.3 percent, down from 10 percent four years ago. Private businesses have added about 7.6 million positions over the same period. But while recent numbers show that there are about as many people unemployed for short periods as in 2007 — before the crisis hit — they also show that long-term joblessness is up 213 percent.

“In part, that’s because people don’t return to work in an orderly, first-fired, first-hired fashion. In any given month, a newly jobless worker has about a 20 to 30 percent chance of finding a new job. By the time he or she has been out of work for six months, though, the chance drops to one in 10, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

“Facing those kinds of odds, some of the long-term jobless have simply given up and dropped out of the labor force. So while official figures show that the number of long-term jobless has fallen steeply from its recessionary high of 6.7 million, many researchers fear that this number could mean as much bad news as good. Workers over 50 may be biding their time until they can start receiving Social Security. Younger workers may be going to school to avoid a tough job market. Others may be going on disability, helping to explain that program’s surging rolls.” Folks who aren’t actively looking, even those who want jobs but no longer know where to look and have long-since lost unemployment benefits, simply are not measured anymore. As far as labor statistics go, they just don’t exist.

While most forms of unemployment are cyclical, rising and falling with the economic times, this last mega-recession has added another variable into the mix: long-term, chronic structural unemployment. This twist impairs longer-term economic growth, taxes social services to a higher level, erodes the tax base and adds a new quality of disenfranchised Americans, seething with anger at a system that is slanted against them, with little stake in the overall society. An overall unemployment rate of around 5% is normal in a healthy economy, but when your 7.3% unemployment numbers miss a very large segment of society, the statistics lose their value as economic predictors.

And without any clear solutions, our government officials simply tell us that the economy just hasn’t improved enough to cover this deficit, but that unemployment is still “just cyclical.” “Economists come to this conclusion in part because there is no evidence that the long-term jobless are accumulating in any one industry, which would be a signal that the economy needs to move workers from, say, manufacturing into nursing. Long-term unemployment has hit workers young and old, of all industries, races and backgrounds. But the long-term jobless actually tend to be more educated. And long spells of joblessness have hit black workers especially hard, as well as single parents, the disabled and older workers.

”With time, however, even people with desired skills can become ‘structurally’ unemployed. Longer spells of unemployment become harder to explain away. Jobless workers’ skills can atrophy. Job seekers find it harder to appear eager. Wounds become scars.” NY Times. Educated older people are often overlooked for the menial, minimum wage jobs as “overqualified” (hence they will evidence dissatisfaction with the work quickly and are unlikely to get along with the genuinely unskilled co-workers).

Higher-end employers often avoid even well-educated long term unemployed for several reasons: if they were worth it, why didn’t they get something  or  they’ve been out of the job market so long that their job skills, relevant current industry contacts and ability to deal with contemporary market shifts are simply rusty or non-existent. “[N]ew evidence shows that bias plays a much larger role than previously thought. Some of the long-term unemployed might never find work because businesses simply refuse to hire them.

“In a recent study, Rand Ghayad a Ph.D. candidate at Northeastern University, sent out 4,800 dummy résumés to job postings. Those résumés that were supposedly from recently unemployed applicants with no relevant experience were more likely to elicit a call for an interview than those supposedly from experienced workers out of a job for more than six months. Indeed, the callback rate for the long-term jobless ranged from just 1 to 3 percent, versus 9 to 16 percent for newly unemployed workers.

“Unemployment becomes a ‘sorting criterion,’ in the words of a separate study with similar findings. It found that being out of a job for more than nine months decreased interview requests by 20 percent among people applying to low- or medium-skilled jobs… In dozens of interviews, the long-term unemployed described discrimination as being foremost in their minds, though at the same time they said the experience of joblessness had changed them.” The harsh reality is that these otherwise qualified people might never work again and may form yet another underclass dependent on government entitlement to survive. And while there a lot of fiscal conservatives with a “so what, we just can’t afford to support them anymore” view of our federal budget, there is a certain heartlessness about this attitude that defies what was once “we’re all Americans in this together” mantra that made America special.

I’m Peter Dekom, and solving problems for hard-working Americans has to start with caring about them.

Truth

The Supreme Court recently tossed out federal oversight for specified states which were determined to have imposed racially-motivated restrictions on local voters under a 1965 statute. The court held that the law, although amended many times since initial passage, was enacted so long ago that the assumptions that gave rise to the oversight laws could no longer automatically be assumed to have retained validity into the contemporary age.

What they didn’t do was permit racial criteria to return to making voting more difficult, notably focusing on the voter ID laws. Additionally, states have been gerrymandering – allowing the majority in power in the state house to shape voting districts (see the above pictorial example) for the House of Representatives that reinforce their power at the expense of voters who might oppose them. Federal suits across the land are re-challenging these discriminatory statutes… from North Carolina to Texas, even adding a state – Wisconsin – where that federal oversight had not applied.

After the above court ruling, the affected states (all with GOP-majority legislatures) immediately reinstated their voter ID laws, and the expected exclusion of minorities – all with a universally-recognized proclivity to vote as Democrats – most certainly kicked in. In mid- November, “a federal judge in Milwaukee considered whether Wisconsin’s tough new voter-ID law violates the 1965 law by placing illegal burdens on minority voters. As in the Texas suit [see below], the Justice Department has sued North Carolina, which in August passed the toughest set of voting rules since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the law was passed with racist intent.” New York Times, November 15^th.  The decision is pending.

Since in earlier blogs I’ve provided the statistics and evidence to support that widely-accepted assertion, the focus of today’s blog is on the Texas response to a federal Department of Justice attack on Texas’ post-decision reinstatement of voter ID requirements but, more particularly, a suit against their use of state legislative power to create Congressional voting districts that may in fact distort voter representation. Gerrymandering. Texas’ admission in court filings in opposition to the new DOD attack is simply stunning. It is, however, an elegant and simple truth.

The state’s response to the DOD suit admits that the redistricting efforts and voter ID statutes discriminate, but that the kind of discrimination that they are intending is not protected by statute or court rulings anywhere. They are, pure and simple, discriminating against Democrats. The state presents this rather clear response: “It is perfectly constitutional for a Republican-controlled legislature to make partisan districting decisions, even if there are incidental effects on minority voters who support Democratic candidates.”

It’s the way it has always been done, and absent a Constitutional amendment requiring fair representational districts that actually reflect the true wishes of all voters, they maintain, they are free to twist and squirm to create districts that reinforce incumbents and deny or diminish representation to those who oppose them. America, land of the free and home of the biased.

For those who hold America’s model up to the rest of the world, it is a staggeringly terrible admission that we have statutorily enforced a decision, which the Supreme Court could say is not violative of the Constitution, that denies the poor, racial and ethnic minorities who live in common neighborhoods, of a vote equal to white, traditional, mainstream conservative voters who truly and rather openly are committed to discriminating against these “lesser” interests. I have read several estimates on the numerical impact of gerrymandering across the United States, the consensus of the experts suggests that one urban vote (whether racial and ethnic minorities abound) is worth 3/5 of one rural vote (where typically, white traditional conservatives dominate the census statistics). I suspect Texas politicians might even accept that allocation number.

Writing for the above NY Times article, University of California (Irvine) Law Professor Richard Hasen responds to that simple Texas statement quoted above. “Leaving aside that whopper — laws that dilute black and Hispanic voting power have more than an ‘incidental’ impact — the statement, part of a court filing in August, was pretty brazen. Minority voters, in Texas and elsewhere, tend to support Democrats. So Republican officials, especially but not only in the South, want to reduce early voting; impose voter-identification requirements; restrict voter registration; and, critically, draw districts either to crowd as many minority voters into as few districts as possible, or dilute concentrations of minority voters by dispersing them into as many white-controlled districts as possible.”

The challenge to conservative traditionalists is substantial. The United States has become a majority of minorities. To meet this rising tide of substantial change, these conservative incumbents could redirect their party platforms to attract more voters while still adhering to the majority of their conservative views – the entire notion that underpins any claim of a democratic form of government… or they could work to make sure that such true majority voices remain unheard and under-represented, even if it means destroying any claim that the United States is the greatest democracy on earth. Guess what path they have selected.

I’m Peter Dekom, and perhaps we should simply accept that for most people outside the United States, we are no longer held up as a model for much of anything except gridlock and hypocrisy.

Uncommonwealth Meeting

In 1999 (when Hong Kong went to the PRC), the sun finally set on the British Empire, but every year, a wisp of nostalgia sweeps the many independent states that compromise what was once the glorious and seemingly unending stretch of jolly olde England. The British Commonwealth of Nations (53 to be exact). Some hate each other, like Pakistan feels towards its neighbor India. Others have followed a tortured path with their own citizens. This year’s summit (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting or CHOGM) was held in mid-November in Colombo, Sri Lanka, but things did not go exactly swimmingly for this small island nation. The issue is human rights and there are some very nasty accusations. The culprit is how the victorious and mainstream Sinhalese treated the defeated minority in the final stages of the conflict and after decades of civil war.

When Sri Lanka gained independence from England in 1948, the majority began a long, drawn out process that effectively treated minorities, namely Tamils (18% of the population) and Muslims (6%) as second class citizens. Buddhism was made the official state religion. Tamils are Hindus or Christians. Tamil youths faced severe unemployment, and economic opportunities eluded this ethnic and religious minority. Laws and cultural biases upheld and applied discriminatory measures such that, in 1983, a revolt from a portion of the Tamils began against the government. These rebels employed the tactics that were common in the Middle East; bombs and civilian shootings became commonplace.

They called themselves the LTTE – Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (their flag is above) – but became known primarily as the Tamil Tigers. The Tigers were labeled terrorists because of their indiscriminate tactics, and even the United States placed them on that infamous list of terrorist organizations. The war raged for 27 years, bloody and sapping the nation and the combatants of their strength and economic stability. Somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 people were killed, including lots of civilians. Peace talks failed four times.

In 1987, the Indian Army intervened. It took until 2001 to implement a cease-fire, signed a year later, but simmering hatred exploded again in 2005. The Sri Lankan government then mounted an all-out assault on the LTTE in 2006 and by 2009, the Tigers were crushed. The aftermath of the conflict was not pretty. “Both sides were accused of human rights abuses throughout the conflict, with much focus on its final stages when thousands of civilians were trapped in a thin strip of land in the north of Sri Lanka… Estimates of civilian deaths in the final months range widely from 9,000 to 75,000… The Sri Lankan government commissioned its own investigation into the war in 2011.” BBC, November 12^th.  

Tamils lost and were treated, once again, as hated second class citizens. Bitterness defined how they were viewed by the victors, who had apparently engaged in a pattern of retaliatory atrocities during the final days of the conflict (denied by the government): rape, torture and killing, according to allegations, followed by official cover-ups. The Tamils claimed the government’s investigation was a sham and demanded that international probes make an independent assessment. The government denied their requests and clamped down on protesting Tamils. Censorship was applied. All this was simmering as invitations to the CHOGM were received by the member nations.

As Commonwealth leaders admonished the Sri Lankan leadership for human rights abuses and demanded an externally-controlled inquiry, the government responded that it was a fully autonomous nation and would no more permit outsiders to investigate their conduct than would England if equally challenged. They said their own investigations had shown these allegations to be false, and that was that.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron announced he would attend, ostensibly to chastise the Sir Lankans for their actions, but the Sri Lankans responded that they would not tolerate a moral lecture from England’s PM. Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop joined in the condemnation of Sri Lanka’s seeming whitewashing of these accusations: "I hope that Sri Lanka will use the opportunity of hosting CHOGM to underline its commitment to freedom, human rights and post-conflict reconciliation and to show the world that progress has been made in these areas."

Other leaders boycotted the event. “Mauritian Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam [became] the third leader to announce a boycott of [the] Commonwealth summit in Colombo over Sri Lanka's human rights record… Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Canadian counterpart Stephen Harper … also stay[ed] away.” BBC. The results were as expected. Nasty accusations. After the dancers, pomp and ceremony were done, the sparks flew.

“Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has repeatedly rejected criticism of his government's actions during the campaign which defeated Tamil Tiger rebels in 2009...The UK has defended its presence in Sri Lanka, with UK Foreign Secretary William Hague saying it is calling for an 'independent, thorough, credible investigation' into alleged abuses.” BBC.co.uk, November 14^th.

Charles Haviland writing for the 11-15 BBC News added: “But when rights are raised, the response has been a bullish defence of the [Sri Lankan] government's position. On two successive days President Rajapaksa has sought to turn what Mr Cameron calls the ‘spotlight’ on to the Tamil Tigers' atrocities, asserting that ‘we asserted the greatest human right - the right to life.’… His outspoken brother, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, has said the UK is acting as if Sri Lanka is still a British colony by trying to raise war crimes allegations, adding that his country cannot act on accusations of atrocities if the accusers do not publicly identify themselves.

“Pro-government nationalists also assail Britain's own conduct. Rajpal Abenayake, editor of government paper the Daily News, told the BBC World Service the UK was guilty of ‘odious double standards,’ accusing it of committing massacres in Sri Lanka during colonial rule and suggesting former PM Tony Blair was guilty of war crimes in Iraq.”

The dark and ugly stain seems like so many other internecine struggles, genocide and atrocities lingering in the minds of all who participated or witnessed this horrific conflict. But can Sri Lanka deal with this effectively and begin a very necessary healing process? Time will tell, but this was most certainly a very rocky start.

I’m Peter Dekom, and distress based on indiscriminate violence seems to be an increasing story in a modern world of clashing cultures and dwindling natural resources.

Obaminable Care

It’s not like we don’t need universal access to healthcare. Clearly, having such a system cannot, will not and has not destroyed our country or any of the other dozens and dozens of developed nations that have already deployed similar or even more benefit-laden programs. We spend around 17% of our GDP for the most expensive per capita healthcare system in the world, one that creates economic windfalls for insurers and pharmaceutical companies who have carefully pushed direct government providers off to the side, making sure their profits remain among the highest returns in the global marketplace (of comparable entities). And we have a system that until now could not deliver affordable services to a massive number of citizens, one that resulted in tons of medical bankruptcies and unnecessary suffering and death from folks who slipped between the cracks.

The Affordable Care Act is seriously flawed, but there is nothing that cannot be fixed if there is a willing Congress to face facts. The House clings to the belief that there is still time to bring the entire system down, because once it embeds into our economy, it will soon be impossible to push out. They are beginning to see the cracks in the system they need to kill the bill, even as there are amendments from Democrats to allow people to keep the plans they have if they choose… The GOP may just agree that the Affordable Care plan needs to be amended… out of existence.

If you go back to the press clippings of the late 1950s and early 1960s in Canada, you will see that conservatives in that country used every single argument that our right wing is using today against healthcare reform. They too said universal healthcare would destroy Canada. They too said it was too much government intrusion into private and personal lives, socialism they called it. And just about every politician who embraced government-provided healthcare (much more of government expense than anything we have) was pushed out of office in the ensuing elections. Today, Canadians are more likely to give up ice hockey than their healthcare system. Go figure, and you know that someday, that we will probably feel the same way about our system and baseball!

Indeed, if President Obama were running right now, his rather complete failure to implement a viable system, the crash of the Website that really cannot be fully repaired by the end of November and his rather startling responses of “I didn’t know” to questions about his signature program, even of NSA spying conducted under his nose, would send him packing. The big misinformation – you can keep the plan you have – would only accelerate his departure.

Some of the assumptions that underlie the statute remain suspect, such as the notion of young people who have never had a serious medical issue and feel totally invulnerable, would sign up in droves for a program that effectively uses their enrollment cash to subsidize everyone else.  The marginal sign-ups for the new program suggest otherwise, even though the technical glitches probably account for most of the reluctance to enroll in the new programs. A functional program, such as the California alternative, is signing up thousands of new enrollees daily.

For most of the world, having genuine access to healthcare that works is a national goal. To the center and the left, it is a goal here too. For the right, they cannot justify one segment of society supporting those at the bottom or even the middle of the economic spectrum on this issue, and they cannot accept a system that skips over the profit-incentive in the private sector. If some must suffer or die, that’s just tough. Life’s not fair. Yet, we know we’re going to implement healthcare reform one way or the other. The old conservatives are being flooded away in a demographic shift that will sooner or later marginalize this resistance.

But we have an opportunity to fix this statute now, begin the reform that should be focused on both universal access and driving down the cost of our dysfunctional healthcare system. Our costs are fully one third higher than the nation with the second most expensive per capita plan (Switzerland), and our cost structure is completely arbitrary – varying wildly from region to region, hospital to hospital for the same treatments and procedures.

Even the President is proposing an immediate fix to be voted on by the Congress: “[T]he president’s plan said that the fix would allow insurance companies to renew plans that do not meet the higher standard of the new health care law for a year for existing policyholders, though they would be required to notify the policy holder of alternative available coverage options, as well any benefits they might lose by staying on their existing plan.

“The president’s proposal would apply only to people who have had their existing policies already cancelled — those currently without insurance would not be able to buy these old plans, said the lawmaker, who declined to be identified discussing the proposal before the president’s announcement…State insurance commissioners would have the right to override the administrative proposal.” New York Times, November 13^th. Great, and if Democrats want to embrace that and still blame the president for the mistakes, ok!

Obama may be the sacrificial lamb, and if that’s what it takes, ultra-laming a lame duck president, so be it. Let our Democratic Congress-people join with the GOP in distancing themselves from the failed elements of Obamacare… BUT FIX WHAT’S WRONG AND GET ON WITH GOVERNING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! It ain’t brain surgery, and the solutions are rather obvious. Get her done!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is really getting tiring dealing with the most dysfunctional government we have had since the Civil War.

Insecurity and Social Services

With just about everyone looking for ways to cut the budget, entitlements are on the firing line, it’s no wonder that the lowest morale among federal agencies is at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Federal employees in that organization, slammed with furloughs and constantly defending their existence before Congress, responded to the federal government’s annual employee survey (Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys) with a positive job satisfaction score of only 56 out of 100. That’s a lot of demoralized folks. With almost the entire department furloughed (96%) during the shutdown, it’s pretty clear that they are hardly considered “essential.”  

There are an estimated 11 thousand workers there, and “HUD’s mission is to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. HUD is working to strengthen the housing market to bolster the economy and protect consumers; meet the need for quality affordable rental homes: utilize housing as a platform for improving quality of life; build inclusive and sustainable communities free from discrimination…” Wikipedia. Who cares… at least that the message these civil servants seem to be getting.

But perhaps even more important is the abysmal morale at a blended organization of former antagonistic turf-war battlers, a failed FEMA structure, the border patrol folks who are at the heart of immigration reform controversies, and the lovely cadre of close to 60 thousand TSA agents, one of whom was recently shot to death at Los Angeles International Airport. There are over 240,000 employees at the Department of Homeland Security, a hodge-podge of hastily restructured and incredibly embellished civil servants shoved together after the 9/11/01 attacks in an effort to create a more centralized and coordinated internal security and disaster relief structure.

DHS does appear to be little more than the bureaucracy from hell, one more federal agency that probably was not needed, could have mostly been covered by what already existed, but hey… got a new problem (9/11)… add more federal government to deal with it. It came with the massive budget boondoggles that included fighting two completely frustrating, unnecessary, deficit exploding wars and pretty much failing to achieve the stability promised. Oddly, this drunken and wasteful spending spree came from the same party that today is complaining about overblown bureaucracies and unsustainable deficits.

That this agency is waddling and seemingly lacking any semblance of balance and control that might just make it work, basking in the glow of a Congress that is willing to incur even more deficit burdens by not cutting anything dealing with security and border control, doesn’t mean that the folks that work there feel their important oats. At 57 out of 100 on the above government employee survey, their morale is one lousy point above that of the hapless HUD folks. It seems that this internal measurement of job satisfaction is a pretty good indicator of “Houston, we’ve got a problem” that our lovely elected representatives seem to ignore.

But dig further into the numbers, and DHS just gets worse, even when compared to the Housing folks: “[HUD’s] 2013 decline in job satisfaction is no surprise considering that the government-wide score fell by two points this year, but Homeland Security fared worse with its four-point drop… In terms of leadership, the department earned a score of 50, ranking second from last behind the Broadcasting Board of Governors. In 2011, DHS earned a 55, so the problem has grown worse.” Washington Post, November 12^th.

Looking at another survey, the DHS numbers sink even lower. “The annual Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings, which are based off the survey results, showed especially low index scores for the [DHS’] Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Intelligence and Analysis division, all of which scored far below the government-wide average of 60.8 points — none of them scored above 54 points… Customs and Border Protection, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and Citizenship and Immigration Services all earned much higher ratings than Homeland Security’ overall score of 52.9.” The Post. I wonder what the surveys will say next year about the Department of Health and Human Services after the debacle in attempting to implement the Affordable Care Act?!

The entire cadre of civil servants is under attack by rolling sessions of Congressional committee and subcommittee hearings. Deficit reduction means that once stable government jobs with pension benefits that make the private sector drool are on the block. It’s not the fault of those who took and are doing the jobs; it’s the idiots in Congress, many seeking pork for their districts, who authorized these expenditures in the first place… and now are disavowing the legacy of their own party’s mandates just a few short years ago. To see the self-righteous grimace on the faces of those who are members of the same party that caused the problem is the essence of what is wrong with a gridlocked, do-nothing Congress: they refuse to take responsibility for their own damned actions! Many didn’t even want to lift the debt ceiling to pay for the expenses that they themselves mandated!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am coming to believe that the real function of our federal government is simply to foment sustainable hypocrisy!

The Missing Link

“Before, tattoos were the province of biker gangs and longshoremen. Then, one day, they went big. Now, they could even be considered mainstream, with 23 percent of all Americans and 38 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds having at least one tattoo, according to a 2010 Pew Research poll.” New York Times, April 19^th. Today, experts feel that this number has increased to a more likely 50% in that 18- to 29-year-old segment. OK, so what?

So…  as elderly Department of Defense senior leaders and our most senior military commanders contemplate what they think the image of a U.S. soldier should be, particularly as our troops increasingly interface with local civilians with cultural sensitivities all over the world, the issue of tattoos leaps to the fore. “The United States Army will soon implement a new rule barring soldiers from sporting tattoos below the elbows and knees or above the neckline.

“The forthcoming ban on tattoos, filed under Army Regulation 670-1, won’t affect current soldiers who will have existing tatts ‘grandfathered in’ — unless the tattoos are ‘racist, sexist, or extremist.’ Any of those will have to be removed — no matter where they are on the body — at the soldier’s expense. Ouch.

“Newcomers must be free of visible ink. Staff Sergeant Robert Black, the assistant commander of the Norfolk Army Recruiting Center, admits it will ‘affect some individuals from entering the Army.’” PacificPalisades.Patch.com, November 15^th. Ya think?

“The logic is obvious. It’s difficult to embody professional uniformity when soldiers’ limbs are covered with personal abstractions. If you need to express yourself to everyone who sees you, maybe the armed forces aren’t a fit for you.

“But it seems somehow wrong to separate soldiers and tattoos. In an affectionate blog post on the Army’s own Web site, Staff Sargent Stephanie van Greete rhapsodized about the love affair between soldiers and their tattoos: ‘Tattoos and the military have a long and colorful history. The rise of the tattoo in popular culture started with floods of inked veterans — especially from World War II —returning home with them.’” The Patch.

Over there! Over here? Everywhere! Society changes, even as old-line employers – including the U.S. military – continue to look down on those with tattoos, particular big and obvious ones in a nation where its youth wear these markings with neo-tribalist pride. Is this a realistic rule? Is it implementable in today’s world? What’s your opinion?

I’m Peter Dekom wondering if this is a rational regulation or just another way of abusing our privates!

Creative Destruction – Urban Style

If you’ve played around with Google maps, especially their real-world view, and if you have stumbled by places like Detroit, there are some fascinating scenes. My Webmaster on this blog, Drew Gross, found a bargain “perfect house” there. The ad and the pictures of the house showed a nice, conventional three-bedroom, two-bath house in reasonable condition for $15,000. At first, Drew thought the ad was a typo, but indeed, it was accurate. He looked at Google’s satellite view of the neighborhood, and then he understood. The property was the only structure standing in an urban wasteland of demolished and about-to-be-demolished once-fine homes.

In days of yore (yore?), when homes fell back on property taxes and were abandoned, the relevant city would take the properties and sell them on the cheap to developers or bargain hunters willing to invest a little sweat equity to get themselves a house they could not otherwise afford. But today, while some inner cities are thriving – in New York, Seattle and DC – other cities are simply rusting away.

People and jobs have left Detroit in droves. They may have great professional sports teams, but their core city is a wasteland. Hitting a population peak of 1.85 million in the 1950s, today the city is home to way less than half that number, about 700 thousand. So restoring blighted homes and neighborhoods would be an act of utter futility for this bankrupt metropolis. There just aren’t enough people to live in those building, not enough businesses that need the space.

Same goes for many towns. For example, “Cleveland, whose population has shrunk by about 80,000 during the past decade to 395,000, has spent $50 million over the past six years to raze houses, which cost $10,000 each to destroy, compared with $27,000 annually to maintain.” New York Times, November 11^th. The local answer is increasingly the bulldozer and skip loader. Take away the crack houses and drug hotels. Take a load off the cops. Kill off the repositories of rats and roaches.

But these towns are not the only urban victims in the rust belt crumble. “Large-scale destruction is well known in Detroit, but it is also underway in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Buffalo and others [You can add Youngstown, Ohio and St. Louis, Missouri to that list as well] at a total cost of more than $250 million. Officials are tearing down tens of thousands of vacant buildings, many habitable, as they seek to stimulate economic growth, reduce crime and blight, and increase environmental sustainability.

“A recent Brookings Institution study found that from 2000 to 2010 the number of vacant housing units nationally had increased by 4.5 million, or 44 percent. And a report by the University of California, Berkeley, determined that over the past 15 years, 130 cities, most with relatively small populations, have dissolved themselves, more than half the total ever recorded in the United States.

“The continuing struggles of former manufacturing centers have fundamentally altered urban planning, traditionally a discipline based on growth and expansion… Today, it is also about disinvestment patterns to help determine which depopulated neighborhoods are worth saving; what blocks should be torn down and rebuilt; and based on economic activity, transportation options, infrastructure and population density, where people might best be relocated. Some even focus on returning abandoned urban areas into forests and meadows.” NY Times.

And this is where national numbers really don’t tell you enough about those at the extreme ends of the bell-curve. Because the top of the food chain are doing so well, richer than ever, they tend to pull the average statistics to “tolerable economics.” But droughts in once-productive farmlands and labor-averse manufacturing and outsourcing against the Rust Belt leave vast pockets of struggling Americans with little hope for a participation in the “recovery.” They have been downsized for the rest of their lives, at least those too old to retrain for the modern job market… and we are cutting government money for training and education under the false mantra of “fiscal responsibility.” Short term bandages with longer term pain. In the end, do we care enough to change this… or is America now “everyone for him or herself”?

I’m Peter Dekom, and this is not exactly the country I grew up in.