Back On The Wagon

I have a new job, no longer free lancing. Check out neuroticmedia.com

So I should be updating the blog much more often now

SMH 6.22.2011

Illegal Immigration: Everyone’s Issue

So my first article for the examiner.com was about undocumented students in Georgia universities.  Illegal immigration and undocumented ‘aliens’ is one of those hot button issues that has been a hot button for most of the course of American history. Historically, white Americans do not like sharing ‘their’ land that they fought the indigenous natives and the hispanic offspring of Iberian colonists and indigenous natives to call our own. Manifest destiny is more American than apple pie and Uncle Sam.  It is a passive and often patronizing form of racism from people who may not believe they hod any racist ideals.

However, it is generally considered good form to respect a nation’s boundaries and internal policies with regard to people who do not live and pay taxes here. It is an imperfect system but it is the system we have at the moment. Yet there is a misconception which abounds with regard to immigration. In general we think Latinos when we think illegal immigrants but there needs to be a distinction made between what is happening on the Mexican-American border and what is happening when say someone from Canada or Poland or China comes here illegally. Those latter folk are truly illegal immigrants, here for whatever reason without documentation.  What is happening on our southern border is much more serious.  Those people are refugees.

We have a Mexican refugee problem. Just because they do not come to our shores half starved on boats (and some of them do indeed arrive that way) in no way makes them less refugees. Life in Mexico for the poor is atrocious and these people are escaping to America much like many East Germans escaped to West Germany. The government of Mexico is not an oppressive state but it is a nation that has serious economic and class issues.

What is needed is a solution that maintains our national integrity AND their dignity as human beings.

Working, Writing, and Politics

Well I am finally using my education to a certain degree and writing at the same time. I am working as part of the Examiner team now, writing on Public Policy for the Atlanta area.  I would have preferred Foreign Policy but maybe I can work my way into that. I may also attempt to sign on as a gaming writer for them. The sky is the limit.

Going Postal

I found an interesting article today on CNN Money. It is about the Post Office and I found it to be very enlightening.  You can view it here.

Unbelievable – no not really

One thing that absolutely leaps out at me when I read this article: the USPS lost $3.8 billion in fiscal year 2009. $3.8 BILLION is a lot of money for any privately funded company or organization. Honestly how are they still in business? How could they afford to lose $3.8 billion and still be in business? Do they have loans or lines of credit or are they able to defer payments? The powers that be over there at USPS did make cuts but could they have made up such an enormous shortfall?

They cut 40,000 jobs and if you assume on average that employee made $26,000 per year (that equates to $12.50 per hour) then the savings was in the order of $1.04 billion.  There are no doubt associated costs for each of those employees so the savings would be higher. Yet they lost the $3.8b AFTER making those and other cuts. The situation apparently only stands to get worse in the coming years.

Now before we become too critical of those who run the USPS we need to remember that they are working under 40 year old regulations that likely need to be updated to reflect the modern situation. Never the less, as a business USPS is not very well run and not just because the working conditions have given us a name for work related rage.

Supply & Demand

When demand for a product decreases and thus the supply of that product increases, the price needs to drop to make the product more attractive. Instead, the USPS has steadily increased its rates and this has had the effect of driving more and more customers away. At the risk of getting kicked in the chest by the head of the USPS, I must simply say “This is madness!”.  You cannot run a private company into the ground this way and expect it to remain a private company for very long.  Either it will be fully nationalized in which case we the tax payers will be getting double taxed (money going to the post office through taxes and money spent on stamps) or fully privatized and quality, which is not always the best anyway, will fall by the wayside. Opening up mail delivery to full competition would create chaos and even though I hate saying it, I do not think it is the answer. Full nationalization as I mentioned would just cost us more  money

The answer? Well let us see what kind of business model they come up with today but I think the answer is to fire somebody and send the rest back to Macro and Micro Economics classes.

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

I was driving home this morning listening to the local sports radio show and the talk was of course all about the upcoming Tiger Woods press conference. We are waiting, patiently, to see Tiger fall upon the alter of public opinion and be whipped like Henry II in the movie Becket. It is what we want and it is what we the public really believe that we deserve. As Tiger spin-doctors we can watch and look at him down our collective very moral noses and whisper “Tsk, Tsk”. How can we here in America do this when we very well know that it is our society that created the environment that was o.k. with this behavior as long as we did not know about it?  The fact, not the truth because truth is a belief backed up by only part of the facts, but the fact is that part of the American Dream is the ability to vilify someone for doing something we have also done or wish also could do.

That is alright with us. Being a hypocrite is an American right; I am surprised it has not been added as an Amendment to the Constitution it is so ingrained in us. Look at many of our American heroes: John Wayne cheated on several wives, President Kennedy and President Clinton had notable trysts. That is the society that we live in. It makes me wonder how many other golfers and how many of the journalists condemning or commenting on Tiger could be accused of the same thing. Very often we condemn most harshly those who commit the sames sins that we do. Of course that is the problem here: we still consider as a society what Tiger did was wrong. Well as a society, fact it, it wasn’t. The sin was in showing publicly what kind of people we are privately.

Now, as an individual I have no problem if you believe that Tiger was wrong and acted terribly in embaressing his wife, himself, and his sport. If your religious beliefs hold adultery as a sin or if you just believe in your own morality that his behavior was wrong, then good for you! Stick to your guns and show your children / people around you that you are a credit to your belief system. Do not forget however, that most religions believe in forgiveness and compassion as well.

As a society however, we need to realize that no matter what our personal beliefs, that morality is not synonymous with legality or even with good citizenship.  Plenty of compassionate and hard working good citizens are philanderers, addicted to sex, and have different sexual morals than the primary religions would suggest are appropriate.  We choose our leaders because we perceive them to be good leaders, not good people. We HOPE that they are good people but when your life is on the line do ou prefer the hard drinking hard fighting womanizer or the pleasant but mediocre general?  I know what my choice would be; your mileage may very.

So when Tiger kneels before us today keep in mind that what he is apologizing for is for being Human in an age of moral transition that is alright with imperfect heroes as long as no one knows about their imperfections.

Advice from Someone who has a Job… No not me

Here is a link everyone looking for work should read. Advice from The Career Builder Blog.

The blogger, Rachel Zupek, talks about how impersonal those old fashioned greetings can be. Shame on you job seeker for not simply calling the company and doing a little research. This is why you have no job and someone like Rachel does. Well to be fair she has made the most of her skills and judging her on one tired and trite blog would be simply unfair and unprofessional. You see, Ms. Zupek (or should I use another term? Is Mz or Ms outdated and old fashioned and showing a lack of research on my part?) is simply part of the Machine. Getting hired in today’s world is really similar to taking a standardized test. In my day it was the SAT but they have a great many acronyms now.  It is all about the process and feeding the machine. It always has been and it always will be.

Note: of course there are exceptions to the above, nothing is an absolute.

For as long as people have been seeking jobs, those who have jobs have been telling the seekers about the secrets to getting hired. It is a game and many people do not realize it. Like any meaningful relationship outside of friendship, getting hired is game of courtship and one might say seduction. The target holds out hoops and waits to see which one of the suitors can make it through the most before falling. It is a beauty contest where the most deserving often does not get hired. Make no mistake, one should take Rachel Zupek’s advice seriously. You are in this beauty pageant and at stake is some security at the very least and quite possible fulfilling your dreams and goals.  Companies think they hold all the cards and in many ways they do. Those of us who are unemployed or underemployed do not have the moral fortitude as a group to say “Well until companies as a whole start treating us a skilled resource instead of unwashed masses, we are withholding our skills from the workforce”.  Companies already hire subs-par workers because they can pay them less and fire them at will. So if we refuse to work, we will just be poor, socially unacceptable, and tragic figures holding out our hands for scraps while physically, professionally, or politically beautiful earn a paycheck every week.

Now, as far as the article itself, I wanted to make a few rebuttal points to Ms. Zupek’s blog.

1. How am I supposed to know who to address when you are going through a third party hiring company more interested in furthering my education than reviewing my resume for it’s content? The article suggests that the job seeker needs to show effort, but what about the employer? If you have an HR department are you not already paying someone to hire me? Why are you paying Career Builder and say American Career Group to do the preliminary work for you? Kudos to both companies because they have sold you on an unnecessary service (less so in the case of Career Builder but a company could probably get the same results with less output). Now why would I want to work for you if I see that you spend your money so unwisely?
2. How am I supposed to know who to address when the people I am calling do not even know you are hiring? Have you ever called even a mid-sized company and their answer person has no idea what you are talking about or worse, makes a guess? Even better have you been told the following: “Everything you need to know is in the advertisement.”?  I have and on more than one occasion. If you want me to work for you, perhaps your left hand should know what your right hand is doing?
3. Is the person who posted the ad and has his or her email as the email of contact really the person I need to address my cover letter to? This another common issue. Often it is just a company email but the person actually reading your cover letter is someone completely different. In an environment looking a reason to reject a resume, is havign the wrong name more or less likely to send my resume to the circular file than using “To Whom it May Concern”?

As a skilled worker in a supposedly Capitalist market, you need to make the companies do the seduction. Make them come after you and I think you will find (as will they when you show them they made the right hiring decision) that you can have your dignity as well as a well-paying career.

The Beginning of the End?

What President Obama said last night is not relevant in the details, save for one. Actually it is the details of what he did not say that should be noted and logged for posterity. Someone a thousand years from now will do a show on Rise & Fall of the American Empire, and last night’s speech will be noted as an important sign. A sign of what? Well the end times of course. No not the oft quoted but little proved prophecies of the return of Jesus or any of a thousand doomsday prophecies based on religions.  I am talking about the inevitable fall of our American experiment, which any psycho-historian worth is or her weight could have predicted twenty years ago.

Actually 22 years ago when President Reagan stepped down after his second term. No hold on, I admit I am a fan of Reagan and what he accomplished as our President. I happen to think that he was one of our greatest. Was the man flawed? Yes, he was flawed. He made mistakes. He was human. However, I am not commenting specifically on Reagan as a President; instead I am commenting on him as the lead politician of his nation, this nation. In his capacity as that lead he was able to get people on both sides of the isle and around the country to believe in him and cooperate with one another.  We had problems but they were minor because we believed that we could fix them.  Reagan was no savior; he was anti-hero in every regard yet he was the right man at the right time. The Cold War had gone on too long and Americans had for too long complained about their country but done very little (with notable exceptions) to correct the issues.  Reagan came in and he sold most people on the fix he offered, as imperfect as it was.  Problems are much smaller when you can believe in what you are doing.

President Obama finds himself in a much worse situation to be sure. He came in under similar circumstances to President Reagan but we are in the midst of a second Vietnam (for that is what Afghanistan and Iraq are) and there is no interest between the two parties in cooperating. Our debt is worse than it ever was and is only going to get continue. The world does not need America the way it once did and our word as well as our dollar, are not buying us very much. It may very well be an impossible task and, no offense to the man, his socialist ideals whether genuine or simply political are not going to work in a country that does not understand it is no longer even capitalist.   In effect, we are a mess.

The real question becomes whether we will, like Rome, be sacked by those barbarians we once conquered or like Britain, simply fade into a second-rate power (no offense to my British friends and Anglophiles everywhere). Can it be stopped? Of course. Our downfall is not divinely ordained but to do so we would need to set aside our apathy and all our notions of what America stands for.  We would need a new constitution and a new government and more importantly the idea that we should and can all work towards the same goal.  Good luck with that.

Greetings & Salutations

I have been a human being for a long time now. I know, sounds kind of odd to say such a thing but being Human and having the ability to understand what is going on in the world around us is not, in many cases, an attribute that everyone can appreciate. Businessmen, politicians, and Monday morning quarterbacks do not value the honest breakdown of of their actions. They do not want to know the truth or think about the end game. All that concerns them is the here and now.

An excellent example of this is sports analysis.  In the beginning of the year as they struggled to win games, the Pittsburgh Steelers were revealed to have some problems. Then they won several games in a row and the analysts declared that the Steelers had righted the ship. Recently that very same Steeler team has seemed to have tipped their canoe once again. The moral of the story? They were never a very good team over the long haul. In actuality they were not a very good team last year but they managed, as the did the Cardinals, to make it to the Super Bowl, which the Steelers subsequently won. Now if I offered you the choice of one Super Bowl today or two tomorrow, which would you take?

I have never worked for a Wall Street firm or been part of a Fortune 500 business. I have never been fired and walked out the door with $400,000. To be honest I have moved from job to job seeking a place were intelligence, honesty, and foresight were more important than how many years experience someone had in food service industry.  In the one place I found it, my mot recent place of employment, I had to leave because life itself took me in a different direction.

Why am I bothering to write this blog? Very simple really. I believe that there are others out there, like myself, who see modern business and the modern workplace for the shamefully dehumanizing place that it is. An honest commentary if you will, which I doubt will make me many friends and deliver any job offers. Never the less since it is free I will avail myself of the right to speak my mind.