Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Enter Barry Lynn, a "senior fellow" at the sinister New America Foundation:

http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2007/why_economists_cant_see_the_economy_5058

... with a cry for sanity. Our fast-globalizing system is becoming ever more "fragile", more vulnerable to devastating blows, if a few key supply links get snipped.

The industrialist grasps the idea of fragility immediately, and often offers up fresh tales of production shutdowns and close calls. Indeed, industrial fragility has quietly emerged as perhaps the single biggest operational concern of business today, reflected in a boom in programs to study supply chain risk at places like MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Penn’s Wharton School.

The economist, by contrast, just as swiftly rejects the idea of such fragility outright. Why? Because no industrialist, the economist will declare, would ever take such a risk. Industrialists who say that market pressures force them to take too much risk are simply seeking protection. They are selfish, or lazy.

Wow. Post-partisan expert action -- that's the ticket. Let the merit class steer us between the Scylla and Charybdis of the plunder class and the Great Uneducated.

Folks, if the two main economic classes are about to collide -- and they may well be -- then we all oughta be ready for more of this Walter Mitty imagineering.

Politics-free snake oil sounds mighty tempting when you're "the man in the middle."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20275

Most Americans are troubled by the culture of dealmaking and financial engineering and insider self-enrichment.... by the callous treatment of workers and work life.... by the erosion of communities and community institutions.... Not very far below the political surface, most of us feel some version of the same vexed ambivalence toward corporate America -- dazzled by the conveniences and comforts it delivers, yet resentful of the tradeoffs that it continually demands....

I think his last shot catches this moment in America well, as the brewing winds of job site rebellion start reaching higher up the class tower, toward the penthouse corporate goblins, and out into the still nominally independent offices, labs, studios, and campuses of all our wonderfully creative symbol makers and shakers.

...it is hard to imagine... a fundamental transformation of these giant institutions. It is even harder to imagine a better world in which they remain essentially what they are.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=06&year=2007&base_name=robert_reich_is_scared_of_comp

Title: "Robert Reich Is Scared of Competing With Smart Immigrants."

Yes, the main enemy on the Dean's list is not seven seas-worthy corporate buccanneers, it's our stay-at-home hyper-meritoids, like Sir Bobby Reich, the pint-sized prog knight, formerly of Clinton round table I. A guy with a reputation for lifetime goo-goo kindness to his lessers, a corner man, even, for all us lowly wagelingers.

But here's Baker's take on Bob: sure, guys like him want to comp and restore all our millions of bloodied and bowed prolios, all of us that got, are getting, and are yet to get jobsapped by "the blunt edge of globality."

Indeed it is Bobby's M.O.: make 'em as whole as can be, and then toss 'em right back in the open trade ring for another round of "take this, you fat yankee swine."

To be perfectly fair -- which Dean ain't -- Bobby's no Greg Mankiw. Hell, if some poor battered wage stiff had the Mank in his corner, he'd get filled with nothing but Wall Street moonshine. "Forget that shutup eye, and the river of blood running down into your mouth and the broken right hand... yer killin' him, Homer... plain killin' him... why, one more round like the last, and Mr Fast Foot Work Wonton over there'll be nose deep in the canvas."

That's not Bobby's way. Bobby cries for us and binds our wounds like Walt Whitman. But still there is no possible "no mas" in the Bobby playbook. And here's the rub, sez Dean: Reich has a double standard -- one for us dimbo wageryites, and another for his beloved brainery.

Take Reich on the proposed new merit-ranked immigration quotas. Here's Baker:

...when it comes to policies that could tilt the playing field the other way, so that less educated workers benefit from immigration (lower wages for highly-educated workers, means lower prices for the goods and services they produce and therefore higher real wages for those in the middle and bottom) Reich gets on Marketplace Radio to denounce them.

I say no. I say all us doughfaced proles and plebs oughta accept any "class acts" we can get on our side -- just so long as they follow us and don't try to lead the parade, as is their mommy's dream for them.

To me, baiting the success progs from down here at street level is a fools' game. Badgering doctors and lawyers and professors and other such highly credentialed frauds is no way to focus a movement against corporate-sponsored wide-open borders. I say, let 'em keep their gates closed -- if they can -- but let's find an answer to all our woes, one that lifts all "working boats" at once, like perpetually chockfull employment, and a dollar sunk so low it ain't worth a third what it's worth today over there in South world.

I hear the hoarse demotic bellow, "bring 'em down! If we can't climb, at least we can knock those high and mighty windsurfers off their pedestals." I hear and sympathize. But getting us to try and spread the misery is the final tower troll monty.

Haven't we, at least since Nixon, been cheering every time mister secular halo takes one on the snoot in the public square? And where's that got us?

Dean's wrong precisely for being so right. so far the merits have not felt the lash, but that is about to change, if it hasn't already. The merits are becoming our natural allies. Their platinum number's already being carefully punched, and they know it. TNC America is on a 35-year roll, leaving the bottom 80% dumped and draggled in its wake. But it's also a one-way ticket to hell for another chunk -- an upper chunk, the top 20% of America's jobbery -- and that will not stop 'em. The boardroom course-setters will not change course now. In fact they can't stop themselves -- it's the logic of all bottom lines to keep on lowering costs everywhere and by any means.

And so we end up here, at the moment the next great import onslaught breaks over us, like Sony TV's, Toyotas and tomato pickers before them. This time it's cheap Asian hyper-brains. We are entering the era of the American brain-wave attacks, and they'll crash over our meritoids' heads and keep crashing, until enough of us stand up and shut the floodgates ourselves.

The first huge wave is now on order, and ready to ship our way, if and when the new-model immigration bill escapes the Hill. If it does we'll surely see the beginnings of Dean's revenge, as hundreds of thousands of holier-than-thou symbol-smiths panic and rush toward our mugs' don't-tread-on-me banner.

It's only a matter of time, and plastic surgeons will be elbow to elbow with rubbermaids.

"You will find (them) ... firmly planted in existing institutions -- the voting booth, the two-party system, the electoral college, oh and don't forget... the Supreme Court. "

Yes the binge politics of the biz wiz ogres in the end martyrs the meritoids politically. But... ah, to be righteous, and to act righteous, to work hard and think smart, and in the last scene, die in Nixon's arena out there in front of the assembled soul-curdled multitude, peppered with their "et tu Brute" poisoned shafts!

What's not to like -- the System works.

UNCLE SAM DOESN'T WANT YOU

They were the kind of kids companies fall over each other trying to hire--smart, personable, hardworking, well-groomed. That they went to Harvard didn't hurt, either. So it was no surprise that by April, most of the seniors in the discussion sections I was leading as a graduate student had jobs lined up after graduation. Nor was the roster of firms: Arthur Andersen, IBM, Morgan Stanley, CBS, Aetna . . . the usual suspects. What was strange was that one company--the country's biggest, in fact--didn't make the list: the federal government.....

If government is to meet our basic expectations, let alone go beyond that to better our lives, it needs creative, intelligent, dedicated people to develop and run its programs.

Back when Dick Nixon was trying to get the schlubby G Harrold Carswell onto the Supreme Court, the immortal Roman Hruska defended the Presidential choice: "So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there."

At the time I laughed as loud as everybody else about this, but with maturity comes the intimation that maybe Hruska was onto something. Thought experiment: would we be worse off, or better than we are now, if the members of the Supreme Court and the Congress were chosen by lottery? Show your work.

We the rubes and flatlanders gotta get off our rumples and demand an end to this Mister Higher Ed steeplechase racket. Go after 'em in Uncle's courts!

we need a groundswell movement -- end all virtual higher ed gauntlets. Let's refuse to fill out that section of the app, and then sue when they don't hire us. Or just sue if they say a college degree is a requirement. Or or or....

Self-evident axiom: it's discrimination to screen job applications for irrelevant years of schooling and degrees, unless direct job requirements can be demonstrated to include XYZ higher school-taught horsefeathers -- and we all know anything picked up past 6th grade, 9 out of 10 times, don't matter a cold French fry one way or the other.

Harvard Law, Hoping Students Will Consider Public Service, Offers Tuition Break

Concerned by the low numbers of law students choosing careers in public service, Harvard Law School plans to waive tuition for third-year students who pledge to spend five years working either for nonprofit organizations or the government.

The program, to be announced Tuesday, would save students more than $40,000 in tuition...

For years, prosecutors, public defenders and lawyers in traditionally low-paying areas of the law have argued that financial pressures were pushing graduates toward corporate law and away from the kind of careers that they would pursue in the absence of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

“The debt loads that people are coming out of law schools with are now in six figures,” said Joshua Marquis, the... vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. “When the debt load is that great, I have had a lot of applicants who’ve said, ‘I’d like to take the job, but I really can’t afford it.’ ”

Perhaps worse, Mr. Marquis said, some indebted young lawyers who choose to try to survive on a low salary as a junior prosecutor may decide to leave to earn more just as they gain enough experience to handle more important cases.

I wonder -- is it possible that this is just some high-minded muffled pretext for a Filene's Basement discount price on a Harvard Law education? Has this priceless sheepskin started to lose its luster?

O how I hope so. Here's my advice to all you young people out there: avoid the Harvard anointment as you would avoid buying a house, and for the same reason -- the bubble may just have burst. You don't want to end up with negative equity, and the sliding price says Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

And whatever you do, stay out of "public service". You don't need the public, and man, they don't need you.

The prison system, openly so called, as we all know is booming. But one of the other two is not cooking up much except its own books.

Seems our Dewey or don't-we school system is actually running much higher escape rates than previously acknowleged. Somewhere around 30% to 40% of inmates drop out of each cohort prior to serving their full 12 year stretch.

Bravo. Let's shoot for half free by 16.

And the third detention system? 'Ceptin vampires of course, it seems to be holding its own -- R.I.P. brothers and sisters.

Courtesy of these folks, who went ahead and endorsed him anyway.