The Philosopher Kings And Queens of America

The fact-free coddle-fest last night ("Fox Business gives Ben Carson a free pass in GOP debate") offered many, many hilariously false statements for your 'umble scrivener to choose from -- lies cheerfully extruded by the yard by the Fox News employees behind the lecterns, and just as cheerfully ignored by the "elegant" Fox News employees who fed them stage direction from behind the moderator desk.

So I thought today I would pick out one that will probably be missed by almost everyone else.

From Marco Rubio, the Wandering Senator, last night (emphasis added):

...

Here's the best way to raise wages. Make America the best place in the world to start a business or expand an existing business, tax reform and regulatory reform, bring our debt under control, fully utilize our energy resources so we can reinvigorate manufacturing, repeal and replace Obamacare, and make higher education faster and easier to access, especially vocational training. For the life of me, I don't know why we have stigmatized vocational education. Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.

First, it's "fewer" philosophers, not "less".  Dumbass.

Second, the best manufacturers I know do indeed value their welders (who can pass a drug test. It's a thing)...and CNC operators...and mold-makers...who are also lateral thinkers that can evaluate weird, complex problems and work out creative solutions.  You can study both.  Dumbass.

Third, without philosophy students, Soundgarden may never have existed.  Dumbass.  (From the American Philosophical Association, "Who Studies Philosophy?")

Kim Thayil, musician (Soundgarden)

On the other hand, without a certain philosophy student, history might have been changed just enough to spare Hewlett-Packard the reign of the Destroyer of Companies:

Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and presidential candidate
Bachelor’s Degree, Stanford University, 1976

You know what?  It turns out lots of gainfully-employed people you may have heard about have studied philosophy along the way.  Lots and lots.  Here is a partial list:

Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President
Bachelor’s Degree, College of William and Mary, 1762

Fred Thompson, former senator and presidential candidate (and erstwhile actor)
Bachelor’s Degree, University of Memphis, 1964

George F. Will, journalist, author, and political commentator
Bachelor’s Degree, Trinity College, 1962

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader
Taught social philosophy at Morehouse College, 1961

Carl Icahn, investor and former CEO of TWA Airlines
Bachelor’s Degree, Princeton University, 1957

Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal
Bachelor’s Degree, Stanford University, 1989

Pope John Paul II
Ph.D., Jagiellonian University, 1948

Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize winning theologian and missionary
Ph.D., University of Tübingen, 1899

Christopher Hitchens, author
Bachelor’s Degree, Balliol College Oxford, 1967

Sam Harris, author (The End of Faith) and co-founder of Project Reason<
Bachelor’s Degree, Stanford University, 2000

Elie Wiesel, author (Night)
Studied at the Sorbonne, 1948-1951

Chris Hayes, journalist, political commentator, and MSNBC host
Bachelor’s Degree, Brown University, 2001

Wes Anderson, filmmaker
Bachelor’s Degree, University of Texas at Austin, 1990

Harrison Ford, actor
Majored in philosophy at Ripon College (no degree earned), 1960-1964

Steve Martin, comedian, actor, and musician
Majored in philosophy at California State University Long Beach (no degree earned), 1963-1967

Phil Jackson, NBA coach
Bachelor’s Degree, University of North Dakota, 1967

Bruce Lee, martial artist
Studied philosophy at University of Washington (no degree earned), 1961-1964

Ayn Rand, author (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged)
Bachelor’s Degree, Petrograd State University, 1924

So...why does Marco Rubio hate Ayn Rand and Han Solo?

Finally, I agree that we should be doing a lot more to offer every American a ladder (well, "lattice", if you want to get technical and wonky) into the middle class by strategically strengthening America's manufacturing base and offering a program of life-long career education and training starting in high school.

You know who else believe that?

Barack Obama, who campaigned on this very subject back in 2008 before he was ever elected president.  Here he is, taking specifically about Austin Polytech high school in Chicago and about which I have written from time to time:

And given the subject at hand, it's only appropriate to close out with a philosophical question of sorts:  How much more might President Barack Obama have been able to accomplish on behalf of the manufacturing sector and American school kids had he not been blocked and sabotaged Every.  Single. Fucking. Step. along the way by the party of bigots, assholes and lunatics to which Marco Rubio owes his allegiance?

The Paper Chase

(h/t @Shoq for the head's up on this article)

I have been told that law school is not like this anymore, but I have number of friends who have gone down to JD Town over the decades, and their experiences have all sounded remarkably similar: despair, fury, self-loathing, collapsing mid-slog at the thought of how long the Sisyphusian horror will continue, some vomiting and crying and, finally, exhausted triumph (this does not include one of my Chicago pals whose ordinary law school travails were further complicated by the fact that our boss was a sadistic, racist asshole and college dropout who actively tried to sabotage my friend's studies over and over again.)

So I am guessing that the author of this article -- "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me" -- is not a professor at a law school, where heartbreak is a required course.

 Probably doesn't teach at business school either.

 Or J-school.

 Or med school.

Or nursing school.

Or any trade school.

Or a military academy.

So, then, some liberal arts college somewhere...

I'm a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students.

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

Not, like, in a person-by-person sense, but students in general. The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

I, too, have taught college.  At a Well Known College in Chicago.  I was also on staff at that college, in a position where my tiny team and I had to put the department back together because after years of negligence it had basically gone feral. Whole labs had been commandeered by pirates and their droogs and molls. Packs of wild dogs roamed the halls while the faculty hid in the dung-wattled teacher's lounge getting wasted enough to brave the crossfire and get back to class.

When the Well Known College finally moved to repair this mess, they did so by 1) handing the outgoing chair an enormous pile of money and telling him to stay in his office and play "Empire" until he died and, 2) hiring me and my merry band in at just barely above minimum wage to rebuild civilization.

And we did -- Yay us! -- and in the process we pissed off a lot of droogs and molls and pirates and wild dogs, all of whom made their way down to the Dean of Crazy Students to register a rich and fragrant bouquet of complaints against me and my rectification crew.

When I returned a few years later the teach a few classes at the same college, I was heartened to see that the changes we had made had taken root and become institutional.   Also there was still a Dean of Crazy Students and still young maidens and neckbeards who felt that since mama and papa were shelling out a shit-ton of money to send them to a Well Known College,  we were their employees.  Many, many more times than once we heard a variant of "I pay your salary!" from some disgruntled child who felt that their mediocre "C" work should really be an "A" or that being docked a grade for multiple absences was Cruel and Unusual punishment, even though that rule was in the syllabus, on the board and mentioned by me ad nauseum.

And now, a bit of deeper background.

I took classes off and on at various places as it suited me for years until it was made clear that I Had No Future without a degree, so I was on campus back when Andrea Dworkin was riding high and all men were monsters and all marriage was rape...and I was around when the Men's Movement was a thing.  I remember Piss Christ, was right down the street when "What is the Proper Way to Display a Flag?" was giving people the sweats, and I vividly recall the day a gang of Chicago aldermen marched into the School of the Art Institute and snatched down the painting depicting the late mayor Harold Washington in bra and panties.

So as a weary and threadbare traveler who has been observer, student, staff member and instructor at schools which were always being wracked one way or another with the fury and cultural apocalypses of the day (which, in turn, often end up being the only-vaguely-remembered college reunion memories of tomorrow), all I can say it that when I read "Edward Schlosser"s take on the modern academy --

...

In 2009, the subject of my student's complaint was my supposed ideology. I was communistical, the student felt, and everyone knows that communisticism is wrong. That was, at best, a debatable assertion. And as I was allowed to rebut it, the complaint was dismissed with prejudice. I didn't hesitate to reuse that same video in later semesters, and the student's complaint had no impact on my performance evaluations.

In 2015, such a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion. Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness (or even acceptability) of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the student's emotional state. As I cannot speak to the emotions of my students, I could not mount a defense about the acceptability of my instruction. And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow.

I wrote about this fear on my blog, and while the response was mostly positive, some liberals called me paranoid, or expressed doubt about why any teacher would nix the particular texts I listed. I guarantee you that these people do not work in higher education, or if they do they are at least two decades removed from the job search.

...

-- I do not see the failure of Liberalism or social justice or whatever:

I agree with some of these analyses more than others, but they all tend to be too simplistic. The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice.

Instead I see Reaganomics and the deeply Libertarian impulse to let an utterly unregulated capitalist fighting pit settle every issue operating at peak efficiency.

By transforming the previously-extrinsic factor of a college degree into the minimum entry requirement for even the lowliest job, American capitalism has handed the American college and university system a license to print money.  This has made the demand for college degrees perpetually inelastic:  since your kids have to have it, they can charge whatever they like.

Second, not only has American capitalism guaranteed colleges and universities an inexhaustible source of wealthy, but governance and rewards structures within those temples of higher learning are handled in the way which capitalism loves best

Feudalism!

To the ippy tippy top -- the administration, departments chairs and the tenured -- go the lion's share of the wealth and job security, while the heavy lifting is done by a"contingent" workforce of academic beanfield-hands, kept in a perpetual state of economic insecurity:

...
The academic job market is brutal. Teachers who are not tenured or tenure-track faculty members have no right to due process before being dismissed, and there's a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place. And as writer and academic Freddie DeBoer writes, they don't even have to be formally fired — they can just not get rehired. In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn't just dangerous, it's suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won't upset anybody.
...

What the author is describing is not some exotic peonage arrangement peculiar to UC Sunnydale. What the author is describing is the everyday reality of labor for virtually every working class American scrapping for a living in our brave, new right-to-work/employment-at-will economy (from me, last year):

...

Thank's to the Conservative Long War on Labor, today almost every worker in almost every job in almost every state is an "at-will" employee who may be canned by the boss for almost any reason, or no reason at all:

[A]n employer may terminate its employees at will, for any or no reason ... the employer may act peremptorily, arbitrarily, or inconsistently, without providing specific protections such as prior warning, fair procedures, objective evaluation, or preferential reassignment ... The mere existence of an employment relationship affords no expectation, protectable by law, that employment will continue, or will end only on certain conditions, unless the parties have actually adopted such terms.[6]

Yes, there are exceptions such as race, religion, sex, handicap status and so forth, but the burden of affirmatively proving that you were fired because you're a member of one of those protected categories falls to the fired employee, and short of discovering a cache of documents in which your boss explicitly outlines his plans to terminate you because you're a woman or gay or over 40, you're usually shit outta luck. 

Welcome to Capitalism 101!

I have seen people sacked for being too unattractive for the new boss's tastes.  For having too must melanin.  For being dangerously competent.  For being too honest.  Too old. Because the boss's drinking buddy or mistress doesn't like you.  For having the wrong last name.  For having the bad luck of not knowing an alderman who owes you a favor. Because the boss needed to make a soft place for one of his pals to land when he got laid off from some other division.

Because in a free and unregulated labor market, firing you because, well, fuck you, that's why, is the boss's very own modern-day droit du seigneur.

...

Once a degree became the only remaining Letter of Transit available to get your kid into the middle class, it became a commodity...another product in the marketplace.

And in the marketplace, the customer is always right.  

And the more the fortunes of the people at the top depends on catering to the whims of the customer, the more monstrous unreasonable the customer gets to be:

When colleges made the checkbooks of the parents of temperamental children their primary focus, they went out of the eternal verity business.

Which is a real shame.

One of the Original Manufacturing Academies

Candidate Obama talking about Chicago's Austin Polytechnical Academy in 2008.

President Obama today:

President Obama to Announce New Efforts to Support Manufacturing Innovation, Encourage Insourcing

Administration Proposes New National Network to Support Manufacturing, Takes Immediate Action to Create a Pilot Manufacturing Institute

On Friday, President Obama will continue to highlight the successful trend of insourcing – companies from around the world bringing jobs back and making new investments here in the United States – at the Rolls-Royce Crosspointe jet engine disc manufacturing facility in Prince George County, Virginia. The President’s Blueprint for An Economy Built to Last lays out a number of ways we can encourage insourcing, support investment in our manufacturing sector, and create good jobs here in the United States, and today’s announcements build on those efforts.

The President will announce a new proposal for a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, to build a network of up to fifteen Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation around the country, serving as regional hubs of manufacturing excellence that will help to make our manufacturers more competitive and encourage investment in the United States. The President’s Budget proposes a $1 billion investment to create this new National Network for Manufacturing Innovation.

The President will also announce that the Administration will take immediate steps to launch a pilot institute for manufacturing innovation as part of its We Can’t Wait efforts. The pilot institute will be funded from $45 million of existing resources from the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Commerce and the National Science Foundation, and will be selected from a competitive application process.
...

Having worked long hours for many years behind the scenes to help make initiatives like these come true, I was handed my walking papers a couple of months after Candidate Obama gave this speech.  I was told that my management regretted the decision -- that I was, in fact, doing a terrific job and that they were freaked out by the prospect of my many projects crashing and burning in my absence due to lack of competent oversight* -- but that I had simply found myself once again paying the steep price price for not being a member of one more  exclusive club.

I learned once again that when the hammer falls, professionalism is often irrelevant and brilliance can suddenly become a terrible liability.

My last day of work was the week of Barack Obama's first inaugural address.

I have not worked full time since.


*(Which is exactly what happened...

A couple of months after I was cut loose, I began getting panicked calls asking for my sub rosa help on some of the projects I had left behind.  They were complicated undertakings with lots of moving parts and  I was told that management had managed to A) lose all the manuals, charts and project notes I had carefully prepared and left behind, and B) had lost track of my hard drive.   

Sigh.  These were projects A)  I really cared about, and B) would completely fuck up the organization if the were allowed to go down in flames.   

After a few hours of free advice to my increasingly-more-hysterical former colleagues [punctuated by many long pauses while they scribbled down every golden word I was saying verbatim] I offered them the opportunity to simply hire me back temporally as a consultant.  Hell, I promised I wouldn't charge them a dime more per-hour than the useless consulting con artists they currently had wandering their halls and soaking up their falling revenue.   

They declined.  I was told that such an arrangement would be "too complicated" to accomplish.  Translation:  Management would have to face me being back in their midst, reminding the entire staff every day that they had chosen to get rid of critical talent while kept useless droids on the payroll. 

So I withdrew my assistance and, about a year later, the projects lay in ruins, costing the organization millions of dollars and a big chunk of their already shaky reputation.   That was the price management was willing to pay to avoid admitting it had made a mistake.)

The Reign of Rahmses -- Part 3

The kick-em-harder school of Chicago education "reform" seems to have been faced down by the Chicago Teacher's Union.  

For now.

For a little background on the political schticks and mortar on which Chicago is built, here is a reprise of a few selections from my 2010 series, "The Lessons of Rahmses".

Today's lessons...

Voters:

Voters:

Chicago, you will be mine, like my dog, or my horse, or my falcon, or my favorite neck-stabbin' pencil except that I shall love you more - and trust you less.

Background: A primer on just how fast politics and voters in Chicago can turn ugly provided by Kathleen Hall Jamieson from her book, "Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction":

In 1983, Republican Bernard Epton faced Democrat Harold Washington in the Chicago mayoral contest. Epton was white, Washington black. Among other things, Epton's radio ads falsely accused Washington of being a "convicted felon" and of having been "disbarred." An unsigned leaflet alleged that Washington had once been arrested on a morals charge. Epton's slogan, widely criticized as "racist," was "Before It's Too Late."

On Palm Sunday, Washington and presidential hopeful Walter Mondale went to church services at St. Pascal's Catholic Church on the Northwest side. "When they arrived, they found 'nigger die' spray-painted on a wall and were met by a nasty, jeering crowd of perhaps three dozen, some of whom shouted racial epithets...

Daley tamped down on this shit by using the same strategy the U.S. military is using in Afghanistan: buying peace by throwing money around. Behind all the fine talk, shiny promises, green initiatives and boulevard planters, there was always lots and lots and lots and lots of money.

That money is all gone now, but the deep, tribal divisions in the Chicago electorate -- which have always roiled just below the surface -- remain.

Employee Morale:

Employee Morale:

Neck-stab half the fuckin' staff and throw 'em the fuck out with the trash.

Doesn't matter which half: the ones you neck-stab stop being a problem; the ones you spare will be so grateful you didn't neck-stab 'em that you can work 'em until they drop in their traces.

Anybody has a problem with that, they can fuckin' quit and go sell irregular tube socks on an I-94 on-ramp, 'cause they'll never work a real job in my fuckin' city ever again.

So let it be written. So let it be fuckin' done.

Sadly, the background for this Lesson can be found on all sides and in every Chicago paper, every day...

Here.

Arbitrator OKs CTA layoffs starting Sunday
February 3, 2010 6:09 PM

Labor unions at the CTA lost a challenge to the transit agency's plans to lay off more than 1,100 employees starting Sunday as part of major service cuts to reduce a budget deficit.

An arbitrator's ruling today against the unions means that the cuts -- an 18 percent reduction in bus service and 9 percent for trains -- will be implemented, barring any developments to erase a $95.6 million deficit that remains for 2010, transit officials said.

CTA management has introduced more than $200 million in internal cuts and other cost savings, and it said the unions must agree to salary and other concessions to help erase the rest of the deficit and stave off the service cuts. The unions representing CTA bus and rail workers have so far refused, saying they made concessions in the past.

And here.

Fitch downgrades Chicago bonds

Posted by Greg H. at 10/28/2010 3:48 PM CDT on Chicago Business
Chicago's bond rating has suffered another hit, this one from Fitch Ratings.

The New York-based firm on Thursday lowered its rating on $7 billion in outstanding general-obligation city debt to AA- from AA, particularly citing the city's increasing reliance on one-time revenues to fix its budget.

"While the economy remains broad and diverse, the city's financial position has weakened," Fitch wrote. Revenues have been hurt by high unemployment and above-average home foreclosures, while the city has reduced reserves from around $2 billion a couple of years ago to a projected $790 million by December.

Fitch applauded layoffs and other payroll trims implemented by outgoing Mayor Richard M. Daley, but added, "The ability to make further expenditure cuts to personnel is extremely limited" due to union contracts.

"Rising costs for public safety and the continued slow economic recovery will severely limit the city's ability to achieve structural balance without working (politically difficult) structural solutions," it said.

Here.

Chicago Community College Budget Calls for Hundreds of Layoffs
Alex Keefe Jul. 29, 2010

Hundreds of non-teaching staff members could be laid off under the new budget proposal for Chicago's community college system.

Next year's budget for City Colleges of Chicago could fund 311 fewer positions, some through attrition.

But that could include 225 non-teacher layoffs.

Chancellor Cheryl Hyman they would affect administrators, as the district tries to consolidate some workers from its seven colleges.

And here.

New Chicago Public Schools Budget: Layoffs, Furlough Days, And Larger Class Sizes To Make Ends Meet

Chicago Sun-Times | Fran Spielman | 04/16/09

About 1,200 city school workers will receive layoff notices this week, and principals will begin sharing the budget pain via pay freezes and six furlough days, as Chicago Public Schools officials move today to plug their remaining $370 million deficit.

And here.

Standard & Poor's lowers Chicago bonds

(Crain's) — The city of Chicago's general obligation bonds took a hit by Standard & Poor's, which lowered its long-term debt rating, citing ongoing budget strife.

The ratings agency assigned Chicago's general obligation debt an A+ rating, down one notch from AA-. It gave the same A+ rating — also lowered from AA- — to nearly $804 million in general obligation refunding and taxable project bonds.

S&P said in its report that the new rating "reflects our view of the city's ongoing structural imbalance and heavy reliance on non-recurring revenues to bridge its 2011 budget gap, including the use of most of its remaining reserves from the sale of its parking meters."

And here.

Daley To Union: 1,600 City Lay Offs Unless Concessions Made

Chicago Sun-Times:

Mayor Daley will be forced to lay off up to 1,600 city employees -- none sworn police officers or firefighters -- unless organized labor agrees to another round of givebacks to wipe out a potential $300 million shortfall, union leaders were told this week.

But with all the grim news raining down in from every direction, what transforms the situation from merely Very Bad into Utterly Toxic is when city workers look around them and see that, even as the City cries poormouth and demands ever more work for ever less pay -- hard work, long hours, creativity and competence still have nothing whatsoever to do with who gets the axe and who does not.

That no matter what City Hall public information machine says about drowning in red ink and the desperate need for everyone to pull together for the common good, there is still a fucking club,

and they sure as Hell still ain't in it.

From the Sun-Times:

Connected city worker spared in merger, layoffs
Never knew she had clout, Special Events director says

October 22, 2010

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Clout apparently still counts in City Hall jobs -- despite Mayor Daley's promise to implement a personnel system free of politics in the wake of a hiring scandal that cost taxpayers $12 million to compensate victims of the city's rigged hiring system.

The wife of a former Democratic ward boss -- who also happens to be the daughter-in-law of a former alderman -- has survived a departmental merger that will eliminate 13 jobs and force nine layoffs.

Maureen Volini was a $73,752 administrative services officer for the Mayor's Office of Special Events.

Now that Daley's final budget is merging Special Events with the Department of Cultural Affairs, Volini has avoided the ax with a transfer to the Department of Procurement Services.
...

Tomorrow:  The Toll of Job Stress and Public Service in a post-Daley Chicago

The Reign of Rahmses -- Part 2

Today, David Brooks had many, exciting things to say about Mayor Rahm and his exciting vision for an exciting, new school system that combines the leaned-out, work-til-you-drop-in-the-traces efficiencies of Wal-Mart with the screw-the-unions, private sector fervor of Wal-Mart.

Well, for those of you trying to make sense of where this salami is being cached and why, I am re-releasing a few of my "Lessons of Rahmses" from 2010 to give the newly-arrived a little taste of Chicago's on-the-ground political realities.

Today's lessons...

 Lesson Five: Fighting Legends

Fighting Legends:

(Circa October, 2011) All I fuckin' hear about is fuckin' "Daley". People loved him 'cause he used to throw millions around like nickles. Now I gotta spend all day tellin' those same people "No", "No" and "Fuck no".

I 'm da New Mare, but I cannot fight the power of his Deficits.

Shit. 

I feel like some Liberal retard just stabbed me in the fuckin' neck with a fuckin' pencil.

Background:


More here if you are so inclined.

Lesson Two: Being Da Boss

Being Da Boss:

Obey? Moses, Moses, are you fuckin' kidding me?

Bring me a fuckin' pencil so I can fuckin' stab you in the fuckin' neck.

Then say "Thank you, Boss!"

Background: From this 2005 Sun-Times article, a distillation of Chicago's favorite, unanswered clout-related question: "Who hired Angelo Torres?"

Torres' clout remains a mystery

August 26, 2005

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

The Daley administration gave up the ghost Thursday on two priorities stemming from the Hired Truck scandal: privatizing the program and finding out who placed a former gang member in charge of it.

Nineteen months after the Chicago Sun-Times blew the lid off the scandal, City Hall released a pile of documents that track Angelo Torres' personnel history, including three pay raises over a two-month period in 1998 and 14 salary increases over eight years. But the documents shed no light on the identity of Torres' political sponsor.

The closest thing to a smoking gun is the revelation that Torres got his first Shakman-exempt position -- as principal operations research analyst for the Office of Budget and Management on Sept. 1, 1998 -- after sign-off by four city officials.

They are: Victor Reyes, the Hispanic Democratic Organization founder who ran the Mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the time; then-Budget Director Barbara Lumpkin; Glenn Carr, the mayor's longtime personnel director who was fired in June, and Robert Sorich, the mayoral patronage chief who was recently indicted in the city hiring scandal.

Observers have long suspected Reyes was responsible for Torres' meteoric rise, citing the Hired Truck czar's past ties to HDO.
...

As much as City Hall wanted to solve the Torres mystery to get a political monkey off Mayor Daley's back, it's not possible, Huberman said. So the question of who put Torres in charge of a program that doled out $38.5 million a year in no-bid trucking business will apparently remain unanswered until the feds choose to solve it.

The Torres case is typical of how, despite a lot of hoo-ha about reform and cleaning up gummint, any genuine accountability and genuine pain is always reserved for lower-level, unprotected flukies. Just like the mob, when it comes to Da Mare, his lieutenants always close ranks to protect him.

Tomorrow, Voters and Employee Morale

Back To School

When posts collide.

This column started life as a response to the "Should You Go to College?" bong that's being passed around in the familiar NYT-Yglesias-Sullivan-NYT circle in the dorm room down the hall.

Then it collided with Suzannah Breslin's delightful advice column , "How to Fail at a Job Interview".

Then it caromed off of an uplifting story about a high school of my acquaintance.

So now it's something else.


Part I: Like, or Like Not. There is no "Why".

Back when I was a dashing, worldly Returning Adult College Student, I picked up a little rent-and-sammich money as a student worker: a job for which I was hilariously overqualified, and which I enjoyed a lot.

After sizing me up (which, as I recall, involved seeing how well I could handle the weapon's suite in whatever the latest first-person-shooter game was popular at the moment, and playing some deep-cut "Depeche Mode" b-side and asking me if I recognized it in a tone that suggested shibboleth-testing) my fellow student workers accepted me as one of the tribe, I found myself;

1) Playing a lot more chess than I had played in years and,

2) Being asked to regale them with Amazing True Tales of a strange place called the Real World about which they had only heard scraps and whispers around the campfire ("...and so the intern hit the gas and rocketed down the old country road. By the time she got back to town she felt silly about being so scared...but when she got out of the car to look for what had made the scraping sound...she found the escaped maniac supervisor's metal hand stuck to the back bumper...still holding her shitty employee evaluation!")

Among these 20-something art, theater and videography majors, many myths had grown up about the Real World -- a terra incognita which I (not unlike Bilbo Baggins) had traversed and lived to tell about.

Overwhelmingly, their legends about the Real World all descended from some
understanding that they had picked up in their childhood about how people should behave and how work ought to be.

"I mean, people can't just fire someone for no good reason, right?"

Sure they can. I'd guess that thousands of people get hired and fired every month for no good reason at all.

"But if you work really hard and you do a great job...?"

You should do that anyway, but no, being competent is no protection against being summarily shitcanned. In fact in many places being competent makes you a threat.

These were not idle questions: these young men and women had almost all taken on huge debt loads to buy a piece of paper that said they were prepared to be dropped onto an alien world, and they were beginning to suspect that, by way of practical preparation, their elders may have given them a box of Crayons and a "Steak n' Shake Funland" maze instead of the maps and weapons necessary to survive the rigors

of planet LV-426.

During one semester this sense of dread was sharply heightened when one of their older peers -- a gifted grad student -- took a job at The Very Prestigious Advertising Company, and over the course of several weeks was driven to frantic despair by what she believed to be the unfair and contradictory demands of her many bosses.

Each time she returned to us she looked more and more defeated and desperate. She spoke of impossible deadlines. Of creatively deadening projects. Of incredibly clueless superiors with enormous power. What, did they expect her to give up her outside life and just work for them around the clock?

"Yes," I told her during one of our asides. "That is exactly what they expect you to do."

"But this is ridiculous! How can people work like this?"

I shrugged. "Millions do. Every day."

She was near tears.

"Well that's just totally stupid. And unfair. They don't even know what they're doing. They won't give me a chance to good work."

I agreed. I still do. My heart went out to her and to all the others with whom I have had such conversations over the years.

Part II: "Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that." -- Homer Simpson

Here is a useful chart (one of many) that explains where all of your hard work on those impossible deadlines working on horrible misconceived projects for those brain-dead bosses ends up going:

You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Gains

Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans. If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.

Part III: The Real World does not care that you can recite the Bhagavad Gītā backwards and can change water into Fanta with your mind.

Here is a snip from the fine column by Ms. Breslin that explains how humans get jobs in the Real World

How to Fail at a Job Interview
Jun. 22 2011

I’ve been on more job interviews this year than any other year in my life.

This is a good thing (theoretically, at least) because it forces you to figure out who you are and sell it.

Can’t do that? You lose.

TIP #1: Miss the point.

Earlier this month, I hired a young female journalist to write a guest post on this blog for $100. (Expect to see it soon.) As a hirer, I was forced to confront the real reason why people hire you.

Because they like you.

This has been said elsewhere, but it is the single truth people fail to grasp about interviewing. It’s not about your skills, it’s not about your resume, it’s not about if you answered the questions right.

Do they like you? If they like you the best, they will hire you. If they don’t, they won’t.
...

Remember that: social networks and chemistry count for vastly more than you are ever led to believe in school. This will be on the test and will count for 75% of your final grade.

(Also Not!ABL from "Balloon Juice" wants to remind all the ladies that a clean cootch is vital.)

Part IV: Driftglass talks to Young Americans about college

Here, in no particular order, are some home truths I know about college that did not get covered by the New York Times or Think Progress.

• The old social order that paid teachers much less than plumbers but rewarded teachers with a higher social distinction is now gone. The collapse of the union movement, the rise of the "college prep or bust" mentality in secondary education and the highly-focused Conservative contempt for all public employees has remade our national narrative into a Gothic horror story about billionaire CEOs Galtian heroes versus school teaching AFT moochers and looting SEIU goons.


• As someone who has hired many, many people, I can tell you that, outside of special training and certification requirements, a degree is generally treated as little more than a filtering device to save the HR manager from having to read 1,000 resumes for every job. It represents nothing more than a proxy for "do you have a pulse, can you read at a ninth grade level, and can you sit still and not fuck up too badly for 2-4 years? Yes? Great. we'll train you to do the rest."


• If you are suspected of being over 45, no one will hire you, and details about your college years and experience serve as a way for hiring managers to very quickly weed out middle-aged applicants without leaving fingerprints. In the age of "we'll get back to you, but we really never do" you will likely never know why you didn't get that job, but the whiff of gray hair and higher health care premiums are a huge reason.


• The business of college isn't primarily about education anymore: it is about buying a Wonka Golden Ticket that will get your kid a place on the ever-shrinking cultural lifeboat called The Middle Class. It means a house, maybe, and a job with benefits, maybe. Sure Junior might be on the road 270 days a years for the Ramjak Corporation selling Chinese anthrax-dipped toys to babies, but Junior will be in a suit and have a per diem and have a scrap of paper that says they shouldn't be fired first when the company decides to move most of its operations to Saigon.


• The day institutions of higher learning figured that they held sole title to a device that could produce secular economic indulgences was the day educational quality and college experience began to become completely secondary to the awarding of pieces of paper for which the American public would pay ANY price.


• Colleges generate vast wealth and are run as a feudal system: those at the top -- officers and those with tenure -- often enjoy comforts, wages and appurtenances that would astonish you, which is why tenure is handed out only to those who work the hardest to help keep the feudal system intact. Everyone else from janitors to "associate" professors are itinerant labor that will one day be hired by the van-load for cash from pools of dirty, sullen unemployed English and Philosophy majors who will be living in abandoned refrigerator boxes insulated with moldering copies Master's theses on "The influence of 'The Beverly Hillbillies' on the novels of the New South", in vast slums called "Michenervilles".


• If you can afford it, go anyway. From a spiritual perspective, you'll find a couple of great teachers who will change your life and why would you deny yourself that? From a career perspective, the most durable capital is social capital. The mentors you will have and the contacts you will make in school will pay you far better dividends for far longer than almost anything you will book-learn there. Also unless you are, say, a flautist or a New York Times op-ed pundit, you are going to need skills upgrades for the rest of your life starting right now, so over time the whole distinction between white collar and blue collar career paths becomes more and more meaningless.

Part V: The Wisdom of Youth.

Before you listen either to me or to the New York Times, consider taking a real Real World lesson from some terrific young men and women who are graduating from the very first senior class of a new Chicago high school called Austin Polytech -- a flawed but promising and innovative academy in the heart of one of Chicago's toughest, poorest neighborhoods that is trying to erase the false and destructive distinction between a good vocational education and a good college-prep education, while at the same time producing the next generation of leaders in the field of advanced manufacturing.

You want hope? You want "act local"? You want a practical economic, educational and community-based vision of a better future with something to offer both Liberals and Conservatives of good faith? A place where smart labor and smart business can both lay down their swords for a moment and perhaps find common ground?

I give you APA.

A Troubled High School Celebrates a Milestone

...
Austin Polytechnical Academy opened on the West Side of Chicago in 2007 as the city’s first and only career academy dedicated to occupations in high-skill manufacturing. On June 12, the school sent its first 92 graduates into that understaffed job market, many with industry-recognized credentials, internship experience and more than three years of engineering classes on their transcripts.

The school, developed as part of the Renaissance 2010 initiative by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, then chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, aims to prepare students to fill some of the nation’s estimated three million vacant positions in science, technology, engineering and math. The ambitious plan seeks to engage private-industry companies to help train the students, all of them from a community that has watched local industry flee, unemployment climb and foreclosure rates soar to the highest in the city.

Where graduates go from here — work force or college, inside or outside the community — will be a test of achievement for Austin Polytech.
...

Since September, the Chicago News Cooperative has followed three students: Stran’Ja Burge and Marquiese Travae Booker, both seniors, and Deandre Joyce, a junior. In that time, the school has endured wrenching changes, many of them emblematic of a larger instability within C.P.S. as leaders seek to reform one of the country’s largest and most troubled public school systems .

Two separate narratives about the school have emerged: one public and one private; one filled with success, the other fraught with troubles.

In the positive narrative, the Center for Labor and Community Research, a nonprofit organization, helped Austin Polytech obtain accreditation for its machine shop through the National Institute for Metalworking Skills, becoming the only high school in Illinois to earn that classification. The school also rolled out two job-shadowing programs, secured summer jobs and internships for 36 students, and saw 89 students earn 123 industry-recognized certificates.

But it was also a year of nearly constant fits and starts by the C.P.S. system, sapping energy from teachers, administrators and students.
...

Yet for students like Ms. Burge, who is ranked in the top 10 of her class, as well as for Mr. Joyce and Mr. Booker, much of the hurly-burly has been a sideshow to the usual rites of passage: college applications, ACTs, prom, final exams and future plans. The unrest at the school was more a nuisance than anything else, they said.
...

What comes next is different for each: Ms. Burge will attend college at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, where she will play basketball and pursue a degree in engineering. Mr. Booker landed a job at the Laystrom Manufacturing Company, where he interned last summer. Mr. Joyce hopes to stay on track during his senior year, raise his ACT score from an 18 to a 20, and then decide what will come next: college or work.

Despite the school’s tumultuous year, Ms. Burge said she had enjoyed her time at Austin Polytech. It gave her the opportunity to take advanced-placement calculus, travel to Washington on behalf of the school and participate in student government.
...

As she headed off to school a few days before the graduation ceremony, Ms. Burge walked by her uncle sleeping on the front porch. He struggles with addiction and her grandmother lets him sleep there, she said, adding that his example was an impetus to work harder.

“I’m not like ‘Aw because my uncle’s a crackhead, then I’m not going to go to school,’ ” she said last fall. “I’m going to do the reverse and because I see him do that, this is why I’m going to school every day and this why I’m going to college.” She is the first in her family to pursue college outside Illinois.

When Mr. Booker was not playing baseball or practicing with the bowling team, he spent the year working at Harold’s Chicken and trying to figure out what came next. Then an opportunity presented itself. Laystrom Manufacturing offered Mr. Booker a position, created just for him, in the quality control department. He took the job.
...

There is no Bachmann in this story. No political horse race between "I don't know" and "I don't care" for our pundit class to get a case of hopping priapism over. No place for a wingnut to get his "welfare queen" bigot batteries recharged. No pie fight over the debt ceiling between the craven and the insane.

Just a page 10 story from my own back yard about the poise, persistence and character of some fine young men and women who are up against obstacles every day of their lives that are far more formidable than Eric Fucking Cantor and his Insane Teabagger Posse.

For the record, this is what gives me hope.

Also for the record, this is why I have zero patience for whiners who counsel giving up and rolling over because Harry Reid is still a jellybag, and Barack Obama hurt their fee-fees.