Shoes For Industry! Trump's Glorious Manufacturing Future.

At the Federal Shoe Factory.

At the  Federal Avocado Factory.

At the Federal Tiny Screw Factory.

Burn The Lifeboat Factory

Professional Left Podcast Episode 890: Killing The Economy To Own The Libs

"The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way."  -- David Brooks, November 11, 2014

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A Little Good News

A little bit of light on a dark day:

The Surprising Problem With U.S. Manufacturing: It's Creating Too Many Jobs

An ongoing theme of our reports from “career technical” schools—like this high school in Georgia and this community college in Mississippi and these high schools and tech-training centers in California and South Carolina, and these colleges in Vermont and Maine—is that for people with appropriate training, medium-wage skilled jobs actually exist...

Job openings in manufacturing are at a 15-year high. Layoffs are at a long-term low. Wages are rising faster in manufacturing than in the economy as a whole. The unemployment rate in manufacturing is below the overall average. Please go to the item for the full presentation, but here is one of several representative charts, showing continued recovery after the crash of 2008.

...

I will celebrate anything that makes it more possible for Americans to find a decent job at decent wage.

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?

Bittersweet

I highly approve of Al Franken's new pitch. Minnesota's Hennepin College has run a terrific manufacturing training program for many years: so successful that, before the Great Recession, they used to have job fairs where the roles were reversed, and employers would line up to compete for the favors of graduating students.

I used to be very involved in this sort of enterprise. Then came the Great Recession, and cutbacks, and not for the first time did I discover too late that when thinks get tight, it does not matter how competent or brilliant or hardworking or ingenious or innovative I am. I was out on my ass, with my job held open to provide a soft landing place for someone with clout. My complex, big-budget and highly-visible projects were handed over to some of my less competent former coworkers who could not figure out how to make the little wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round. They called me, in states of increasing panic, asking me what they should do as various components started to fly apart.

Because I was personally invested in these projects -- because I thought they could demonstrate how the wise and properly managed investment of public monies could be of tremendous public benefit -- I took the first five or six calls and gave them my best advice (I also asked what the Hell they done with all the meticulous project notes I had left behind so that future project managers could cope with precisely these situations. I was told, uh, um, er, we...kinda...lost them.)

Because I am not a chump, and because still had dreams of not going broke losing my condo, I put forth the radical idea that they would hire me as a consultant to save them from disaster. They knew I could do it. They knew that probably no one else but me could do it, and for much less than what they were already pissing away on a brace of useless consultants who were being kept around to stroke the boss's ego. Millions of dollars and the organization's reputation was on the line. But bringing me back just to fix what no one else could fix would have meant rubbing the boss's nose in his own incompetence, and so bringing me back became a bridge too far.

And so I got to watch "my" projects crash and burn. The taxpayer lost millions of dollars. People who make a living selling the idea that the public sector can't do shit got another arrow in their quiver.  The concept we were trying to prove got a crippling punch to the throat.  And six years later my career has not risen from the dead.  

So I highly approve of Senator Franken's initiative.

But it is bittersweet.

Burial Rites of the Unemployed Tribesmen of North America

It is a strange thing to be studied, ethnographically catalogued and academically theorized upon like a member of a dying tribe of exotic nomads slouching towards a sad but somehow inevitable extinction.

Probably good for my soul.

I have considered writing a lot more about the experiences of the long-term unemployed and underemployed, labor markets and suchlike stuff (about which I know quite a bit) but as I am not at at D.C. think tank, or a major DC/New York publication, outside of my role as part of a doomed demographic, I do not actually exist.

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.)

What Making Has To Teach Thinking

From the Harvard Business Review:

What Manufacturing Taught Me About Knowledge Work
by Jordan Cohen
8:00 AM February 4, 2013
Comments (10)

Growing up in the 1970s, I often found myself in my father's factory, which manufactured women's clothing. Spending time in the factory was not only a way to be close to my dad, but also great entertainment in an era of only 5 TV channels and no cell phones or personal computers. (Later, my first job was sweeping the factory floors). The factory was like my personal playground — the stacks of pallets were mountains, the floor-to-ceiling dress racks a jungle gym, the colorful stacks of fabric a 50-layer cake. Enthralled by my surroundings, I would run around the factory floor and talk to the operators at each machine. They took pride in showing me what they did — they were paying it forward.

The technology employed in the seventies was a top-of-the-line sewing machine or a battery-powered forklift. There was little computerization, automation or even reporting compared to today's manufacturing environment. Yet my dad needed to be able to see if production was on schedule or not. He also had to be able to quickly identify bottlenecks to determine if he needed to intervene in order to complete a run or meet a delivery deadline. Rather than sitting in an office, my father put a desk in the middle of his rectangular shaped factory floor. He built a small platform that raised his desk 3 feet above the floor. This enabled him to see the entire factory at one glace. It also allowed the employees to quickly locate the boss if they needed help. It made each employee and their respective work visible to each other. My father knew every job, task and process.

He set up a system that was the same for each station or job. Items that needed to be worked on were piled onto a cart just to the right of the operator; completed items were piled up just to the left. As fast as it took dad to lift his head, he could tell if the sewers were on schedule (were the piles on the right high or low?) or if a particular operator needed help (was the pile on the right of one operator always higher than the rest?). He knew when the pressers were about to be idle because not enough dresses had been completed (was the pile on the right low and about to run out?). He knew if the buttonhole operator needed more training on that new machine, or if the shipping truck was late. The visibility was critical to the productivity of the factory.

... A productive working environment requires the inputs and outputs (right cart and left cart) to be visible.

That m[e]ans knowing what the input is.

...

And from the comments:

[Jordan is] not advocating a tightly-managed command-and-control environment that de-emphasizes the employee's skill and autonomy in problem solving: It's more about understanding the flow of work and how to act as an enabler or servant-leader so they can meet objectives freely. It's the essence of an empowered, self-organizing/cross-functional team.

Apparently I Am the Unwitting Tool

Of a vast Chicago Tribune/Asshole Boss syndicate that doesn't want you to Know the Truth about the manufacturing labor market.

Well OK then.

First, all kinds of factors go into local labor rates as well as the vitality of the local economy as a whole.  And second, imputing to an entire economic sector the experience of one anecdote or one company (however true that one example many be) is a mug's game, whether that company is run by an angel who will pick up the tab for sending her people to college (I know several such) or a vulture who will churn and burn his people without mercy to make an extra nickle (I have run across plenty of them too.)

Instead, here is a link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Your tax dollars at work!  

I haven't seen the BLS at any of our recent Chicago Tribune/Asshole Boss syndicate luncheons, so have a look for yourself and decide for yourself.  

Jobs?

Did someone say jobs?

From the Chicago Tribune:

Shortage of skilled workers holds back Chicago-area manufacturers

Executives on panel discuss industry challenges

November 16, 2012|By Alejandra Cancino, Chicago Tribune reporter

Chicago-area manufacturers who participated in a panel discussion Thursday said the shortage of skilled workers will crimp their growth next year.

Tim Jahnke, president and chief executive of Elkay Cos., an Oak Brook-based maker of stainless steel sinks, faucets, water coolers and plumbing products, said the situation is so severe that his company may have to forgo about $10 million in sales — unless he's able to ramp up production.

Elkay is operating only one shift, and to increase production Jahnke would need more midlevel skilled welders, which he says he can't find.

Steven Kersten, owner and president of WaterSaver Faucet Co. and Guardian Equipment Inc., said the days when manufacturers could hang "help wanted signs" are over.

Companies need to get involved in worker training, and Kersten said his company is doing just that. In addition to in-house training, the company has hired an English instructor. The company also partners with Austin Polytechnical Academy, a West Side high school whose goal is to train the next generation of leaders in advanced manufacturing.

Kersten said many applicants for jobs at the Chicago-based company do not have basic skills such as being able to understand instructions or how to use a computer or measuring tools.

...

I have a two-minute speech, a 20-minute speech, a six-hour-speech and an epic, Der-Ring-des-Nibelungen-length opera on this subject.

Suffice it to say that, right this minute in the Chicagoland area there are around 30,000 manufacturing jobs going unfilled.  

Imagine that?  I mean, it's certainly not a magic bullet, but whatever cause consumes you -- antipoverty, social justice, salvaging the middle class, making sure every kid gets a great education -- the fact that there are a lot of decent, well-paying jobs going begging at the same time unemployment lingers around 8% like the party guest who never leaves should piss you off.

The good news?

All we have to do to fix this is to overhaul the entire, dysfunctional, underfunded, over-bureaucratized, patchwork "system" that gets people of all ages ready for the jobs that are really available.

By Now You Must Know How Much It Brines my Scotch

To ever agree with The Mustache of Understanding.

However this is a subject that has been near and dear to me for a very long time.  And on this one subject on this one day, Mr. Friedman is quite correct:

If You’ve Got the Skills, She’s Got the Job

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

...

Tapani eventually found a welder from another firm who had passed the American Welding Society Certified Welding Inspector exam, the industry’s gold standard, and he trained her welders — some of whom took several tries to pass the exam — so she could finish the job. Since then, Tapani trained a woman from Stacy, who had originally learned welding to make ends meet as a single mom. She took on the challenge of becoming a certified welding inspector, passed the exam and Tapani made her the company’s own in-house instructor, no longer relying on the local schools.

“She knows how to read a weld code. She can write work instructions and make sure that the people on the floor can weld to that instruction,” so “we solved the problem by training our own people,” said Tapani, adding that while schools are trying hard, training your own workers is often the only way for many employers to adapt to “the quick response time” demanded for “changing skills.” But even getting the right raw recruits is not easy. Welding “is a $20-an-hour job with health care, paid vacations and full benefits,” said Tapani, but “you have to have science and math. I can’t think of any job in my sheet metal fabrication company where math is not important. If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day; you need to compute angles and understand what happens to a piece of metal when it’s bent to a certain angle.”

Who knew? Welding is now a STEM job — that is, a job that requires knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math.

Employers across America will tell you similar stories. It’s one reason we have three million open jobs around the country but 8 percent unemployment. We’re in the midst of a perfect storm: a Great Recession that has caused a sharp increase in unemployment and a Great Inflection — a merger of the information technology revolution and globalization that is simultaneously wiping out many decent-wage, middle-skilled jobs, which were the foundation of our middle class, and replacing them with decent-wage, high-skilled jobs. Every decent-paying job today takes more skill and more education, but too many Americans aren’t ready. This problem awaits us after the “fiscal cliff.”

Unlike so many vast problem stare us in the face, the solution to this one is entirely within our control.

The Secret Liberal Manufacturing Job Conspiracy

Revealed!

The Liberal Bias blog gives away the entire secret Liberal manufacturing plot to make Republican Preznits look bad here.

* We Liberals are just no damn good at keeping our conspiracies quiet.


*(Thank you for the catch, chrome agnomen)

Today in Centerville -- SOTU UPDATE

UPDATE:  When I wrote this long piece today, I swear I had no idea how perfectly it would tongue-in-groove fit together with the manufacturing and job training sections of Barack Obama's State of the Union speech.  I had  just effing had it with David Brooks (once again) getting away with dropping another steaming load of pernicious Centrist claptrap into the pages of the NYT.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

If I had never written a blog post in my life, I believe the sheer brass of  Mr. Brooks'  calculated malfeasance today would inspire me to learn Blogger or WordPad just so I could publicly detail the cardinal and venial sin he commits against honest journalism this time around.

You see, in a Basic David Brooks Column/Variation #3 (a heartwarming tale of human spirit overcomingness cribbed from somewhere bolted to yet another completely dishonest indictment of "Both Sides") you might have to run a couple of hydrostatic tests on the thing to find the bad weld or the false bottom -- not that hard, but it does require some experience.

But today?  Today was easy because Mr. Brooks pooped a solid ingot of stupid onto the New York Times editorial page with barely a lick of paint to cover the crime --

Free-Market Socialism
...
The idiocy of our current political debate is that neither side seems capable of talking about the interplay of economic and social forces. Most of the Republican candidates talk as if all that is needed is more capitalism. But lighter regulation and lower taxes won’t, on their own, help the Maddie Parliers of the world get the skills they need to compete.

Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their emphasis from lifting up the poor to pounding down the rich. Democratic candidates no longer emphasize early childhood education and community-building. Instead they embrace the pseudo-populist Occupy Wall Street hokum — the opiate of the educated classes.

This materialistic ethos emphasizes reducing inequality instead of expanding opportunity. Its policy prescriptions begin (and sometimes end) with raising taxes on the rich. This makes you feel better if you detest all the greed-heads who went into finance. It does nothing to address those social factors, like family breakdown, that help explain why American skills have not kept up with technological change.

-- and he did it on a topic I just  happen to know oodles about: labor markets, education and training systems, the huge and ever-growing training gap, manufacturing, etc.

...
If President Obama is really serious about restoring American economic dynamism, he needs an aggressive two-pronged approach: More economic freedom combined with more social structure; more competition combined with more support. 

As a survey of nearly 10,000 Harvard Business School grads by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin makes clear, to get companies to locate their plants in the U.S., Obama is going to have to simplify the tax code, cut corporate rates, streamline regulations, make immigration policy more flexible and balance the budget over the long term.

To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.
...

Yes, I am forced to confess that in addition to have versed myself thoroughly in things like science fiction (both canonical and arcane), I also own and have actually read such action-packed bodice-rippers as:

"Skill Wars: Winning the Battle for Productivity and Profit" 

"The 2010 Meltdown: Solving the Impending Jobs Crisis" 

"Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough" (on how to correctly measure and make sense of system changes) 

"Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education" 

"Creating Public Value -- Strategic Management in Government"

And so forth. 

("...and I think I've understood them. 
They're about girls, right? 
Just kidding. 
But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash's autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.")*

I have a bookshelf full of the stuff which I am in the process of putting up for adoption because,

1. I honestly don't know if I will ever again have chance to use in a professional capacity, and 
2. These aren't the sorts of tomes that any sane person would haul around for recreational reading.

I'm also the sort of wonk who has a dozen board-feet of policy documents quietly oxidizing somewhere in cold storage, along with the regs for various government training  projects and initiatives, reviews of high school and community college curriculum and just an ass-load of material on what are known as "sector-based" programs because they figure out what sectors are most active and long-term viable in the local economy and then concentrate on getting all the players -- labor and management, business and gummint -- to work together to strengthen that sector for everyone's mutual advantage.

And working together on a local level is key, which is why flogging the President of the United State for not being able to force the owners of some metal stamping plant in Peoria to play nice with the members of the local school board is just one of the many, many layers of infantile incomprehension at how the real world really works with which Mr. Brooks' horseshit hoagie is piled high.

For example, does Mr. Brooks have any any idea how many hundreds of thousands of dollars -- sometimes million of dollars -- it costs to set up and maintain a decent manufacturing training program at a community college?  Does the factory Mr. Brooks mentions -- "Standard Motor Products, which makes fuel injectors" -- exist within a cluster of similar plants where the pool of potential trainees who might all need similar training on similar machines makes such a large capital investment makes sense...or would such a facility stand idle most of the time?

Given the high demand for these skills, and the high wages that go along with them, how exactly does Mr. Brooks plan to lure competent machinists off the factory floor and into the classroom to teach his programs?  Will  Mr. Brooks' program(s) offer academic credit, industry certification or will he force the local community college board and business leaders to build a curriculum that will do both?  Will the credit be transferable to the nearest four-year institution, or will a student who want to move onward and upward discover find that his hundreds of hours have been consigned to some non-degree-seeking Adult Ed limbo and have to start over?

Will there be night classes for the locals who already have a job but need to upgrade their skills?

Are you going to drug-screen people?

Oh, and who exactly is paying for all of this?   Because regardless of what Mr. Brooks seems to believe, the President of the United States does not personally stand outside every unemployment office and community college in America asking people what they want to do with the rest of their lives, testing them for aptitude and then handing out vouchers for whatever their school will cost.  That money may come from a lot of different sources , but if you want your local employment and training system to foot any of the bill, then you'd better make damn sure the whole thing is certified by the local workforce board.

Any such system will, of course, have any number of strong advocates for spending all of these scarce resources on entirely different things like training nurses or long-distance truck driver, so I assume Mr. Brooks has figured out a way to set up the hundreds of local governing bodies that will make all these very local decisions in a way that will keep everybody happy, or at least willing to forgo sabotaging the entire enterprise.  Or is assuming that the President will attend to each of these concerns personally?

By the way, the local factors and considerations I have ticked off so far?   These are just the ones I came up off the top of my head after an exhausting trek across the state last night and they barely scratch the surface.  We could, for example, kill a mighty good bottle of scotch and not cover the half of variables involved in hashing out the pros and cons of  "distance-learning" (Will it be permitted?  Encouraged?  Prohibited?)  or putting newbies and experience workers in the same classroom?

And after that, if you then wanted to talk about the horrors of trying to get a community college to risk its financial security to re-calibrate its 20-years-out-of-date degree program (and its 20-years-out-of-date instructors and equipment) in order to graduate students with industry certifications you would also have to agree to make time to solve the problem of getting some pterodactyl in a company's HR department to risk their job security by re-calibrating their 20-years-out-of-date job descriptions, rustic workplace culture and often just-plain-ridiculous expectations, because it ain't just public institutions who have failed us.

We would also need to talk about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (aka "da stimulus") which Mr. Brooks failed to mention spent hundreds of millions of dollars (while working inside an absurdly constricted 18 month spending window) advancing every one of the issues he is bitching about.

We would also need to talk succession planning, employee buyouts, and a culture that says encouraging a student to take up a trade instead of focusing on college is an insult and possibly racist, because they are all interrelated and all in urgent!urgent!urgent! need of attention.

As I said, if this were my first blog post, I would take my freshly-minted, community college trained, industry-certified blogging skills and write a long, shapely jeremiad encompassing all of this.  I'd spill 10,000 words wondering how Mr. Brooks can keep getting away with dropping such grotesque distortions into the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

Wondering who -- by name -- permits this disgrace to go on and on and interminably on?

Wondering who keeps allowing Mr. Brooks to just wish away ugly reality of the fanatical and united opposition that this President faces on Every. Single.  Fucking.  Issue. so that he can spew his malevolent Centrist lies again and again and again.

But this is not my first blog post. This is, in fact, getting up toward my 3,700th, and I know for sure that I will never get an answer to any of questions no matter how many times I ask them, no matter how often they are email to the people involved, and no matter what font I use.

And yet, if only for the sake of ordering my own thoughts -- and for the sake of a notation made in some future record of this time and place that back in the Bad Old Days when clowns like Mr. Brooks were paid vast sums of money and given virtually unlimited access to the American media, there were at least a few voices pointing out that our media Emperors had been bare-assed nekkid all along -- I feel compelled to carry on.

But rather than wrenching my back carrying more adjectives down from the attic, allow me to restate Mr. Brooks' key paragraph --

To ensure there’s skilled labor for those plants, Obama would have to champion different policies: successful training programs like Job Corps, better coordination between colleges and employers, better treatment for superstar teachers, more child care options and better early childhood education.

-- and use Teh Internet to make my case.

Here is a video of Candidate Obama pointing to an innovative Chicago high school -- Austin Polytechnical Academy -- by name as an example of what his administration wanted to do.   This school was created in one of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods -- a  neighborhood which had been destroyed by decades of deindustrialized, disinvestment and vulture  capitalism.



 A year later, here is Senator Dick Durbin visiting the same school and listening to the kids tell him him about coffee manufacturing

 

Here is the same school featured on the News Hour. 


Here is a link to President Barack Obama promoting manufacturing in Iowa.

Here is a link to President Barack Obama promoting manufacturing in Michigan.

Here is a link to President Barack Obama announcing his Advanced Manufacturing Partnership.

Here is a link to President Barack Obama calling for big investments in high-tech manufacturing in Pittsburgh.

Here is a link to President Barack Obama calling for big investments in advance manufacturing in the energy sector.

Here is President Barack Obama addressing a joint session of Congress last year and asking for their support for his job's plan:

"Already, we've mobilized business leaders to train 10,000 American engineers a year, by providing company internships and training. Other businesses are covering tuition for workers who learn new skills at community colleges. And we're going to make sure the next generation of manufacturing takes root not in China or Europe, but right here, in the United States of America"

Here is President Barack Obama begging Congress to help him provide the unmployed with temporary assistance and a path to finding permanent employment:



Here is President Barack Obama asking Congress to help him make "America more competitive for the long haul" by doing what is necessary to "out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth"

"As I've argued since I ran for this office, we have to look beyond the immediate crisis and start building an economy that lasts into the future -- an economy that creates good, middle-class jobs that pay well and offer security. We now live in a world where technology has made it possible for companies to take their business anywhere. If we want them to start here and stay here and hire here, we have to be able to out-build and out-educate and out-innovate every other country on Earth."

Here is a link to the Department of Labor's Annual reports page, which is packed with information from all 50 states and every major metroplitan area on the progress that has been made in trying to fix the decade's old problem of getting people into good jobs with a decent future

Here is a link a PDF on the Department of Labor's Annual reports page which shows what the State of Illinois has been up to in running sector-based training and employment programs.

And here is a link to Barack Obama talking to the workers at a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio about the success of his bailout of the America automobile industry, because it turns out that in order to build a bridge between the people who are looking for a decent job and an industry that needs well-trained people, you first have to save that industry from complete annihilation.

I could go on like this for another 100 pages, but I hope I have made my point.

I should also mention that to find these "Obama + manufacturing" videos online, one has to be willing to wade through an ocean of Republican bile, lies and unified, fanatical opposition to Every. Single. Fucking thing President Obama has proposed: a unified, fanatical opposition which Mr. Brooks simply refuses to acknowledge because doing so would screw up the incredibly lucrative Centrist scam off of which he and so many others like him parasitically feed.

But whatever the craven Mr. Brooks chooses to pretend, over in the wingnut universe where most of his Republican jackal pals reside, the auto industry -- that pillar of the manufacturing industry in America and creator of the very jobs Mr. Brooks is talking about -- was not and is not discussed as just another market sector need of "lighter regulation and lower taxes"  but as a massive front group for Evil Union Thugs which should have been allowed to crash and burn (taking all of its second- and third- tier suppliers with it) in a glorious bonfire of pure freedom-luvin' laissez-faire capitalism.

And this truly deranged idea -- that what the American Economy most needed in the depths of the Great Recession was massive, collapse which would have put additional millions out of work -- was not a belief the fringe nutjobs whispered about in quiet rooms: it was a broad, wingnut consensus which virtually the entire Conservative brain caste including GOP candidate and future-David-Brooks-meal-ticket, Willard Romney



was only too happy to shout from the rooftops.

Weird how Mr. Brooks seems to have overlooked or forgotten all of that, isn't it?

Mr. Brooks also seems to have overlooked or forgotten the fact that even modest, non-partisan legislative efforts like the Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success Act -- which was designed to target funding directly at the issue he identifies --

Strengthening Employment Clusters to Organize Regional Success Act of 2011 or SECTORS Act of 2011 - Amends the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 to require the Secretary of Labor to award renewable three-year competitive industry or sector partnership grants to eligible entities to develop strategies that: (1) encourage growth and competitiveness through work with employers within a targeted industry cluster; (2) help workers move toward economic self-sufficiency and ensure that they have access to supportive services; (3) address the needs of firms with limited human resources or in-house training capacity, including small- and medium-sized firms; and (4) coordinate with entities that carry out state and local workforce investment, economic development, and education activities.or workers including, steadier employment with increased earnings and better access to benefits.

-- are doomed to die quiet, cloakroom deaths so long as they face the united and fanatical opposition by the leaders of Mr. Brooks' Republican Party.  And everyone knows it.

Just like he somehow manages to overlook or forget the fact that, in the wingnut universe, the mere suggestion that the United States should maybe have an "industrial policy" so that we can start to catch up with with the rest of the advanced manufacturing countries is spoken of as if Barack Obama was trying to hand the nation's nuclear lauch codes over to Cesar Chavez.

Just like he somehow manages to overlook or forget that over in the wingnut universe the appointment of Ron Bloom to coordinate Administration manufacturing policy was treated as definitive proof of a massive, secret, Maoist plot to destroy America being led by the malicious Communist-in-Chief.

Ah, but Teh Internet remember!

 A random sample finds...

...a clip of wingnut Congressman Allen West calmly explaining that Barack Obama is a Marxist.

...a clip of GOP Party boss and the most popular Conservative radio host in history -- Rush Limbaugh -- explaining that Barack Obama is a Marxist for the 851st time

...a clip of slighty-less popular Conservative radio host Mark Levin explaining that Barack Obama is a Marxist.

...a clip of noted Swiftboat Liar, Birther pimp, Conservative hero and New York Times best-selling author Jerome Corsi explaining that Barack Obama is a Marxist who will probably cancel the 2012 elections.

...and a montage of the most influential Conservative liars in American history explaining that Barack Obama is, as the young people say, everything but a child of God.

If the last seven years and +3,600 posts have taught me one thing about blogging, it is that we pottymouthed Liberals will never be a serious impediment to Mr. Brooks in any way. We will never be able to prevent him from using his national platform to repeat his pernicious lies over and over again. We will never be able to undo all damage he does, or deprogram all the credulous readers who believe every word he says.

Mr. Brooks makes a handsome living tells plutocrat-pleasing lies, and there is nothing we can do about that.

What we can do, as citizens, is tell the truth as we know it, as best we can, in any venue which is available to us and hope it does some good.

And the truth is, while I strongly disagree with many of the specific policy prescription the Obama Administration has offered up to pull us out of the terrible and widening hole our manufacturing economy is in, President Obama inherited a manufacturing education and training system that was not a system at all. It was disaster; a series of make-do patches that had been slapped onto an economic sector which has been in full retreat for 30 years.

Basic childhood education was and is a tragedy.

High schools were and are a catastrophe.

Programs for vocational education which provided exactly the kind of training and direction Mr. Brooks is whining about have been underfunded and understaffed to the point of collapse for decades while their advocates were marginalized and ignored. This happened because up until very recently we were content as country to let our manufacturing base slide into the ocean --  because everyone knew were were all gonna get rich going into computer programming!

As thousands of small, neighborhood companies vanished -- many for no reason other than a lack of succession planning by their owners -- America shrugged because who cared about a lot of old factories in bad neighborhoods anyway when everyone knew were were all gonna get rich in the stock market!

As Reaganomics came into full, horrifying flower -- as we sleepwalked into became an importer/debtor nation instead of an exporter/creditor nation --  the informal but absolutely critical pipeline of skilled workers was permitted to dry up and blow away because everyone knew were were all gonna get rich off of real estate!

And then it all fell apart almost overnight...and suddenly everybody wanted to know why the schools weren't working, why their mortgages were underwater and where all those good factory jobs had gone.

But answering those questions honestly and in full measure -- telling the simple truth about where we are, how we got here, who is working to solve our  problems and who is working to oppose every solution -- would not only fail to stroke a single plutocrat's egos, but would also freak the shit out the Great Wad who still believe in Centrist fairy tales.

Which is is why you will never read about it under Mr. Brooks' byline in the New York Times.

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.

Harder To Grow Walnuts

On a pumpkin tree than originally anticipated.