Joking about the jobless in The Times

Posted on January 28, 2013 by oddmanout215

The final destination of your online job application

The final destination of your online job applications

There are many jerks in positions of authority, but this fact isn’t likely to hit you on a gut level unless you’re unemployed and in debt and sending resumes to that black hole in the Internet where job applications disappear.

Just ask The New York Times‘ Nelson D. Schwartz, who reminded readers on Sunday that finding a good job is entirely about who you know, not what you can do. Referrals get you good jobs, not applications to those thousands of online listings that don’t really exist for anyone who isn’t well connected:

…Indeed, as referred candidates get fast-tracked, applicants from other sources like corporate Web sites, Internet job boards and job fairs sink to the bottom of the pile.

“You’re submitting your resume to a black hole,” said John Sullivan, a human resources consultant for large companies who teaches management at San Francisco State University. “You’re not going to find top performers at a job fair. Whether it’s fair or not, you need to have employees make referrals for you if you want to find a job.”

Among corporate recruiters, Mr. Sullivan said, random applicants from Internet job sites are sometimes referred to as “Homers,” after the lackadaisical, doughnut-eating Homer Simpson. The most desirable candidates, nicknamed “purple squirrels” because they are so elusive, usually come recommended.

“We call it Monster.ugly,” said Mr. Sullivan, referring to Monster.com. “In the H.R. world, applicants from Monster or other job boards carry a stigma…”

A witty fellow, this John Sullivan. Probably the sort of guy who pulled wings off flies and burned ants with a magnifying glass when he was a kid. Just think of all the suckers on the brink of bankruptcy or foreclosure who spend hours a day job-hunting online, unaware that corporate jerks are dumping their applications into the “Homer” bin.

OK, the fact that online job searches are a waste isn’t news to the long-term unemployed, but Schwartz’s peek at the jerks on the other end of the application process should be a wake-up call for the have-nots in this country.

To recruiters, you’re either a purple squirrel or a Homer who looks for work on Monster.ugly If you are one of the latter — i.e., one of the vast majority of the unemployed — you are never going to find another good job, no matter how much the economy recovers. The so-called recovery is directly related to the fact that payrolls have been drastically and permanently cut. All the networking in the world won’t change this fact.

All of which is perfectly obvious, and apparently funny, to the John Sullivans of the world.

Posted in economic collapse, globalization, humor, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What John Mackey can do with his vegan stir-fry

Posted on January 22, 2013 by oddmanout215

boycott-whole-foods-market

Oh, the ironies of the Obama era! Last week John Mackey denounced Obamacare as “like fascism.” This was a few years after damning it as socialism. The Whole Foods co-CEO doesn’t see, or pretends to not see, that Obamacare is a gift to hospital chains and health insurance companies — corporate monsters, just like Whole Foods. Under Obamacare, the government doesn’t control “the means of production” in health care, as Mackey charged. It merely ensures that Aetna and the other companies remain a wastefully expensive obstacle to health care for most Americans.

But enough about the big chief, it’s the day after the inauguration, let him enjoy his eloquently empty promises. Let’s dwell on the ironic fact that Mackey, a right-wing, low-paying, union-busting, small business-killing, Romney-endorsing, climate change-denying megalomaniac is one of the the most well-known advocates of organic foods.

It’s one thing — a good thing — to support farmers’ markets and independent health-food stores, but anyone who thinks of him/herself as a progressive and shops at Whole Foods is a hypocrite or just D-U-M dumb. Mackey’s organic foods chain is eating up all the smaller stores and paying rank-and-file workers next to nothing. When it comes to labor relations, Whole Foods is about as progressive as Walmart.

Mackey was in The New York Times Magazine this week, bragging about his vegan diet and describing a recent meal he made for himself, a vegan stir-fry that included kale, chard, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, a walnut-cashew-based dressing and almond milk. The sort of foods most people who get paid Whole Foods-level wages couldn’t possibly afford on a regular basis unless their other expenses were minimal and they were receiving food stamps.

Bottom line: I like to eat healthy, when I can afford to, but I’d rather buy lunch from a grungy hot dog vendor than from the cold-blooded plutocrat who runs Whole Foods. He’s a multimillionaire, well-fed and fit, but all the vegan stir-fry in the world won’t cure what ails him.

Footnote: Mackey later said he regretted using the word fascism in regard to Obamacare, but he clearly remains confused. Someone should send him reading material for when he’s not puttering around the kitchen. Maybe a Political Science 101 textbook.

Posted in climate change, dirty rotten scoundrels, food, health care, humor, mainstream media, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A rear-view glance at Lance

Posted on January 19, 2013 by oddmanout215

Between Lance Armstrong admitting he was doping and Jodie Foster coming out as a lesbian, it has been a rough week for the clueless. — Bill Mayer, Real Time, Jan. 18

I groan when the corporate media declare a new villain of the week, seemingly to distract us from the truly awful people who are rewarded for undermining what used to be called the common good.

Sure, Lance Armstrong is a sociopath, a guy who’d bike over his own grandma to win the big prize. But sports fans who were paying attention knew this years ago, without Oprah’s help. And yes, Lance is a liar, but there are many liars in public life, and how foul are his lies compared to Dubya’s WMD con game, or Jamie Dimon’s claim that JP Morgan never needed or asked for the $25 billion in TARP money that kept it from going bust?

The major villains in this country — banksters and corporate bosses — don’t ‘fess up to Oprah or anyone else. They hover above the law in glass-and-steel towers figuring out how to make more millions to hide offshore while putting more and more Americans out of work. They lie and steal with impunity — i.e., with full cooperation from the U.S. government — and then suggest that working stiffs who retire at age 65 and collect Social Security are being coddled.

Somehow, the corporate media never get around to reporting the scope of the banksters’ crimes, or the extent to which corporate CEOs and their friends in D.C. have gone to enrich themselves at the expense of workers in a job market that gets smaller and weaker with each passing year.

Instead, reporters attach themselves to frauds like Lance and Barry Bonds, and freaks like Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. They feed us soap operas and morality tales about “celebrities,” ignoring any facts that might spoil the celebrity stories before they run their course.

It turns out that heroic Lance was doping — a shocker! — and it’s time for his public comeuppance. He and our other fallen celebrity heroes have important ritual roles to play. They are stand-ins for the truly vile — people like Dimon and his fellow chief executive gamblers on Wall Street who will never be formally accused, let alone brought to justice, for the economic disaster caused by what Matt Taibbi called their “greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit.”

Even more than in other eras, the news business today is about encouraging us to cheer and boo cartoonish heroes and villains — to keep our minds off the truly dangerous bad guys, the ones with the power to create a permanent underclass where a middle class used to be.

Clarification: I’m not saying the Lance Armstrong story — ruthless, creepy cancer survivor cheats his way to the top and uses his fame to raise great sums for cancer patients — isn’t worth telling. I can’t wait for the TV movie, maybe with Lohan as Cheryl Crowe, singing “Every Day Is a Winding Road” while Lance is having a blood transfusion on the floor of his tour bus.

I’m just wondering what happened to the quaint idea that a free press, by definition, should insist on an adversarial relationship with government, big business and the financial industry, in order to make sure Americans don’t become too clueless to realize when they’re being oppressed.

Posted in bicycling, dirty rotten scoundrels, economic collapse, humor, liar, mainstream media, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘Santa Claus Go Straight To The Ghetto’

Posted on December 24, 2012 by oddmanout215

Listen, people: The word “ghetto” dates to 16th- or 17th-century Venice, where Jews were restricted to living on an island near a foundry that produced a lot of ghet, or waste products. Or is it simply derived from borghetto — “little borough”? Help me, mothers and soul brothers, Wikipedia and various dictionaries are a bit vague on this.

“Ghetto” became a tag for any inner-city area dominated by a particular racial or ethnic group. By the 1960s, the usage usually was for urban areas in America where poor blacks were crammed. Brown was born in a rural setting, but he grew up poor as any big-city kid: Tell ’em James Brown sent you, huh/And go straight to the ghetto/You know that I know what you will see/’Cause that was once… me.

“Ghetto” is more often used these days as an adjective describing a narrow frame of mind — “That girl is so ghetto” — than as a geographical term. Which is not to say there’s less poverty now than in the 1960s.

Never mind. There’s nothing ghetto about “Santa Claus Go Straight To the Ghetto.” It’s funky, funny and wise, and has a very cool guitar lick that reminds me of “Highway 61 Revisited.” Hit it! Hit it!

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Happy First Day After the Solstice!

Posted on December 22, 2012 by oddmanout215

Some people work very hard,
But still they never get it right.
Well I’m beginning to see the light.

Dec. 21 was the winter solstice, the shortest and dreariest day. The world seemed a dark, pitiless place where you couldn’t find a glimmer of hope, or even a cheap cup of coffee. Was the the end of days upon us, as the Mayan calendar allegedly predicted?

solstice 2
I woke up today and the world was still here, which made me feel even worse until I remembered this is the second shortest day, that the days grow longer from now to the first day of summer, that I shouldn’t feel bad about feeling bad this time of year.

I remembered that the solstice marks the return of the light, and so what if the fiscal cliff and environmental disaster loom. So what if people are walking around in football jerseys, babbling to themselves or their hidden phones. The doors of perception are opening. Soon we’ll see the light, and the divine plan will be clearer.

And I said, oh shit, maybe we’re better off in the dark.

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In guns we trust

Posted on December 20, 2012 by oddmanout215

Frank Rich says America’s love affair with guns is something that will have to be chipped away at; that guns…

…have always been intrinsic to the very idea of America and “freedom” – enshrined in our Constitution’s Second Amendment (however one chooses to read it), romanticized in our glorification of both our revolutionary and frontier past, and a staple of our popular culture not just in this era but every era: from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows through The Birth of a Nation, Zane Grey, Stagecoach and The Wild Bunch, gangster movies and gangsta rap, Bonnie and Clyde and Zero Dark Thirty, The Untouchables and The Sopranos…

Exactly. One of my favorite movies is Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, because it’s beautifully filmed, features some great old actors, and is imbued with a healthy contempt for big business and its role in corrupting American government. I know Peckinpah’s gun-slinging outlaws are romanticized, but I prefer them to the so-called captains of industry who ended up owning this country and exploiting most of its workers.

Rich used the phrase “gun-worship” at one point, so I wasn’t surprised when, a few sentences later, he referenced the excellent column in which Garry Wills explained why it is so hard to get through to the “guns don’t kill people — people do” crowd:

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

Wills is right, of course. Gun zealots are death-obsessed and paranoid. On the other hand, it’s hard to explain away their contention that government for the rich and powerful, at the expense of the rest of us, is no good.

Rich again:

If we are going to start to find our way out of gun-worship, it’s going to take many leaders over time to affect that change, just as in, say, the abolitionists’ movement or any other major political or social movement that changed our country and helped it grow up.

Right, Frank, but where are those leaders? Arguably, gun-worship in contemporary America is mostly about feelings of impotence; an admission that all our other gods — democracy, the free market, the justice system — have failed. So far as I can see, the leaders in our dismal two-party system, whether for or against gun control, merely reinforce those feelings.

Posted in gun nuts, history, mainstream media, movies, Obama, police state | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Media make a killing on massacre in CT

Posted on December 17, 2012 by oddmanout215

My e-mail yesterday included links to the “most recommended content about the Connecticut school shooting from the Daily Kos community.” Forgive me, Daily Kos, for not reading the articles. I’m sure the writers had good intentions, but only so much light can be shed when the story is about carnage, especially when most of the victims are children. What’s the point of reading about a massacre, once you’re aware of the basic facts? (And yes, I know, it took the media a while to get the facts straight.)

Titillation is the point. The news peddlers know we can’t resist stories in which gruesome things happen to people for no good reason. We gawk at the wreckage and think oh, those poor children, they could have been my children, I’m so glad they weren’t!

Before long the news peddlers are milking the story for all it’s worth, with photos of slaughtered kids, and interviews with their classmates and relatives. Yes, but how does it make you feel knowing Joey was shot in the face a mere 10 feet from where you were standing?

The news peddlers stoke our pity and fear, because that’s where the money is. In this regard they’re a lot like the gun merchants, who stoke our fear then peddle the idea that assault weapons will keep us safe. I’m thinking of words on the Web site of the company that made the rifle used by the killer in Connecticut:

With a Bushmaster for security and home defense, you can sleep tight knowing that your loved ones are protected. Bushmaster offers everything you need to ensure the safety of you and your family. Our high-quality pistols, carbines, and rifles are extremely reliable, easy to shoot, and include lightweight carbon models that are perfect for women. And with their intimidating looks, all Bushmasters make a serious impression. Any gun will make an intruder think. A Bushmaster will make them think twice.

.

A friend of mine posted the gun maker’s message on Facebook yesterday. I wouldn’t be surprised if the person who wrote it is a former reporter.

Footnote: And please don’t tell me media coverage will help us reach a tipping point in the struggle to impose stricter gun control laws. That’s like saying politicians are getting ready to become less corrupt.

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Safety measures too ‘costly’ for Walmart

Posted on December 9, 2012 by oddmanout215

Officials at the retail monster called Walmart couldn’t install emergency exits at the Bangladesh factory where more than 100 workers died in a Nov. 4 fire. Too cash-strapped, it seems:

… In a meeting last year, Walmart officials decided against agreeing to pay suppliers more so that they could upgrade their manufacturing facilities and pay for the costs of safety improvements. “Specifically to the issue of any corrections on electrical and fire safety, we are talking about 4,500 factories, and in most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories,” Walmart officials said in documents obtained by Bloomberg News. “It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments.”

More than 300 Bangladeshi garment factory workers have died since 2006. Walmart reported a 9 percent increase in third-quarter net income, earning $3.63 billion.

Vicious cycle: Clueless consumers shop at Walmart to save a few greenbacks. Walmart grows even more profitable and diverse, forcing even more smaller retailers to either go out of business or lower wages in order to compete. As wages continue to decline, more and more people seek out bargains at Walmart, or at other big-box chains that offer similarly poor wages and benefits.

It’s no surprise that corporate profits in America have hit a record high and worker wages a record low, or that workers at companies that help feed the monster are treated even more shabbily than the monster’s “associates.”

Posted in dirty rotten scoundrels, economic collapse, unemployment | 1 Comment

Why Adelson is so generous to GOP

Posted on December 7, 2012 by oddmanout215

The greedy gnome is a pragmatist, not an ideologue:

In actuality, [Sheldon] Adelson’s fealty to the GOP stems primarily from the fact that his “Las Vegas Sands Corp. is being scrutinized by federal investigators looking into possible money-laundering in Vegas, and possible violation of bribery laws by the company’s ventures in China, including four casinos in the gambling mecca of Macau.”

Maybe, but do you have any idea how much money must have changed hands in Adelson’s successful effort to establish casinos close to hundreds of millions of Chinese? I’ll bet you all my chips that Obama’s so-called Justice Department never brings charges against the gnome, just as it never charged any of the corrupt power brokers on Wall Street.

Footnote: The Brian Eno video is from the 1970s, in the very early stages of China’s transition from a Communist monster to a capitalist monster.

Posted in campaign finance reform, dirty rotten scoundrels, humor, Obama, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Alarming stats on sea levels

Posted on December 1, 2012 by oddmanout215

Is must be asked — what sort of “ambitious measures” could possibly hold back the ocean? From The Raw Story:

Sea-level rise is occurring much faster than scientists expected – exposing millions more Americans to the destructive floods produced by future Sandy-like storms, new research suggests.

Satellite measurements over the last two decades found global sea levels rising 60% faster than the computer projections issued only a few years ago by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The faster sea-level rise means the authorities will have to take even more ambitious measures to protect low-lying population centres – such as New York City, Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida – or risk exposing millions more people to a destructive combination of storm surges on top of sea-level rise, scientists said…

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