Category Archives: Society

Get A Job You F@#$ Slop Is All He Replied

There has been much gnashing of teeth over the recent NPR stories about disability insurance.  It is well worth the read.  This is an issue that I’m both glad people are starting to pay attention to and scared because people are starting to pay attention to it.

Here is how it goes for those of you just tuning in.  The economy of the United States has been progressively changing for 30 years now.  Manufacturing jobs are leaving and only partially being replaced by lower paying service jobs.  There are no jobs for these people.  They are poorly educated and, often, too old to get trained for a new economy job.  They got their unemployment checks for as long as they could and then went on welfare.

All of this was happening at a time when Republicans decided that people on welfare were a pox on the society that their wealthy masters helped create.  So, with the help of Bill Clinton, they passed a massive welfare reform law that was incredibly successful at reducing the number of people on welfare.  It’s main driver was forcing the states to carry a larger burden of the welfare pot.  Before, the federal government would pick up most of the tab.  Now, not so much.  The only problem is it didn’t reduce the welfare roles the way everyone thinks it did.  It was supposed to be a “back to work” bill, but many of the people on welfare were completely unemployable in the new economy.

States had an easy choice to make.  They could either continue to pay money for welfare or they could funnel as many people as possible onto disability insurance.  Disability insurance is 100% covered by the federal government.  Can you guess which one they chose?  Congratulations, you have basic reasoning skills.

So, millions of Americans lost their jobs, couldn’t find new ones, went on unemployment, went on welfare, and are now on permanent disability.  Many of these people have disabilities that most of us would laugh at.  The most common being chronic back pain.  Millions of other Americans work every day of their life with back pain, why don’t they get disability too?  Well, mostly because they can find a job that allows them to sit down.  There’s not much call for an employee with little education who needs to sit behind a desk all day.  There’s not much an employee with little education can do sitting behind a desk all day.  So onto disability they go.

Welcome to the new Invisible America.

As you can imagine, this system has all sorts of perverse outcomes.  Families now depend on that disability income in order to survive and it pays about minimum wage.  If you were given the choice between working a full time minimum wage job where you were constantly in pain or collecting disability, which would you choose?  It turns out that millions of Americans were more than willing to work through a good deal of pain working at a job that put them well into the middle class, but not so much when doing so puts you into the lower class.  Can you blame them?

Of course the $260,000,000,000 (that’s how much disability costs the government each year now) question is what to do with these people.  And this is where my trepidation begins.  I fear that calling attention to this issue will make it more likely to be welfare reform all over again.  Only this time, there will be no fallback.  The result being millions of unemployable people with no lifeline relegated to the streets.

At the same time, though, keeping so many people on disability is untenable.  The disability pot is currently scheduled to run out of money in 2016, right when Obama is leaving office.  Obviously, something needs to be done well before that.  But what?

I wish I had answers.  I don’t know enough about the needs of these Americans to comment intelligently.  That, of course, won’t stop me from commenting anyway.

This sounds like a great opportunity to start a massive retraining effort.  Instead of sending these people back to vocational training, though, we should really just send them back to regular school and pay them what they’re getting right now to go.  As long as they put in the effort to go to school, they get the money.  They could do this for the rest of their lives if they so choose.  Hopefully, though, they would progress to such a point that they could then get jobs that pay more than they are being given by the government.

Yes, this is very pie-in-the-sky.  But it’s something.  If we had come up with something along the lines of this instead of “welfare reform”, we’d likely be in a much better position than we find ourselves now.

Slacktivists Unite!

Slactivism – The act of doing something for a cause that has zero impact for said cause and only serves to make the individual performing the action feel good about themselves.

Examples of slactivism include: politicians wearing a flag pin to show their patriotism, people putting yellow ribbon magnets on their car to show they support our troops, people putting flags on their car to show their patriotism, people putting ANYTHING on their car to show they support ANYTHING, and people changing their Facebook profile picture to a pink equal sign to show they support gay marriage.

I will admit, I was a little bit in awe of the sheer amount of people who changed their Facebook profile picture to the now ubiquitous pink equal sign on a red background and it’s various permutations (my favorite being a kissing Lady Liberty and Lady Justice superimposed on the image).  It was inspiring, on some level, to see so many friends and strangers announce that they believe gay marriage should be legal.  But back in the real world, gay marriage is still illegal in a vast majority of the country and your changing of your profile picture has changed none of that.  In the end, it’s just a big circle-jerk amongst a bunch of like-minded individuals.

It doesn’t have to be like that, though.  You can effect real change by spending very little of your time.  Call your U.S. Representative, call your U.S. Senators, call your State Representative, call your State Senator.  Tell them that you would like gay marriage to be legal.  You probably don’t believe it, but politicians listen very carefully to the phone calls that they receive.  It is the most effective method for an individual to enact change with their politicians and it is much more efficient than waiting for someone else to get elected.  Make it so.

We’ve Seen The Likes Of Sheriff Joe Arpaio Before

I’m currently reading “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson.  It’s about the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to anywhere but the South.  It should be required reading for every American.  It is at the same time incredibly depressing and incredibly inspiring.  Read It.

In the book, there are anecdotes about sheriffs harassing Black folk under the guise of the law.  All in the name of keeping Blacks “in their place”.  All I could think about was how eerily familiar it all sounded.  Then I realized; It’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio!  For those of you that don’t know, Joe Arpaio is the sheriff of Maracopa County in Arizona.  He spends much of his time giving people who aren’t white (mostly Hispanics) a hard time.  So much so that he has been investigated by the Department of Justice.  When he’s not doing that, he’s busy treating inmates incredibly poorly and setting up concentration camps (his own words!).  He also has a really bad habit of ignoring sex crimes.  A good segment of the Right practically worship this man.  He is re-elected time and again.  He likes to claim that he’s America’s toughest sheriff, but he’s really only tough against a certain segment of society that has no power.  We normally call people like that bullies.

We’ve come a long way since the Jim Crow South.  We’ve also come not very far at all.  Joe Arpaio is just a symptom, though.  He’s a symptom of a disease that has festered in the American psyche since her birth.  That disease is fear of The Other.  The Other can change from generation to generation, but it has been omnipresent in our society.  First it’s the Irish and then the Jews then the Italians then the Blacks then the Hispanics then the Gays then the Muslims.  It goes on and on and on.

The Other is a weapon that the powerful use to keep The Ignorant on their side.  The Ignorant are often not stupid people.  Most often, they are just people that have a lot on their mind and plenty of injustices inflicted upon themselves.  The Others just provide an easy scapegoat for the problems of The Ignorant.  The Others have never been a group to fear.  They’re just a group trying to make life a little better for themselves than they had the day before.  That is their defining characteristic.  That makes them exactly like us.

There is a trivially easy solution to the plight of The Other.  We all know the Ignorant.  They are our family.  They are our friends.  They are our neighbors.  Too often, we ignore the illogical ramblings of The Ignorant because it is socially awkward to do so.  That has to stop.  Speak up.  Say something.  Do so politely, but firmly.  You will likely not change the mind of the person speaking.  But others are watching.  Others are listening.  Others will learn.  Teach them.  This plus time are our weapons.  Wield them wisely.

You Have No Idea How Bad Inequality Has Gotten

Below is a video that really gets to the heart of how unequal society has gotten.  Think about this the next time you complain about Obama wanting to raise taxes on the top 1%.  These people aren’t going to suddenly stop creating jobs because their taxes go up a percentage point or two.  They are amassing wealth because they enjoy the power, not because they enjoy the wealth.  And even if they do like the wealth, do you honestly think that they’re just going to stop accumulating it just because their taxes go up?

One minor quibble about the video.  They get socialism wrong.  Socialism’s goal is not, nor has it ever been, perfect redistribution of wealth.  Although, I guess they do use the definition that everybody seems to think socialism means.

Whenever I Was Sad, My Grandma Would Give Me Karate Chops

This is an absolutely beautiful video about bullying.  The author of the poem is Shane Koyczan.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/59956490]

Highlights From The State Of The Union

Last night’s State of the Union Address was mostly boilerplate Democraty feel good circle-jerky material, but there were some interesting highlights.

  • The announcement of a bipartisan panel to investigate voting irregularities that led to long lines at the polls.  No one should have to wait six hours in line to vote.  Of course, much of this can be tied to Republican governor shenanigans (I’m looking at you, Scott Walker), but there were other issues as well.  It will be interesting to see what comes of the commission.
  • Universal pre-school!  This would be huge if Obama can pull it off.  Kids that age are sponges soaking up everything around them.  Getting them into a learning environment just a year earlier than they are today will have enormous implications to every avenue of social justice.
  • Raising the minimum wage to $9.00.  A somewhat better living wage for all!  People complain that it will cost jobs, but there is zero evidence to show this and some evidence that shows the opposite.  Counter-intuitive, I know, but it’s true.
  • Tying governmental scholarships, in part, to affordability of education.  This is a great idea.  There is some decent evidence that some of the meteoric rise in college tuition is due to the availability of governmental money.  Telling colleges that they have to be affordable is a great way to rein in costs.

I hope all of the above get a vote this year.  They are a good mixture of sound investments in the future and immediate economic gains.

There Is No Magic Age Of Adulthood

A bit of a follow-up on my post on the deaths of young people in Chicago based on a comment from a friend.  I think it’s important to understand where I’m coming from.

From my point of view (with exceptions, I’m sure), those young people who were killed are children.  Even the 25 year-olds.  Turning 18 does not magically make you an adult.  Turning 21 does not magically make you an adult.  Expecting someone to behave like an adult just because they have a magical birthday is magical thinking.

Yes, the law says that you are an adult when you turn 18.  The law is fucked up, though.  We pick an arbitrary age for adulthood because it’s easy.  It fits snugly within our paradigm of personal responsibility while allowing us to smugly shrug off the experiences of the children who commit crimes.

That isn’t to say that using a certain age as a guideline is a bad thing.  It is perfectly reasonable to assume that a person should be an adult by the time they turn 21.  Where we fail is in our steadfast adherence to everyone being an adult at age 21 no matter what.  Demanding a 21 year-old who had no support system growing up to behave like a functional member of society is like me demanding that my grandmother be able to pick up an iPad and use it flawlessly.  I see 3 year-olds using them as if they were second nature so surely a 90 year-old should too.

What we call “adulthood” is just learned behavior.  We were just lucky to have the correct combination of parents, friends, and neighbors to attain “adulthood” at the socially acceptable age.  When we demand that others who didn’t have that combination behave like us or suffer life altering consequences, we behave like children.

1,118 In The Last Five Years

That’s the number of homicides of children under the age of 25 in the city of Chicago.  The Chicago Muckrakers has a map of all the homicides.  As they say in the article, “you can see where and when they died, their name, race, age and gender.”  Homicide deaths are the red dots, non-homicide deaths are various other colors.

It’s kind of shocking.  That’s a lot of death.  It’s very easy to dismiss this.  Say that a 25 year-old is an adult.  Say that they were criminals.  In doing so, we completely dismiss the traumatic experiences these kids go through in life.  And its easy to dismiss that as well.  Out of sight, out of mind.  This, though, is the end result of hopelessness.  1,118 dead children.

Embracing Muslim Communist Homo-Bortion

I love a good mocking of the college Greek system just as much as the next guy, but Gin and Tacos sure does it right.  In the Greek system’s defense, what is actually being mocked is the parallels to Conservatism and the Greek system.  Apparently, it turns out that organizations of mostly white males tend to be more conservative than others.  Who’da thunk?  It also turns out that fraternities feel persecuted because they never get as much credit for the good works they perform as they do for the sexual assaults or the binge drinking or the pledge week deaths.  News flash, good doesn’t matter if you continue to do evil.  But, but, but, tradition!

More Stuff, Less Time

One of the major complaints that come from people who are in favor of cutting welfare is that the poor have too much stuff.  After all, almost 100% of really poor people have a refrigerator.

It’s easy to make fun of idiotic attacks like that.  Really easy.  But, like all effective attacks, there is a sliver of truth to it.  Poor people do have more stuff.  Mostly, this is because the middle class has more stuff.  And the middle class has more stuff because the cost of stuff really hasn’t gone up much even as the purchasing power of the middle class has stagnated.  The middle class gets a new refrigerator and the poor get a still functioning old refrigerator for dirt cheap.

What is hidden in all of this is the one thing that we haven’t figured out how to recycle.  Time.  Specifically, family time.  The total hours of time worked per family has increased steadily in the United States.  As Paul Krugman points out, you may be tempted to say that is to be expected with more women joining the work force.  Europe has pretty much the same employment rates as the U.S., though, and their total hours worked has dropped steadily.

So we now have a middle class that has slightly more stuff than they used to be able to have but at the expense of much less family time.  You would think that the party that attempts to claim a monopoly on “family values” would want to address an issue as important as this.