World of Work 2012

The above title is a fact.  It does not mean that Mrs. Romney hasn’t worked hard to raise a family.  But working hard to raise a family can not be compared to experiencing the work-a-day world up close and personal.  In fact, both Mitt Romney and Mrs. Romney are shockingly inexperienced and tone-deaf to the issues that those who live in the work-a-day world discuss at their kitchen tables.

The Wealthy Perceive the World As Fair & Square - Perception Is Their Reality:

Full confession here:  I was raised in a wealthy family.  Nothing approaching the Romney’s or any of the super-rich that define wealth in the 21st century - but fears about financial security were notably absent. My Grandfather was a CEO, my father was a lawyer and we all lived very, very well.

My mother worked and had a career prior to her marriage, she did so in the freelance world and did not have to take every job that came her way.  After she married, she lived a life not unlike Ann Romney’s. And like Ann Romney, she saw the world of business and work as a decent place where people were reasonable and advancement was based on a meritocracy.  During my teen years, our situation gradually changed but  I didn’t have to face the  work-a-day world until I was almost 20. And I confess that I was totally unprepared for how capricious and unfair it could be.  And my late mother, learned vicariously through me, that her vision of the world of work was flawed.  You have to experience it to “get it”.

Education & Hard Work No Longer Translate Into a Good Job

When Reality Bites Perceptions Change:

Do a good job, work hard, and you get rewarded….Yeah, right - that works so well.  ”You snooze, you lose” should be changed to “Schmooz or be prepared to lose”.  A meritocracy the working world is NOT. Even in the late 80s, there was the matter of unpaid overtime.  They expected you to work 10 hours but would pay for 7.   If you didn’t agree - you were labeled a “clock watcher”.  Weekends??? You’ve got to be kidding me - weekends are for clearing up the work you couldn’t finish in the 50-60 hours you worked during the week.  After all - you don’t want people to think you weren’t a “team player”.  I soon learned to count myself  lucky to get one full day off in a week. I generally got a full day once in two weeks. In the 1990s  with a master’s degree under my belt, I was making an awesome $26,000 for 60-70 hours or work a week in New York City.  I worked in a setting where being “salaried” was a euphemism for being responsible for far more than anyone could accomplish in a paid 40 hour week.

Experience Is A Hard Teacher:

Has Ann Romney faced coming home exhausted after being underpaid and overworked, only to have to leave and start all over again 8 hours after she got in?  Has she ever experienced having two hours of her 7 hours pay sucked up in commuting costs? Has she ever had to juggle the needs of her family with the fear of losing her job?  Has she ever been yelled at and come near to being fired for not accomplishing something that was not physically possible in the first place?  Has she ever experienced a boss that screamed at her to do one thing - that she knew made no sense - only to nearly get canned for doing as she was told later?  Did she work for YEARS on a higher degree hoping it was a ticket to a more lucrative job only to find after years of work and expense that said career had been downsized and outsourced?   Has she ever worried that her electricity would be cut off because the cost of living keeps going up while pay stays flat or decreases?  Has she been forced to sell her home because of a lay off?

The answer to all the above is a decisive “NO!”

The World of Work Takes No Prisoners:

The world of work has morphed over the past thirty years into a distorted mess where rewards are meted out to some of the least worthy while those who have spent years gaining hard skills in technical fields are being fired just as they were about to reap the rewards of years of education and experience. All the while the “suits” grab all there is with both arms.  Like Sylvia Plath’s “Bell Jar” the work-a-day world is a place where distortion and disingenuousness win over fact and fidelity.  Its like a fun house with smoke and mirrors, getting out with your sanity and finances intact is part luck, part shrewdness and a dash of ruthlessness also helps.

The fact that Ann Romney worked hard to raise five children isn’t the issue.  It shouldn’t be the issue to stay-at-home Moms or to those in the work-a-day world who are balancing family and work.  What is relevant is that she hasn’t a clue about the world of work.  This is not an evil distortion of women’s values on the part of Ann Romney.  She simply can’t understand what she doesn’t know.

© 2012 RMGHicks - http://www.thebodypoliticUSA.com - All rights reserved.

It truly is astounding to realize that those who are screaming wild-eyed under the banner of “freedom” from the health care insurance requirement seem to think it is perfectly acceptable to deny access to basic contraceptive methods.  They aren’t flying the flag of freedom, they are promoting theocracy.

If there was ever a compelling reason to vote for Obama and the democrats it is the knowledge of what the far-right wing would do to us should they gain power in the House, Senate as well as the Presidency. In the words of Thomas Frank in his new book “Pity the Billionaire”.

The scenario that should concern us most is what will happen when the new, more ideologically concentrated Right gets their hands on the rest of the machinery of government. They are the same old wrecking crew as their predecessors…..but now there is a swaggering, an in your face brazenness to their sabotage.

Although Frank was making primary reference to economic policy, the same holds for women’s health issues.

The video below is amazing and expresses the very real issues and lives that are on the line in this budget and this election cycle.  I want to thank Karen Anne Stone for blogging about this issue on her blog  Women’s Health Care: Will We Be Denied? The video she found is stunning in how it gets to the core of this issue.  I’m embedding it here to spread it around.  For those of you who blog, I suggest you do the same.   This should be every channel every hour on the hour until the message sinks in.

© 2012 - RMGHicks - http://www.thebodypoliticusa.com - All rights reserved.

Like many - I was fooled by  ”scientist shortage” reports of the 1990’s:

On that day, I said goodnight to my mother and talked briefly to her attending physician.  After assuring me that my mother’s condition was stabilized, the conversation turned to research.  I mentioned briefly what I did for a living (I was a lab manager/technician)  and my plans to get a doctorate. The doctor nodded sagely that it was well known that the U.S. needed more Ph.D.’s in biomedical science.

How many times does a lie have to be repeated for the general public to be hoodwinked into thinking it is true?  In those days, it was quite true that getting a reasonably high-paying job  in biotechnology straight out of graduate school was completely doable.  What no one seemed to grasp was that the flood of graduate students post-docs  coming to the US from abroad, was already sowing the seeds of the  massive glut that I would face upon graduation from a doctoral program.  By the time I was out of the pipeline,  there were no industry jobs for new graduates.  Freshly minted Ph.D.’s were shoved unceremoniously  into the post-doctoral logjam into which most would disappear for 10 years of further “training” at coolie wages before “qualifying” for a real job with a salary and benefits.

Here we go again - the great STEM career shortage rides again:

So it was with a feeling of deja vu that I heard the president’s senior advisor and assistant for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs say that the thing to do was to encourage women and our youth in general to train for those valuable STEM careers (science, technology, engineering and math) - because this was how to secure their future!

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Are you kidding me?  A career in any of these fields involves a long and arduous education generally involving several YEARS of post-graduate study.  A lot can change in those years.  Shortages turn into gluts as people chase the career tracks that are profitable - for the moment.  Once a critical mass of “bodies” is reached, the field becomes commoditized and you can kiss that nice salary and secure future good-bye.

Right now people are flooding into computer science and programming - again.  Efforts to encourage women to enter this field are in full force - again.  The reason I say “again” is because we have heard this all before - back in the 1980s.  One such effort appeared in the New York Timestoday.  (”Giving Women the Access Code” by Katie Hafner.

Ask many of the graduates of higher education in STEM fields how valuable that degree has been and more than half will laugh hysterically.  My computer science counterparts learned the hard way - as I did - that employment opportunities can turn on a dime creating a situation where  long term educational commitments are nothing more than a crap shoot.

We need more than a bandaid for this problem…

Encouraging students to enter STEM fields without first understanding the cyclic dynamics of these industries is the height of irresponsibility.  These types of degrees promote “hard skills” that are not easily transferable to alternate disciplines.

So it should be no big surprise that women and men are shunning these fields in favor of a softer skill set in business where  sliding from field to field is not so difficult.

© 2012 - Ruthmarie G. Hicks - http://www.thebodypoliticUSA.com - All rights reserved.

Thomas Frank - Pity the Billionaire:

First some true confessions.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading over the past couple months.  A brief illness had put me off my game for a while and somehow a good read keeps the mind vital without taxing it as much as a steady diet of writing.  (In other words, I have been lazy for the past few weeks - but only for medicinal purposes.)  During that time I worked my way through Thomas Frank’s  “Pity the Billionaire”.

Frank has some very cogent arguments about how the far-right operates and how reality has morphed into an almost alternate universe from the rest of us.  Its a place where grass is blue and the sky is green.  In that topsy-turvy upside-down world  one of the most glaring ironies is the resurgence of Ayn Rand.   After all - corporate corruption and regulatory complacency had almost brought the entire world economy to its knees.  That should have been enough to consign copies of Atlas Shrugged to the paper shredders for the next half century.  But no…quite the contrary.

Ayn Rand For Dummies:

Rand contends that the true heros are the billionaires. The talented and few.  They are the masters of the universe.  They are our betters. They make ships like the Titanic possible.  But they are also the victims.  They are victims of our ingratitude.  Our inability to appreciate how they have made our lives better makes them so. They employ the people who built the ship and lifted them from them from homelessness and an early grave to mere poverty.  The people should be grateful to the likes of these billionaires.  They are the producers.  So they made a few mistakes and almost pushed us in to a second Great Depression that would have made the 1930’s seem like a cake walk - no biggie.  After all,  they are the JOB CREATORS!  And now the job creators are on strike, refusing to hire because we, the ungrateful public have made their lives so “uncertain”.

We want too much from them. We expect things like off-shore oil platforms not to explode.  We want to make sure our food is safe and our water aquifers are not permanently contaminated by their actions.  We expect that the  financial advisors we pay good money to are actually working FOR us and not making side bets that our investments will fail.  We actually expect banks and Wall Street to be responsible enough not 86 the entire world economy. Trifles like that.

There is so much wrong with this analogy that it boggles the mind.  However, I will leave you with this.  On board the Titanic were the likes of John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Isador Straus (owner or Macy’s department store) and his wife. Thomas Andrews, the builder of Titanic and J. Bruce Ismay, owner of the White Star Line and master of the universe.

The Titanic - A Case Study that Sinks Ayn Rand:

Several survivors had noted  that Ismay wanted to make a splash (no pun intended)  by arriving in New York a day early and pushed the Captain to order full steam ahead even though there had beens several serious iceberg warnings.  Thomas Andrews  the ships builder had made room for a more appropriate number of lifeboats, but was overruled by Ismay and others who cited expense and the waste deck space. And  thank goodness there were no trifling “regulators” at hand to ensure that there were enough lifeboats for all!  The expense alone might have caused this “job creator” to go on strike.

As the tragedy unfolds, Guggenheim, Astor, and Straus probably could have bribed their way onto lifeboats, but refused until all the women and children were safe.  Andrews, according to the stories, made no attempt to save himself.  The Captain, EJ Smith, went down with his ship.  Hundreds of passengers in 3rd class never got safe passage to the boat decks as the barriers prevented them from reaching first class.  But guess who managed to survive?  J. Bruce Ismay himself - who managed to sneak onto a boat.

In the world of Ayn Rand, this would be a good thing - as this “job creator” is now safe to lift more people about half an inch above the destitution level.  To do so he would of course have to fight regulators that would slap more restrictions on his activities.  Like, for example, requiring ships to have enough life boats and ensuring that lower class passengers have safe passage to said boats. Stop me if I’m crazy - but what is wrong with this picture?

Lassiez-Faire Economics in action:

The video  is an independent film that I found on YouTube about the sinking of the Titanic.  It’s well done and depicts the bravery and desperation of the Marconi operators who kept transmitting the S.O.S. and C.Q.D. distress codes as the Titanic went down.   Remember that this disaster was the result of laissez faire economics and lack-luster regulation.  It was the spawn of the Robber Baron Era or the ”Gilded Age.”   Today we have the same problem.  Only this time the world economy could sink bringing down far more than 1500 people.

© 2012 - RMGHicks - http://www.thebodypoliticUSA.com - All rights reserved.

Mitt Romney - empty suit with etch a sketch

Thanks to his cadre of talented campaign advisors, Mitt Romney has allowed us to see the man behind the curtain, revealing himself for what he truly is…an empty suit with an etch-a-sketch.  Substance doesn’t matter and words are easily rewritten to  match the sentiments of the constituency of the moment.   The opinions and needs of the electorate certainly don’t matter. Just package your into an attractive, or at least palatable wrapping and the content becomes irrelevant.  ”I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign…its almost like an etch-a-sketch. You can shake it up and start all over.” Sadly, that pretty much sum it up.

In a perverted way, perhaps we owe the Romney campaign a debt of gratitude for being honest enough to tell us the truth.   The needs and priorities  of “we the people” ceased to be of any concern to Washington insiders years ago.  The Romney campaign is simply honest enough to dispense with any pretense.

At the end of the day, the etch-a-sketch with an empty suit is a pathetic metaphor for what our representative government has become.

© 2012 -   Ruthmarie G. Hicks http://the bodypoliticUSA.com - All rights reserved.

Small Business Saturday had its debut last year.   But they are upping the publicity and ante this year.  In my opinion – a program like this is a step in the right direction.  In Washington they jawbone about supporting small business – but talk is not action.  Yet small business, including bricks and mortars  have traditionally been the backbone of American exceptionalism and success. They need and deserve our patronage and support.

Our love affair with big-box stores and rock bottom prices has  come at a cost.  Service?  What’s that?  Knowledge of the product? You’ve got to be kidding me?   In addition this has resulted in bankrupt businesses, lost jobs that paid decent wages and less money coming into the community.  Consider this:  when you spend $100 with a local merchant, $68 returns to the community. When you buy at a national chain – only $43 is returned to the community.  Thats a 37% difference in direct  economic stimulation.

So if you can’t find “made in America” at least do the bulk of your shopping at Mom & Pop skip the Big-Boxmart black Friday insanity!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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© 2011 - Ruthmarie G. Hicks - http://www.thebodypoliticUSA.com - All rights reserved.

Yes, science and engineering are HARD.   OF COURSE ITS HARD...Science is fascinating in the abstract - but “doing science” is never easy.  If it were easy we would have cures for cancer, heart disease, obesity and all infectious disease coming out of our ears. We’d have a shuttle to Mars where people would take vacations and someone would be working on a Warp engine to go faster than the speed of light by now.  I know its hard because I have a Ph.D. from a highly regarded medical school  and was a molecular biologist by trade for over 15 years.

However, you don’t need that many scientists.  The percentage of people that we need in this country to be actively engaged in R&D is relatively small.  That the early classes weed out a large number of students is not  a tragedy…though I agree that there needs to be a vast improvement in pedagogy in order to keep students engaged.  But the bottom line is that in that lecture hall of 200 students - the world only needs roughly 10 of them to move on to the doctoral level.

The problem isn’t at the undergraduate level. It’s at the graduate level and post-doctoral level.  It extends into the industry itself and path that those 10 successful  students in that lecture hall are forced to walk to pursue their careers.

STEM Careers at the doctoral level - Let’s talk about the process:

Graduate School:

Those who make those initial cuts at the undergraduate level - are shuffled into a literally BRUTAL graduate system.  It’s a hazing process of long hours and abuse.  Many are teaching assistants that provide a cheap form of labor for the university.  All end up in laboratories where they choose a mentor for their graduate careers.  “Mentors” may or may not be exploitive - but more often than not - they are.   In almost all programs - working outside of the university to make ends meet is NOT ALLOWED.  During that time the student gets paid a stipend that is barely subsistence.  Labor laws?  What’s that?  The “mentor” gets a cheap source of labor and is often reluctant to let a good candidate graduate.  They then lose that pair of hands that are producing publications and grant money for them. Thus, the  “education” required to acquire the Ph.D.  can drag on for 7-8 years of full-time study.

The Post-Doctoral Logjam:

Ok - You’ve got your degree and you have earned the privilege of being called “doctor.”  Wipe that grin off your face, because now you are entering the post-doctoral logjam.  This is where many potentially great minds fall out of the pipeline.   The postdoctoral period used to be a temporary situation that lasted 2-3 years.  It allowed the newly minted Ph.D. to expand and hone their skills so that they can start their own labs or become a staff scientist in industry.  In the heyday of biotech of the late ’80s and ’90s- a newly minted Ph.D. could earn a decent salary completing a post-doc in an industrial setting.

Those opportunities are looooong gone.  The increase in monies to the NIH (National Institute of Health) and NSF (National Science Foundation) under Clinton lead to a FLOOD of foreign students and post-docs into US academia.  This led to record graduations between about 2003-2006 - just when Bush was cutting the budget to ribbons.  Hence the post-doctoral logjam grew to monumental proportions.  One post-doc wasn’t enough. Now people were doing two, three, four or more. I saw brilliant mind stuck in that “holding pen” for 10 years or longer.  If you are doing the math - that’s  7-8 years to the doctoral degree and another 7-10 years to a JOB….14 -18 YEARS.  Post docs are poorly paid (well under $40k in large cities where the cost of living is high) and some don’t even have basic benefits like medical. Most work between 60-80 hours a week.

Once again - this is a cheap source of labor.  Labor laws??? Again - WHAT labor laws?  It is pure exploitation.

The JOB:

When you finally get to a “real job” - there is no security at all.  If you are in industry you are at the mercy of the suits with MBA’s who know NOTHING about science, are paid about three times as much as any of the  scientists under them and who can eliminate whole departments almost on a whim.   For academia - the pay is once again - terrible and the budding scientist is competing for an ever decreasing slice of the grant money pie.  By this time the newly minted “scientist” is often in their mid-forties with NO NEST EGG and no security.

What caused the deterioration of STEM opportunities?

There is plenty of blame to go around…The trouble here is that the powers that be in both academe and business got greedy.  The scientist became a commodity  who was not valued.

In-sourcing of talent from abroad created a perfect storm.  Over-supply made jobs scarce. The presence of so many foreign nationals who knew nothing about “labor rights” exacerbated the situation.  Labs are nothing more than high-tech sweat shops that should be a national disgrace.

Those who had made their livelihoods in academia for years were stressed by the decreasing flow of grant monies.  They applied pressure to those in the trenches  (graduate students and post-docs) to keep their labs open and running.  Desperation creates abuse.  It was always abusive, but this just made matters worse.

The Bush administration nixed the unionization of teaching assistants and post-docs. Institutions that had unionized had made strides to stem the abusiveness of the system.  Working conditions, while far from cushy, improved. But once that was gone - so was all restraint.

The myth that Americans “can’t do” science was perpetuated.  Congress was pressured to allow even more students, post-docs and H1-B’s into the country - exacerbating the glut.  Industry and academia won because they could crack the “green card” whips and get an outrageous amount of work out of vulnerable people for ludicrous wages.

We have the critical mass of scientists that we need in this country.  The trouble is that there are no opportunities - which is why I, along with many other American nationals left the field without looking back.

NOTE:  For those who can access it - the comment thread for the article is excellent.  Quite a few scientists piled on board.  If you want an earful on the reality of this situation - try this link.

© 2011 - RMGHicks - http://www.thebodypoliticusa.com - All rights reserved.

Ok - it was a crazy storm - but 3 million is about 2.5 million too many.  Our infrastructure should not be so problematic in the 21st century.  Secondly - as of yesterday it was being reported that over 2 million were still without power.  After 3 days they were just 1/3 of the way back to mormal?

Luckily, I have power.  I spent the better part of the last four days clearing downed limbs from my property  - That’s part of the new normal that can not be avoided.  But many people I know are still without power.  That should NOT be part of the new normal.  Nor should the fact that I reported a massive tree limb  from county trees on high tension wires blocking my ability to exit my driveway.  I called the authorities and still no action…4 days later????  A high wind could take down those lines taking power away from thousands of people - Let’s not even discuss the danger to me and drivers on the highly trafficed street my driveway sits on.   But I guess I’m being trivial.

Having the power grid down for millions of people would have 100%  unacceptable 20 years ago….

Back in the dark ages of the late 1970s I experienced my first grid failure.  Nothing special was planned, it was a hot summer night and my parents were in the city.  I had a friend over and we were working on a jigsaw puzzle.  Suddenly…all the lights went out.  Totally unprepared, we stumbled around in the dark  because - as we found out - flashlights are a hard thing to find in the dark.  Once we had a working flashlight,  I was able to secure a couple of antique oil lamps from the basement. Fortunately, we had oil.  After a bit of digging around, we found matches.  Over the next hour we set ourselves up with oil lamps and candles.  The whole time it never dawned on us that the whole power grid had gone down.

Why?  For the same reason we weren’t at all prepared for the lights to go out.  Today a heat wave and lightening storm would be a signal to prepare for a blackout.  Back then, our grid actually WORKED.  Stuff like that just didn’t happen in the modern rockin’ world of the 70s.  I had a battery operated radio - so we finally turned that on and heard that all of NYC was in the dark.  We were STUNNED!

In the aftermath, there were investigations - the event was not taken lightly. I was pretty young at the time, certainly there must have been some political grandstanding that I was unaware of. But in the end….Government cooperated with the utilities.  They pulled themselves together and went about insuring that this would not happen again!

Let the finger-pointing begin…..

Those were the good old days…..Now the entire process has degenerated into a finger-pointing contest.  Our local utility  (ConEd) points rightly at local and county governments…Why didn’t they trim county, and city-owned trees that run alongside many of the major power lines?  With the highest property taxes in the nation - that’s the least they can do.  The county and city points to ConEd stating truthfully that they are woefully understaffed and the grid is antiquated.  They also point out that this is the case  even though ConEd customers enjoy the second highest gas and electric rates in the nation.

And the blame game continues into the recovery phase.  ConEd blames the county for not clearing the downed trees quickly enough for them to work and the county blames ConEd for not getting the grid back on line and nothing changes except that the burden of this mess is passed on to the consumer.   I  personally  have spent $2000 of MY MONEY trimming back county trees that lie near my property over the last two years. I will also have to invest in a generator because losing power for days on end is now an integral part of my life.   So what the #$%! am I paying such a premium for in terms of taxes and utility bills?

The New York Times has an article today that sums it up nicely…When each bad storm means more dark days..

A pox on BOTH of your houses - both ConEd and and Westchester County are equally blameworthy, but the bickering and finger-pointing gets us nowhere…

Neither our government or the utilities are functioning…which  I admit has become a common theme of mine.   But the essential culprit here is the lack of government oversight and REGULATION.  Anyone who thinks lack of oversight and regulation have nothing to do with need to think again.

Look what happened to the grid in California when Enron got its grubby hands on it because of deregulation by the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) ?  Does anyone remember what a mess that was?  Rolling blackouts, soaring prices, shortages contrived by unregulated utilities taking power stations off the grid during peak usage just to jack up prices.

Deregulating public utilities  is a mistake of monumental proportions.  They are natural monopolies and the consumer is therefore at their mercy.  Such industries require rigorous oversight or we will rapidly devolve into a society that relies on oil lamps, candles and fires to keep us warm.

When did we become completely incapable of investing in our own country?

The tea party wanted to get government out of their lives….well careful what you wish, you just might get it.  Government out of your lives means an uncontrolled, grid, bad roads, crumbling bridges, poor railroad transportation, an air traffic grid woefully out of date…and eventually - a third world nation.

What about the cost to the “job creators” the tea party keeps howling about?  The small businesses they claim to champion can be devastated such frequent interruptions.   But the tea party just keeps screaming that higher taxes would bring small business to its knees - so the obvious impact of major power grid interruptions get swept under the rug.

But think on this -  why would a business - large or small be  interested in setting up shop in  areas where the power grid can collapse like a sand castle when the tide rolls in?   Further, if you think the businesses that are still here will stay when they find they are doing business by candlelight every time it rains - think again.

A couple of weeks ago I was in running my dogs in the park and an acquaintance  of mine came in with her two dogs.  I mentioned the stock market and  she started asking  about commodities prices.  For about half a second I wondered why this was a concern.   Then it hit me - she is the owner of  a coffee shop which is also a roasting establishment.   Commodities prices have a massive impact on her life and profit margins - and coffee has gone crazy over the past year.  Admittedly some of this was due to weather issues - but much of it was sheer speculation.
The same holds true from the oil speculation that was one extra nail in our fiscal coffin in 2008.   High oil prices drove the cost of living sky high in the middle of recession in 2008 and helped lead the country off a financial cliff.  But the impact goes even further than  that.  People die from commodities speculation. When food products are involved - such as wheat death and malnurishment  result.  In poor countries such speculation driving prices sky high can mean the difference of eating or not.  Indeed, the high price of wheat was a big factor in rebellion in Tunisia and in Egypt.

© 2011 - RMGHicks - http://www.thebodypoliticusa.com - All rights reserved.

Bravo Mr. Cramer!