Category: Rants

For reasons that I assume relate directly to a large ad buy, CNN decided to let some hack from "CareerBuilder.com" answer the question that's on every young person's mind: "Why are internships so important?" Yes, please tell us, Ms. Beth Braccio Hering of CareerBuilder.com. Why are internships so important? God knows all my students are killing each other to get them. It's mildly horrifying to see the zeal with which they fight for the privilege of working for free, but let's stick to the original question.

You're a recent college graduate with a killer cover letter, a stellar grade point average and glowing recommendations.

But if one important item is missing from your résumé, good luck trying to get a position at The McTigue Financial Group in Chicago.

You need an internship.

(snip)

The good news for those fortunate enough to earn a spot: One in four become a full-time financial representative after graduation.

Yes, the problem is clearly that you have no worked gratis for one of Ms. Hering's paying clients. Both she and CareerBuilder.com are disinterested third parties here. They're merely trying to help you. And to let you know that 1 in 4 of these lucky boys and girls will attain a dream career as a "financial representative" if all goes well. Fingers crossed!

The state of the economy also is changing the nature of work given to interns. "In this economic downturn, employers are relying increasingly on interns to shore up areas where full-time hiring has been cut," Benca notes.

Oh yeah, they want to shore the hell out of those areas. They're quite eager to replace paid employees with college kids who can be convinced to work for nothing.

So you're working for someone else for free. What's in it for you?

Benefits for you

Besides getting a foot in the door with a potential employer and looking good on a résumé, internships have other advantages:

• The opportunity to "test drive" a career (Would I be happier in marketing or advertising? Am I more comfortable working with patients or in a lab?)

• Chances to network

• Establishing relationships with mentors

• Possible college credit or certification

• An introduction to the field's culture and etiquette (Are clients addressed by their first name? Are jeans appropriate for Casual Friday?)

• Accumulating new skills

• Gaining a "real world" perspective on an occupation (How much overtime do employees really work? How much time is spent behind a desk versus in the field?)

In the fantasy world inhabited by the minions who get paid to believe in the purity of this system, interning is a really sweet deal! All you have to do is move to one of the most expensive cities in the country – preferably NY or DC, possibly LA – and live for three or four months working ~45 hours weekly without getting a paycheck. Is it too late for me to sign up? This sounds awesome. What's in it for the "employer"?

Employers do not create internships just to be nice to students and others interested in a certain career. While an interview or a company test can add to what an employer knows about a person, an internship helps an employer evaluate how an individual would fare in the actual workplace.

Like The McTigue Group, many companies develop an internship pool and hire from that group. As Benca notes, "Not only are they seeing potential employees with experience, it is experience within their company."

Ah, I see. They do it to identify and court young talent. It's like the Yankees giving a free tryout to some talented minor leaguers. It is at once benevolent and efficient. I'm going to double-check the article but I think the author forgot to mention the thousands of hours of clerical work interns end up doing without unnecessary complications like salary, benefits, or labor laws.

In reality, getting free labor out of gullible (not to mention desperate and terrified of unemployment) undergrads is only part of the rationale behind the Intern Economy and this well-rehearsed bullshit about how much it benefits students. More importantly, this system is a brutally efficient class barrier. An internship is a necessary precursor to getting a job. Having Mom and Dad cough up several thousand dollars to support you while you live in an expensive city (and do some high-class partying, er, "networking", with your fellow children of the Investor Class) is a necessary precursor to interning for free. Hmm.

In one of the best episodes of the short-lived masterpiece Fawlty Towers, Basil (John Cleese) is eager to attract a more upper-class clientele to his flophouse. So he puts an ad in the local paper for a Gourmet Night at the hotel restaurant…closing with the phrase "NO RIFF-RAFF." Would that employers could cut to the chase and be so explicit in reality. They can't, but the Intern Economy gets the job done all the same. Internships have always been reserved for those whose parents or uncles know a guy who has a summer place on the Cape next to one of the managing editors of the Times or whatever, but now that the expectation of working for free has been drummed into the heads of an entire generation the process is more efficient than ever at weeding out the ones who don't come from money.

Far be it from me to question the sincerity of someone from CareerBuilder.com, but I am not clear on why employers would eliminate 75% of college students by making the internships unpaid if their goal really is to find the best candidates for future employment. What about the potential stars who have to, you know, work and earn money in the summer? That is a curious way to structure a process intended to identify the most promising potential hires for the future. That is, after all, the whole point of internships. Right?

For the aspiring journalist who lacks the time to read all of this, the short and simple answer to the titular question: grab Sean Hannity's wang and go to town.

Right wing media figures fall into one of two categories these days – sociopaths and sycophants. The sociopaths write the books and host the shows.
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The sycophants kiss the sociopaths' asses to get invited on the shows and maybe, just maybe, get the shot to become sociopaths themselves. They prove their worth in the minors, doing a lot of 5th string blogging on semi-popular websites (World Nut Daily, Tucker's Folly, NRO, etc) and assiduously fawning over Beck, Malkin, Hannity, and the like. Ooh, ooh! Pick me! Pick me!

Do a side-by-side comparison of these two pieces: "Hannity's Victory: a must-read this year" by Jedediah Bila (whose previous writing credits consist of "conservatives4palin.com" and…) and "Conservative Victory" by Rebecca Hagelin. As the titles reveal, they are both about the new book Conservative Victory by charity fraud Sean Hannity. For a pair of "pro-family" advocates, these married women aren't shy about blowing Hannity in public. Less reviews than press releases, take a look at some of this fine journalism. First, Hagelin:

Sean says it best, (followed by extended quote)

Sean brilliantly connects the dots between…

Sean’s terrific book outlines specific steps… Here are a few of my favorite steps, please read “Conservative Victory” for all of them. (note: not a sentence)

A Conservative Victory is an American victory. I highly recommend Sean Hannity’s book as the way to get started on securing both.

Don't forget to come up for air, Rebecca!
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Anything to add, Jeddy?

When the going gets tough, it’s time for straight talk. It’s time to say what needs to be said, without all of the lofty rhetoric. That’s precisely what Sean Hannity does in Conservative Victory. Hannity’s style is approachable and no-nonsense, much like the down to earth, call it like he sees it energy he has brought to radio and television from the start. He discloses in his introduction that, “We are in desperate need for a new vision, and an effective strategy, to defeat Barack Obama and the American left before they rob from us everything our ancestors sacrificed to bequeath us, and all that our military has fought, bled, and died to preserve”

Can you even imagine writing shit like this for a living? To have your name attached to such embarrassing and blatant ass-kissing? Well, there's a healthy market for this kind of literary detritus.
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The only impediment to success is a gag reflex, apparently.

I am like a meteorologist for pant-shitting. Based on what I am seeing on the Tri-County Super Doppler Shit Radar, I have asked the National Weather Service, in cooperation with the Oversight Committee on Pantular Integrity, to issue a severe pant soiling watch for the next three days. As soon as Defense Secretary Gates announced some changes to our national nuclear strategy on Tuesday afternoon it was readily apparent that the forthcoming torrent of explosive wingnut diarrhea would have all of us seeking shelter and filling sandbags.

We can't show any weakness in front of the Russians!!!!!

111!!!

The changes are pretty prosaic, of course. The DoD will no longer pursue "next generation" nuclear technology, which essentially means smaller warheads made with more accessible materials. Imagine the horror of a world without the proliferation of smaller, cheaper nukes. We're also committing to refrain from using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations, although I'm sure the next Republican president will take care of that one. Overall the aim appears to be a more reasonably sized, less expensive stockpile rather than the Cold War-sized the-Russkies-are-acomin' arsenal on which we currently sit.

I mean, whatever nuclear threats we face would fall under the umbrella of terrorism, not World War III scenarios from Caspar Weinberger's wet dreams.

The funny thing about this is that the U.
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S. doesn't really have a nuclear weapons infrastructure anymore. We outsourced that years ago. Bechtel, the privately-held "engineering services" company that exists solely off of Federal contracts (bang-up job on the Katrina trailers, champs!) has the nuclear arsenal. The DoD merely gets access to it. In theory.

As has been the case since the Manhattan Project, nuclear weapons are developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, neither of which is run by the Federal government. Both are operated under contract by Bechtel. Our nuclear materials and waste reprocessing takes place at the Hanford Site in Washington, the Y-12 Complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Savannah River Site in Georgia, which are run under contract by Bechtel, Bechtel, and Bechtel, respectively. Pantex, which is and always has been the nation's sole nuclear weapons assembly, maintenance, and disassembly facility, has been auctioned off to Bechtel (with an assist from Lockheed Martin, to whom Sandia National Laboratory was sold). And nuclear testing, which is all subcritical since the abandonment of nuclear testing in 1991, takes place at the vast Nevada Test Site controlled by…that's right. Congratulations, Bechtel, for being the first kid on your block to collect the entire industry.

You have to give the Boomers a little credit for consistency, though: when they decided to privatize everything, they didn't exclude the one government program they actually care about. Certainly the free market, and specifically a fiercely secretive, privately held conglomerate of former Bush/Reagan administration officials, can maintain a nuclear arsenal better than the military can.

Flying sucks.

I don't know if my relatively new found disdain for it has to do with me getting older (I am.) or if the experience is getting worse (It is.) but lately I look at the need to fly as an unwelcome necessity. In the past I looked forward to it and thought it was pretty cool. And let's face it, getting on a plane and being anywhere in the world in less than a day for a reasonable cost is amazing. This does little to mitigate the extent to which the experience blows these days.

We start with a long, traffic-filled drive to the airport, paying usurious fees to park a mile away from the terminal to which we are shuttled, bags in tow, in a malodorous bus. We wait in the first of many lines to pay for the privilege of having our luggage placed on the flight. Then we wait like cattle to be strip-searched by the TSA. After we finally reach Gate 47B we wait, visibly unhappy, to be packed away like sardines on ever-smaller planes.

Once on the plane we are essentially told to hurry up, cram into a 17" wide seat (seriously, that's the industry average) and shut the hell up once we are done mastering the live action Tetris necessary to fit anything in the overhead bins. Here we will spend between one and a dozen hours wedged between strangers with radically different ideas about personal hygiene. My favorite, and in my experience the most likely combination, is between the massively overweight person and the tubercular hillbilly. I get to battle the former's overspilling paunch while trying to guess the virus that the latter is communicating. Aside from the company of our fellow passengers, the only in-flight amenities are half of a can of Coke, a tiny bag of pretzels, and the open contempt of the flight attendants.

Life Magazine – which apparently still exists, by the way – recently posted this photo album entitled "When flying was fun." It shows a variety of aspects of flying from the pre-deregulation and pre-9/11 days. Under regulation, all of the prices were the same so the airlines had to compete with service and amenities. Some of the "amenities", like the flight attendants forced to do their jobs in hot pants, are dated to the point of inducing cringing. But others, like passengers being able to say goodbye to their departing friends without a SWAT team impounding their vehicle for daring to stop in front of the terminal, have given way to our paranoia and cynicism. The biggest changes, of course, have been motivated by cost. The white tablecloth food service has been replaced by the tiny bag of Anger Pretzels because, well, low fares are all that matter.

The changes in air travel illustrate quite nicely one of the basic dilemmas of living in post-New Deal, deregulated America. Of course the Life Magazine photos are idyllic and completely overlook the fact that flying was too expensive for many people during that era; the posh service reflected the mostly upper- and upper-middle class clientele who could afford to fly with any regularity. Deregulation has done two things to air travel. First, it has democratized it, driving down prices to the point that most Americans above the poverty line could afford a ticket if flying became necessary or merely desirable. Second, it has made the experience horrible. The unencumbered free market is only good at one thing: lowering prices. Everything else is sacrificed to that end. It will give you a $149 round-trip ticket from Chicago to New York, but it won't make much of an effort to hide the corner-cutting that makes it possible.

I see this debate in a lot of different social issues these days: do we want something made or done right if it means that many people won't be able to afford it, or do we want cheap shit that everyone can afford? Regardless of which one of those options we prefer individually or collectively, our system can only produce one of them.

The term "oligarchy" is bandied about in the public sphere with considerable frequency these days, more frequently than we have heard since the Progressive Era. People who write the kind of stuff I write love words like "oligarchy" or "plutocrat." They are shiny, phonetically pleasing, five dollar words with a distinctly nasty edge. Rarely are these terms used accurately, though. Oligarchy, for example, is often used generically to refer to a group of people who have a lot of power.

Oligarchy, as Webster's and any half-decent Intro to Government textbook will tell you, is "a form of government in which power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society." Perhaps a democratic theorist who studies these things for a living could pick nits with me, but I find this definition lacking. What does "power" mean in this context? Economic power? Political power? Cultural influence? Thousands of different groups or individuals could fall into those categories. Nor does size help us define things. Big and Powerful are often poorly correlated.

A better definition of oligarchy, I believe, is a group of social elites with sufficient power (economic, political, religious, etc.) to destroy the society by their actions. In other words, if society can function without you, you are not part of the club. If it can't, call the printer and get "Reigning Oligarch" added to your business cards. Wal-Mart is huge and certainly society would be affected by their collapse, but we'd be fine without them. We could shop elsewhere. So they haven't quite earned membership to the club yet. They can't credibly threaten to bring the whole society crashing down. You're not an oligarch until you can stare the country in the eye and say "I will fucking end you." And mean it.

For the first 75 years of American history, the landed plantation aristocracy of the South constituted a legitimate oligarchy. They controlled 99% of the nation's export economy (which prior to income taxation was essentially the only real source of revenue for the Federal government) and its food supply. This power was concentrated in an incredibly small number of hands but they controlled states large enough to exercise effective veto power over the entire political process. They kept slavery off the political agenda – and more generally got their way about, well, everything – for decades because the Federal government was weak and they could credibly threaten to secede and do serious harm to the North.

It is not a coincidence that Washington didn't call their bluff until the balance of economic power had shifted to the industrial North in the 1850s.
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After the Civil War the banks on Wall Street assumed this role.
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Their stranglehold on the country was made apparent in the Panic of 1907 when, lacking a central bank to inject liquidity into the economy, the embarrassed Federal government had to go to J.P. Morgan hat-in-hand and beg him to personally rescue the economy. Like, with his own money. It took the Crash of 1929, however, to shock the government into taking back some of that power from the financial industry.

Now we are right back in 1907. The giant banks, unencumbered by Glass-Stegall, that brought us to ruin have spent the last year and most of the billions in taxpayer bailout dollars getting even bigger. As any decent financial blogger has noted repeatedly over the past year, the bailout did not come with strings attached. Lacking any meaningful financial regulation, the crisis has produced nothing but bigger banks operating much the same as they have been for the past two decades. And when the next collapse comes a few years from now, Congress will bail them out again.

Because they have to. Because a small number of players control the banking and financial industries and their collapse means the collapse of our entire economy (not to mention the U.S. Dollar).

Thirty years of downsizing, privatizing, and deregulating have left the Federal government too weak to even administer TARP – they contracted that work out to Goldman Sachs. Let that sink in; Washington paid Goldman Sachs to administer the bailout plan for the industry GS helped bring to ruin, not because of crony capitalism but because Treasury simply lacks the power and resources to do it. The phrase "Too big to fail" is nothing more than a tacit admission of being on the short end of an unequal power sharing arrangement.

The effects of things like unemployment or foreclosure on mental and physical health are substantial and well-documented. It will take years to unravel the spikes in depression, alcoholism, divorce, and all of the maladies concomitant to a personal financial meltdown. I'm sure you know people who have lost jobs and homes and I'm equally sure that some of them aren't taking it terribly well. It isn't difficult to understand why that happens.

So this is hard on everyone, but it has to be particularly hard on the upper-middle class. It sucks for anyone to lose a job and a house, but how can the self-styled masters of the universe cope when the things that define them are taken away? Without the enormous house, leased Lexuses, and Assistant Regional Vice-President of Corporate Excellence title to make them feel important, the psychological shock must be crushing. It is not a demographic that invites a lot of sympathy; that said, the fall into unemployment and financial want is a lot steeper for them. Those of us who don't really have shit to begin with are better equipped for (and more used to) living on not much. The more comfortable, however, are used to it. Their identities are tied to Stuff and without Stuff they are like rudderless ships. It's not surprising that they need to find ways to remind themselves that they are better than everyone else.

That's where The Ladders comes in. Perhaps you've seen their incessant TV advertisements.

"Only $100k jobs. For only $100k people!"

Hear that, unemployed yuppies? You're still Special. You are far better than those other unemployed people and you needn't mingle with them. Unemployment now has a first-class cabin, complete with a blue curtain to clearly distinguish you from the unwashed hordes back in coach.

The amusing thing (As if there is only one.) is that these people are all believers in the free market to some extent, many of them quite strongly so. And a "$100k person" would seem to be one who is determined by the free market to be worth $100k in salary. Since that is not the case for very many of the site's 2 million members – I'd bet a lot of them are making zero at the moment and will end up accepting jobs paying far less than six figures if they're lucky enough to find one – it's clear that the label serves mainly to pat the site's members on the rump and reassure them that they are Special. The free market god is an unforgiving one, though, and the site feels like the last gasp of people who realize that The Almighty is slowly "correcting" their standard of living.

Remember how we flirted with Peak Wingnut in the week after Obama's victory? The comments of the conservative faithful were indeed hilarious and unhinged in the wake of The Antichrist's ascension, but it was tempered by the ample time they had to prepare. For the last three or four weeks of the election, all but the most delusional shut-ins took one look at McCain-Palin '08 and knew that we were staring at a corpse. Right wing grief and agony played out gradually over a long, schadenfreude-filled month.

Not so with health care reform. All and sundry were confidently, perhaps even mockingly, announcing its death for six months (Think Progress has a nice compilation and timeline). Nothing was left but to begin the victory parade. That the right was blindsided is evident in the post-vote rush to ascribe the bill's passage to dirty, extra-constitutional legislative chicanery. It is a paranoid, lard-assed American version of the 1920s Dolchstosslegende in the Weimar Republic.

Since I am not one to let such rare treats pass by unnoticed, it seems appropriate to recap the highlights of the week in hyperbolic, impotent, pant-shitting histrionics from the conservative version of reality. The moment the vote was cast it was clear that there would be stupid; it was my goal to capture as much of it as possible. I needed a bigger net. But here is what I did manage to corral, in no particular order.

1. Neal "My brain don't work real good" Boortz wins the Excellence in Short-Term Memory Award for this priceless duo.

March 22: REPEAL? NOT IN YOUR LIFETIME. I'm sure we're going to hear some people suggesting that if we put the Republicans in charge they'll simply repeal ObamaCare. Sorry, I don't see that happening. Remember, even if the Republicans did somehow manage to take back the House and the Senate, it certainly wouldn't be with a veto-proof majority … and don't forget who's sitting in the White House perfectly ready to veto any repeal attempt.

March 24: NOW THE REPUBLICANS HAVE THEIR PLATFORM. Forget a resurrection of the 1994 Contract With America. Forget the latest "Contract From America" version. The Republicans need only make one promise for the 2010 elections … Repeal ObamaCare.

It must be nice to have an audience too busy hand-loading ammo and registering as sex offenders to notice things like this.

2. The Impotent Rage Meets Temper Tantrum Award goes to this anonymous ass clown over at RedState.

I pay the taxes. I obey the rules. I pull the wagon that they ride. They need me to continue to do so. They need you to continue to do so. They need us all. Remember – we pull, they ride. No more…From this day forward, I will engage in little acts of civil disobedience. Every single day. Barack won’t have ol’ Jack to count on any more, because tyranny is not what I signed up for. And they need me. They need us.

WOLVERINES!!!!!!!!!1111!!!!!!!!!!

3. Boortz again: "Today will do more damage than 9/11." It would appear that the "talkmaster" is actually the master of understatement.

4. McTardle spent the last six months passing herself off as a person who knew America's health care system from a hole in the ground. In the aftermath she easily wins the Overwrought Misuse of Shit Half-Remembered from History 102.

Regardless of what you think about health care, tomorrow we wake up in a different political world…Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority?

"Ed, I have some questions about the Federalist Papers, especially Madison's impassioned defense in #10 of the Constitution's ability to prevent majority tyranny. Who should I consult?"

"I say unto thee as I would with my dying breath: Megan… McArdle…"

5. Veronique de Rugy takes the Finding a Way to Complain about Single-Payer in the Absence of Single-Payer Award with this ironclad exercise in logic.

As if that's not bad enough, much worse can happen. As we know, unintended consequences are real, and they always lead to a worse situation that any of us expected.

Before we go further, I'd like you all to stare at that for a minute. I want to rub Veronique's nose in it while emphatically stating NO! much as one would housetrain a puppy.

The unintended consequence is the following: How long will it take for people, individuals and businesses, to realize that they are better off not getting health care and paying the penalty? They can just get insurance once they need it, since people who are sick can no longer be denied health-care coverage. If that happens, we can expect insurance companies to go under very quickly. Basically, many healthy people won't get insurance because the penalty is cheaper than the insurance. However, once they get really sick they will seek coverage and won't be denied. Insurance companies will find themselves with a gigantic pool of sick people. In this worst-case scenario, the government will use the opportunity…to take over the insurance business.

And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!

6. Tony Blankley wins the Impossible to Read This Without Using One's Right Hand to Pantomime Masturbation Award for this desperate effort to sound smart.

If they can stand up to the coming propaganda, America may be free, and the life of the wider free world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if the voters succumb to those seven months of blandishments and deceptions, then free America — including all that we have known and cared for — will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Yes Tony, this is exactly what Churchill had in mind. Exactly. Well played.

7. Ben Shapiro was not seriously challenged for two separate awards: the Straw Man and the Mostly Closely Resembles the Final Livejournal Post of a School Spree Shooter.

There's a reason that Obama, Biden, Pelosi and Reid don't use Simpson as one of their typical sob stories: Simpson weighs 604 pounds, and she's trying to work her way up to 1,000 pounds so that she can make the Guinness Book of World Records…Now we are paying for her. All of us. We're paying for her because insurance companies in America are no longer allowed to charge her higher premiums due to her pre-existing medical condition (i.e. being a load).

Ben has never spoken to a woman without first giving his credit card number or being pepper sprayed afterward.

8. The Really Good Idea Bound to Attract Considerable Public Support Award goes to Louie Gohmert, who proposes to solve the "problem" of Congress passing legislation by repealing the 17th Amendment.

9. The Look How Hard This Obviously Mentally Challenged Man is Trying! Award goes to Charlie Daniels, with honorable mention to his commenters.

You will see health care paying for the abortion of innocent babies. I know, I know, Obama signed an executive order saying this won't happen under this bill, but you just wait and see. I believe that a huge amount of doctors will simply stop practicing and that many young people who had planned to go into medicine will simply opt for another profession. And think about this people, if the Democrats can pass health care, what else are they willing to push down our throats? The sorry answer is, as long as they are a majority, anything they want to; amnesty for illegal aliens is just around the corner.

Slippery is the best kind of slope.

10. The Quickest Resort to Violent Rhetoric Award goes to…come on, who else but Glenn Beck?

11. Finally, the Golden Pantshitter Trophy for Outstanding Achievement in Pant-Shitting goes to Rush Limbaugh, not only for chickening out on his promise to leave the country if the bill passed but also for his bombastic, drug-addled, not-even-visible-from-Reality rant about the end of America as "we" (i.e., Teabaggers) know it.

The next big push will be amnesty for … millions of illegal immigrants who are here…Obama's gonna need their votes in 2012. The Democrats are going to need their votes in every election from now on – if we have elections, and I'm not joking…The Constitution has just been ripped to shreds, so why is anything safe?

Like Obama isn't the greatest financial boon to wingnut AM radio blowhards since the Waco Siege. Rush should be kissing his ass. Come to think of it, Rush can kiss my ass too. That worked out well.

These are just a few of the highlights. Feel free to add your own – emails from psychotic uncles, Facebook/Twitter posts from the special wingnuts in your life, comments from co-workers, editorials, etc. – in the comments. Regardless, I think it is abundantly clear that this was a week of childish, incoherent, pant-shitting rage of historic proportions. I am proud to live in such a time.