In Which I Engineer A New Job.

On Monday, I start a new job! Last week, I got a call from a headhunter asking if I'd like to apply for a Test Engineer position at HP. I would. I hung up. Then I laughed because I am so not an engineer.

But looking over the job requirements, I thought that I could handle most of them and learn the rest easily enough, so I took the pre-screening test and sent it back, figuring what the hell.

Aced it, apparently. So I was called in for an interview on Monday, spent two hours answering a very detailed set of questions, then took another written test.

I really liked the two guys I interviewed with and thought the interview went very well. I went home still thinking it was a long shot, but that I had done about as good a job selling my capabilities as I could.

Apparently, they thought so too, because they called me an hour later to offer me the job.

So this weekend I'm studying XML and shopping for an engineer's hat.

I hope they let me blow the whistle.

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Wealthy, Entitled, And Oblivious.

I was a Republican for a good part of my adult life. See, when I was growing up, Republicans believed in good government, not no government. Eisenhower and Republicans like him stood behind Social Security, conservation and protection of the environment, the idea that the rich should pay their fair share of taxes (90% top bracket in those days, though deductions and loopholes brought that down considerably), and the idea that government could and should do many things that private industry was just not suited to do, like scientific R&D and building the interstate highway system and other infrastructure projects that helped make postwar America an economic powerhouse.

Most Republicans don't seem to believe in any of those things any more. Much of the party's leadership seems to be wealthy, entitled, and oblivious to the struggles of those less fortunate than themselves.

Take Herman Cain, for example. He is now the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Cain loves attacking "Obamacare" by saying that he would have died from his bout with cancer if he had been treated under the program. Not only is that a lie, but the true story of Cain's cancer treatment is a sad window into the thinking of too many Republicans these days.

Stephanie Mencimer has written a takedown of Cain's story that should be read by anyone who wants to understand the Republican worldview. It's worth it to read the whole thing, but here's a summary with emphasis added:

Cain makes clear in his new book, This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House, he is probably alive today because he's rich. And that's not something Obamacare would have affected one way or another.

Cain devotes a whole chapter of his new book to his battle with cancer. He never once mentions insurance companies not paying for treatment, skimping on reimbursement, or disqualifying his claims. He never mentions having to fend off threats that his coverage will be revoked. He never has trouble paying the bills or getting to the hospital or into the best treatment programs. 

The sort of treatment Cain received would have put many people into bankruptcy, even if they had health insurance, thanks to caps and co-payments and other tricks insurance companies use to shift costs onto patients. 

...when Cain was first diagnosed with cancer of the colon and liver and a 30 percent chance of survival, he was told that he should go to a specialized cancer center rather than a hospital, namely the M.D. Anderson cancer center in Houston. Not everyone who wants to go to such a top-flight facility gets to go there, however. Plenty of people with private insurance have died waiting for an insurance company functionary to approve such treatment. It can take weeks to get into Anderson, and it requires traveling at short notice, which can only add to the costs. So Cain called his friend T. Boone Pickens, the oil magnate, who used to be on the board of the center and was a big donor to the cancer center. Pickens made a call, and Cain was in.

Poor people without health insurance have a hard time getting doctors and hospitals to treat them at reduced costs, much less for free. But when Cain, a multimillionaire, needed a second opinion about his cancer surgery, he went to see a doctor in Savannah, Georgia. After giving him a full workup, Cain writes, the doctor "didn't charge me a dime—and he supported me in my Senate campaign."

After Cain had his surgery...(h)e was able to go home a week early because, although he was still weak, one of the companies on whose board he sits dispatched its private plane to fly him back to Atlanta so "we did not have to endure the stress of commercial travel." 

[Cain] believes his cancer survival was divinely inspired. He writes that he was spared the unbeatable odds of his diagnosis because God said, "Not yet!" He speculates, "Did it have something to do with the Lord wanting me to survive so that I might help set this great nation of ours on its own path of recovery?…My journey now is God's plan."

That's the thinking of someone who is wealthy, entitled, and oblivious. And that's why I can't be a Republican anymore.

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Who Killed The Middle Class?

And you may ask yourself, well...how did we get here?

It took a village of out-of-touch political insiders, an under-regulated financial sector dedicated to the proposition that greed is good, and two bought-and-paid-for political parties. This long article, actually an interview of economist Jeffery Sachs (no relation to Goldman, I don't think), explains how it happened. The interview is well worth reading in its entirety. For those of you who are short on time, I've excerpted the most salient points. Emphasis added in spots.

"The income distribution in this country has gotten out of whack to a historically unprecedented extent and it has come with a very serious derangement of our political processes.

The U.S. is facing a structural crisis that goes beyond the bursting of the financial bubble. The remedies, therefore, must also go beyond what I regard as gimmickry of a stimulus package, or a temporary tax cut – or, for that matter, even less relevant permanent tax cuts.

The main effect of globalization, which is known but somehow weirdly separated from our politics, has been that those who have products, or services, or celebrity, or other things that they can sell to world markets, have found a boon in globalization. But for most of American society, and certainly for the majority of Americans who don’t have a bachelor’s degree, globalization has meant facing much lower-wage workers abroad and increasingly powerful competitive pressures.  So our society began to separate between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” really in the early 1980s.

Reagan came to office with a diagnosis, most famously put in his inaugural speech, that government is not the solution, but the problem.(...) Reagan made a big and wrong diagnosis, with extraordinary consequences, and a lot of the country bought it.

He was playing to a lot of powerful interests [the rising Sun Belt, conservative businessmen, etc.], and the dismantling of government began, all in the service of cutting top tax rates as a theory of how to make the economy function properly. It’s a weird idea because there is plenty of evidence that government and markets are complementary parts of a healthy society – it’s not one or the other. The interests at the top benefited from globalization through market forces, tax avoidance and tax havens — and they absolutely grabbed hold of the federal government.

Each of the parties is constantly feeding at the trough of major interest groups. The Democrats, basically, were sold to Wall Street by [Bill] Clinton, and they’ve remained in Wall Street’s hands up until now. And that is one of the greatest failings of the Obama administration: the fact that he couldn’t find his way clear of the major interest group that helped bring him to office, and therefore he really couldn’t undertake deeper changes in the country.

When I was growing up, it was a commonly thought that America needed a mixed economy, that there were spheres of life where the market economy should prevail, and there were spheres of life where the government would be crucial. [The mixed economy] has had great history in all of the high-end democracies and there is a lot of economic reasoning behind it.
Basically, government has to be operating where the profit motive won’t suffice. The profit motive works where you have good economic competition, but if you just need one highway between city A and city B, that’s not going to be a competitive highway, so you’d better involve the government. If you want scientific knowledge in a society, for example, you don’t patent basic theorems, because everybody needs to use them, so you have to find a different way other than the profit motive to get science to develop.

I think Ronald Reagan really had a devastating effect on this. The idea that one would elect a president on the premise of demonizing government rather than making it work properly is really a shocking idea – “I’m here to dismantle the role of government.” No president since then has deviated from that line.
What are our deeper economic objectives? Among these is a sense of well-being, of life satisfaction. Income can play a role in that, but so do things like social trust and honest government – and compassion for other people. This kind of discussion is considered odd and I think that is part of our problem right now. We don’t have effective ways to discuss these things in our society.

Instead, we have people who represent a cult of selfishness, what I would consider Ayn Rand libertarianism. They are political figures who say that the goal of America is to leave [people] alone, and that ideas like compassion and so on are dangerous. What the Republicans have on offer – which is based on this 30-year misdiagnosis – is cruel and deeply wrong, because they express disdain for the idea that people are suffering and they need help.

We’ve arrived at a crossroads about the real meaning of our civilization. I think that we will need to reflect on how to achieve a higher level of happiness in this country —  [and think about] issues of social trust, social connectedness, decency, compassion.

This [crisis] isn’t really about hard work and effort. It is about a society in which the options for a lot of people seem to be closed off right now. One of the great visions of America has been that this is a society where if you work hard, you can make it. But today we have the lowest social mobility of any high-income democracy.

There is no quick fix right now. A quick fix would occur if we had hit a bump in the road of a normally functioning economy, but my point is that we had growing rot that was disguised by financial bubbles. Rebuilding the infrastructure, strengthening the scientific base, having an energy system that moves to a sustainable renewables, low-carbon economy, improving educational outcome so that more kids make it all the way through – those are 10-year projects, more or less."

The question is, where do we go from here.

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What Are These People Whining About?

My friend Julee Klein posted a link to this article from Business Insider on Facebook. If you're wondering what all the fuss is about the Occupy Wall Street protests, this is a simple, graphic way to understand what people are upset about.

I certainly don't agree with everything the protesters are saying, but these charts certainly make clear that this country has major problems that are closing more and more people out of any chance to attain the American Dream. Or even a decent middle class life. Check it out.

Despite the myth of social mobility, poor Americans have a SLIM CHANCE of rising to the upper middle class

 

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Out Of Control.

Health care costs keep going up. O and I now pay about a third of our monthly minimum budget for health insurance, and the coverage we get for that is poor. We're protected from health catastrophes (although a serious health emergency would still probably wipe us out), but we still have to pay for any doctor visits, etc. out of pocket.

That's bad enough, but the fact is that we're lucky. We're able to pay for insurance. All too many people in this country can't afford even that minimal level of protection.

This situation is peculiarly American. Every other industrialized country in the world offers its citizens some form of universal health care. And for a whole lot less than we spend on health care delivery here.

In fact, the US spends two to three times more per person on health care than any other industrialized nation, with similar or worse results in terms of health outcomes.

Why? Check out this article by economist Dean Baker.

we pay more than twice as much per person for our health care as people in any other wealthy country. The reason is that the richest 1 Percent -- executives in pharmaceutical and insurance companies, hospitals and highly paid medical specialists -- all make huge sums off our health care system. If we paid the same amount per person as people in any other country, our long-term budget projections would show huge surpluses, not deficits.

That's right, our long-term budget deficit problem is driven almost completely by our out-of-control, for-profit health care system. And as our population ages, things will only get worse.

What's the solution? Medicare for all would be a good start. Health care costs in the Medicare system are significantly lower than those charged by the private sector, mainly because of the mass bargaining power of the government.

With the current political climate, it's very unlikely that anything resembling a solution will emerge on the federal level, but some states, including Vermont, Montana, and California, are moving toward versions of a single payer system that promise to get health care costs under control.

It can't happen soon enough.

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Why You're Just Not Feeling Yourself Today.

 

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