YOU NEED EXPERIENCE FOR THE JOB...

Remember that movie scene from Titanic? Ironic, a man sails to a country founded in a revolt against a king spouting "I'm the king of the world." Surprisingly though the irony of that situation says a lot about the politics of the era that shaped what we are today. If you need visual proof please watch the scene.


James Cameron has a deep sense of irony alright.

While I was walking to the gym today, I thought long and hard about the differences between a successful entrepreneur and businessman, and the making of a good aristocrat. There is a difference between the two. Contrary to widely accepted conventional wisdom, I don't think all rich, successful business types out there can be called aristocratic. Conversely, it follows not every aristocrat is filthy rich- although we must make a concession that as a general rule they are almost never poor.

I think defining who or what they are, however arbitrarily, will be essential for this article. Aristocrats are people that generally do not have to pay for their mistakes, be it monetarily or legally. People that are just rich somehow or another do pay for their mistakes, monetarily or legally. An Aristocrat wouldn't go to jail because an Aristocrat might also be friends with the judge, and thus earn a chair above the law. A rich man that commits a scandal and is not an aristocrat goes to jail still. These are the differences. One pays for his mistake, the other gets commoners to pay for his mistakes.

So it also follows, because Aristocrats tend to be rich, they tend to grow their ranks from the successful business class. All things being equal, its easier to make the leap to Aristocracy if you are rich than if you are born poor. But we all know people born poor that made it into the Aristocracy.

How does this apply today to large persistent unemployment? The fact of employment is that someone has to HIRE you for you to get the JOB. But if no one hires you, you can't get the job. The fact of employment is that in bad times the power is one way. The fact is in good times the power dynamic is still one way. The employer has the initiative to hire you. But you can't force your potential employer to do that. Let's be realistic here then.

However, what employers are beholden to: they need employed labor like a car needs wheels so they can pump money from the public. Employers are tied to labor in a more general sense. But the greater numbers of employers over the smaller numbers of labor means in power politics one tends to win.

What does have to do with aristocracy. An aristocrat in society is not tied to this dynamic, because the aristocrat has a fall back option: the law. An aristocrat does not have to worry about economic ups and downs because an aristocrat is backed by institutions that generally don't fail. For as long as an aristocrat buys out a government and sticks puppets there, nothing else matters. Then any sort of economic turbulence wouldn't matter at all.

This is how unemployment can be persistently high year after year and yet the people with the money and the power don't seem to care. You can rest assured a Mom and Pop employer or even a mid-sized company would care about large unemployment and bad economic events: if they fail they fail, and so would their fortunes too. These people have a stake in making sure America is healthy economically. But an aristocrat that sees his chosen enterprise as the goldmine needed to maintain a lifestyle of luxury would not care one bit, the mansions and cars will always be there no matter how many mistakes are made at the helm of the aristocrat's company.

You know I hear alot of economists talk about incentives. Dare I say a country that's become too aristocratic for its own good creates bad economic incentives? That they do not have to worry about business cycles or trade deficits or anything else? I might be speaking too much.

Anything that stands out as social commentary might be treason.

But I think putting leaders at the helm of the ship that drives the US who are not held to the same rules of success or failure is asking for disaster. They will destroy jobs or warp the labor market however much they feel like and get away with it, too. Aristocrats kill jobs. Period.

So why are we trying them in the court of law if the verdict was already made?

.... :(


Lastly, I've come across this neat article I found. Just wondering if anyone has read this before. Looks rather old. I've included the link here:

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html


:) It has nothing to say about royals other than how nefarious they are to liberty and freedom. >:D

One of the things that continually intrigues me about the Tea Party is that the group lacks any unifying anthem. Sounds ridiculous but let me explain.

Music in my opinion is the ultimate form of media that binds mankind. If you really think about it, aside primitive cave paint, a good set of bongos could be fashioned out of almost anything and then made into a harmony for the tribe. Music has been with us as a unifier for a long time.

When I was in boot camp we sung (shouted) cadences that were hilarious. Usually about romping and stomping on some rival platoon. But they were always energetic and generally amused me.

Anthems were there for the royal courts of Europe, for the Churches, and more recently anthems have been there to symbolize countries as a whole. Star Spangled Banner get anyone's attention?

But above all; music has been there for political movements. And this is why I suggest this for the Tea Party. People are generally moved by passion and emotion, and without a good anthem for the Tea Partiers to shout, there just won't be any sort of rallying cry for them. The French Revolutionaries had La Marsaillaise. And just recently, god help me, I listened to the first version of Internationale, the first anthem of the Soviet Union. What impressed me about that song was its tone of optimism, like all possibilities were open. Of course the irony was that history proved this to not be the case. But negatives and positives aside, if the Tea Party had an original, moving, passionate anthem of its own, I believe they could and would succeed in attracting people to their cause.

I've included some long forgotten anthems here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L-WuPy8l_0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h5M78YVN8M&feature=related

So where are the singing Tea Partiers?

If any of you reading this are Tea Partiers, feel free to message me and maybe we can knock up some tunes and lyrics. I think an enterprise like this will be good for America because, with the outstanding success of American Idol, we've turned a nation of singers and dancers,thus we have a large talent pool for this project. Imagine a good 21st century anthem! It would create jobs because it would encourage people to start writing lyrics, and that in turn might spawn an industry. And maybe it could be featured on American Idol. Or we could start American Tunes. Or something like that, I think its all worth a shot. Something like this could provide a huge stimulus in the form of positive attitudes.

Lastly, I've stumbled upon a very interesting document written in the 18th century. I read this a few times and wanted to share it with you all. It speaks volumes because a lot of what they talked about in this document seems to be a reoccurring theme today:

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

Hello all,

This article has been a long time in coming. But I say you all knew this was coming sooner or later, so I cast the first stone.

Whatever happened to the Aristocracy in the Red vs Blue political blood bath in America these days? We have Tea Parties, Coffee Parties, Christian Militias, even Socialists are back on college campuses. I have only two surprises in all of this: to date there has been no cheap knock off of a "Stamp Act Party 2.0." And disappointingly- nothing to symbolize the political will of the Aristocracy of the United States.

At the risk of making myself a target for political hacks, poli-sci professors, and the polarized, I will make a leap of faith in saying this about American Revolutionary history: it was also a revolution to do away with the feudalistic order of society. It was a revolution to liberate the possibilities of man. An ossified, stratified order of society where kings and aristocracy are the only ones with the opportunities to live life with possibilities is just NOT a society where non-aristocratic individuals have chances to make themselves the way they wish. Either you are born an aristocrat, or you aren't, and if you aren't, it means you get no sort of political privileges at all while a handful of aristocrats get tax breaks, control of government, and utterly no worries about their source of income and substance. But if you AREN'T that- part of the privileged class -well good luck buddy you're on your own.

Napoleon once said: There will always be kings, even if we don't call them that.

So now lets flash forward to the 21st century. Arguably, the United States, born of the first 'modern' political revolution: a revolution to free the possibilities of mankind, not a seizure of power to bottle up possibilities- has clearly lost its way. A digression is needed here: a good doctor listens to his patient. If the patient continually complains of the same malady, such as heart pains or pain in the kidneys, or so on, it might be a sign something is wrong.

Lets be good doctors. What is our patient complaining of today: loss of liberty or fear of loss of liberty, freedom is disappearing or nonexistent. 'You gotta know people to get jobs (whatever happen to simple merit?). Here is my favorite gripe I've heard countlessly: A political clique in Washington utterly disconnected with the sufferings of its own people. More big government spending as the people themselves don't trust government as much as they use to: what a paradox that is! They don't trust government yet the government goes on spending more. Slow and pathetic government response to hurricane Katrina- I believe Karl Rove himself said that this broke the 'bond' between Bush and the People. America is increasingly becoming a two-tiered society of haves or have nots. Either you are part of the politically connected or you aren't. Best of all: continual calls to 'get back to the essence of the Constitution'!

Alright people when are we going to start taking the complaints seriously. Gripes like this are age old. They are the gripes of people living in an aristocratic society. And if you need further proof of this, Frederick von Hayek's book The Road to Serfdom illuminates all. This is bar none one of the best books on what life in an aristocratic way of life is. Because Hayek makes it plain: aristocracy IS socialism. Aristocracy is Socialism for the rich. Get it? Aristocracy = Socialism for the rich. Welfare for the rich. Aristocracy is an order of society where the aristocrats can make the mistakes and not pay for them by equal justice under the law; while you and I, the commoner, pays for it. Hayek's book is not just about soviet socialism, or Nazi socialism, although the book was written during World War 2. The book is about socialism period. And Aristocracy IS socialism.

How did it come to this? How did it come that we fight each other and go nowhere while a narrow class of people still continues to prosper while we don't? Its called Aristocracy.

Aristocracy is at its heart all about perverting Equal Justice under the Law. You can be sure of this: when the laws are enforced by government, and government is co-opted by the Aristocrats, you will NOT get Equal laws under equal justice. You get a perversion of it.

So how does this apply today?

Here's how: millions of people losing their jobs and slipping into destitution, forgotten by the nobles of the land, while the same dolts go on T.V. and tell us how things are good and getting better. The media spinning optimistic tales of economic recovery even as the economy still hangs on a thread. The best yet: more regulation is needed. More watchdogs. I love this argument. So basically put the march of freedom into the hands of a few Wise Men. Men in the SEC that ALWAYS seem to be behind the beat. Come on. Wake up. If government is for the rich and by the rich in the name of Justice for a few and Injustice for the many then you can be sure more watchdogs will just MAKE IT EASIER for same sorts of people to slip by.

Yesterday I had a late night conversation with a recent friend and intellectual, and she was telling me- she being successful in business - that even SHE sees the paradoxes at work: either you are politically connected or you aren't and if you aren't god help you. So I state this for a reason, Aristocracy is not about money. Its not about profits earned fairly in the market. Its about hoodwinking people into serfdom under a delusion all will be well. That economic recoveries are just a few months away! Just keep waiting.

How did it come to this? I will tackle this in my next article in this series.

More big government spending as the people grow more distrustful of government? Accusations of the political clique being cut off from the sufferings of the masses? People not filling out census forms? How much longer does this need to go on before someone just plain says it. Aristocracy. Aristocracy. Aristocracy. Aristocracy. Aristocracy. Aristocracy. Aristocracy. Aristocracy. Aristocracy. Aristocracy.

I have at least broached this subject here. This is me doing my part. I am broaching this subject because I can rest assured the major media outlets won't. So, if you are reading this, talk about it with your friends, with your family, with your neighbors. Its our country too.

Please see this link:
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

Good morning.

In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. "Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!




http://www.scribd.com/doc/6674234/Citigroup-Oct-16-2005-Plutonomy-Report-Part-1
http://www.scribd.com/doc/6674234/Citigroup-Oct-16-2005-Plutonomy-Report-Part-1

The changing nature of change.


Sometimes I really love being alive in the 21st century. When I was a kid back in the 80s and 90s I would get dropped off at my aunt's, and we would watch Back to the Future, Terminator, and other movies that had something to say about 'The Future.' All the flying cars and self-drying clothes, human-intelligent machines, in addition to Star Trek: TNG pumped me with so much enthusiasm for the future that I actually threw nasty tantrums at the fact the future couldn't come fast enough.

At the dawn of 2010, not only has my enthusiasm been fulfilled several times over, I am experiencing what could only be called 'Future Shock.' I am living in an age where I can enjoy the fruits of a Harvard education without having to pay for it, by downloading Harvard Idea Cast onto my iPod touch. Listening to these podcasts not only has me feeling good about myself- I have a Harvard podcast in my pocket, fancy fancy - I am filled with renewed confidence in the intellectual caste of the USA.

Here why I like listening to these podcasts. They explain in great ways how change keeps on changing faster. If I had a dime for as many times as I've heard this from older management guru's I'd be able to pay their bonuses. What does this mean, change keeps changing faster? Or: We live in an age of great change. Heck, even Alan Greenspan titled his recent book "Age of Turbulence."

Let me see if I get this right. How exactly is change changing faster? I would assume, basic physics being what it is, that we would need some reference point to judge the acceleration of change, right? Hmmm. So change is changing faster in an economy that calls itself capitalist. Invariably I have found that the reference points they use to judge change is that which does not change- the past. Judging movement into the future by cross-referencing it with something that moves at absolute ZERO boggles my mind. Why should this age of iPods be anymore turbulent than the day Nero watched Rome burn while playing his fiddle?

Don't kid yourself. If you are reading this and you are between 18-100 at least ONCE in your life you have heard what a 'rapid age' of change we are living in. Think about how silly this sounds coming from people with salaries in the 6 figures, if not more. What exactly changed? Did iPods disrupt my life in the freemarket? Or even computers? Well here's why I think nothing's has changed.

-Anyone that has read a history book will find this commonality: people are always baffled by the future because they are too busy looking into the past. So no wonder change hits you like a brick wall if you are driving forward looking into the reverse mirror.
-Anyone that has read old books will also find this in common: nearly always the Elders and the people that aren't Elders (but want to be Elders)always say that 'things were simpler' in the past, there were more certainties to life, and its all gone now.
-If things were so great in the past where did Bolsheviks come from?
-If the baby boomers did things so well how come their children and grand children get poo-pooed so often as being morally lost?
-If the greatest generation was so great, why the rush to intern Japanese, shove indians on reservations, and so on? I would think that if things came to such a head that pure evils like Nazi Germany under Hitler that something went wrong in the leadership caste of the age to allow Hitler's stormtroopers to rise in the first place.

And no finger pointing please. Finger pointing can go on all day long. If we were to finger point each other for the problems of our age and past ages, we might as well just make it easier on ourselves and blame Adam and Eve for being gullible enough to eat fruit from a tree. It would be too much to ask for us as a civilization to "get over it, and move on," because someone somewhere has to make a quick buck either from book sales or a speech on a college campus wherein it is Thus Spake: Change is changing faster and the new generation is not up to the task.

Don't kid yourself, no matter how old or young you are, you've heard this before, things were better in the past and we've lost our way and the change we are living in is baffling. Better hold on tight or else the Earth will spin faster.

Change is not changing faster, the only thing that is going on is what we call experts, patriarchs, elders, however you want to call them because nearly every society has them, have completely lost touch with common sense. Thats it. Of course its easy to point to the immovable past and say it was better then than it is now and that for whatever reason the younger generation has lost its way morally. Plato's Republic said as much.

I would think we wouldn't be so anxious about the future if we stopped to consider that 100 years from now they'll say we had a simpler way of life that was easier to understand. What does that say, other than that NOTHING really changes with mankind except its institutions?

I am really disappointed that we have people in charge of positions of such critical importance, like Deans of Universities, top management consultants, CEOs, and so on, people with positions of the utmost importance, going around saying they are baffled by change.

If you are not one of these people I would be scared. Because what this says is that the people that are driving the bus of society have no idea where they are going because clearly they have no idea where they came from. And they cover up that insecurity by banking on the quick fix of pointing to change, like its some golden goose, to cover up simple incompetence and the fact they don't know history any better than the young they degrade over and over again.

If change is changing faster I can rationalize any sort of action or inaction without a shred common sense. People, be scared. The elites of this country do not have a shred of wisdom and we will pay for it.

Why?





Please leave some comments if you are reading this. I stand firm in the conviction that I am asking an honest question and if you are an honest reader you'd know that this pertains to you as well.

This entry comes from "Sweets", a recent college graduate from Dominican University who majored in History and American Studies because he loved America so much. Here's what he got in return.

“Hey, college boy! Go break down the load and get your shit in order.”
Ah, the familiar instructions coming from my fellow co-worker never cease to make me smile. He is an interesting if not peculiar character - a former white supremacist and high school dropout with serious anger control issues who gets to work with sharp knives all day. My angry friend compliments my other associates: the ex-convict turned amateur internet poker star, the movie set worker who one day decided to leave sunny California and live in Chicago, the culinary arts graduate who is addicted to “having a good time” and me.
You may be wondering how someone nicknamed college boy found himself working with such a strange group of people. Perhaps I could blame this Great Recession and it’s effects on the job market? It is true that businesses have cut their workforce substantially leaving millions underemployed or unemployed. YES! The recession feasted on my dreams and left me licking the plate for crumbs! But how do I explain the millions of my fellow citizens who have found great jobs during this recession? It must be something else.

Maybe the politicians deserve to be held responsible for my predicament? After all, it was Congress, the state legislatures, and the Presidents who failed to heed the warnings of various economic agencies and analysts. Who can forget NAFTA, the tax incentives, and other policies which made American-based businesses move overseas to increase their profit margins? Yah-boo sucks to you, Joe American! Pedro in Honduras or Li in Chinacan do it cheaper and with less regulation! Those criminals in Congress tied the noose, stood me up, kicked the barrel, and left me to suffocate on my ambitions. However, is it fair to blame a group of people with the combined IQ of a comatose amoeba for simply creating the opportunity but not acting on the opportunity?

At last! That leaves only those base bankers, brokers, and businesses diabolically dealing demise through derivatives and predatory lending. Why not place the blame at the feet of those directly responsible for our current economic disaster? Well, despite how vilified these bumbling blokes are portrayed in the media, it is not entirely their fault. Just like that respectable guy who visits Las Vegas only to leave 3 months later thousands of dollars in debt, married to a silicone leaking stripper named Fifi, and wearing a soiled suit, the people of Wall Street were living in the moment and needed someone to pull them back into reality. Too bad the government regulation agencies are monitored by our comatose amoeba better known as Congress.

So who is to blame for my seemingly eternal residence in the Hell known to the world as the service industry? Last week the answer hit me harder than a brick being thrown by a rather portly Bavarian fellow wearing lederhosen.
“College boy! What the hell are you doing? Your stupid ass needs to get in gear because you are just floating around like an idiot.”

Just like that my belligerent co-worker opened my eyes to who is most to blame - me. Yes, I do have a college degree. Yes, I did graduate in the upper third of my class. Yes, I have volunteer hours and community service. In fact, I have a lot of the desirable traits many employers seek including the uncanny ability to present information in front of large groups without wetting myself from fear. My biggest problem is that I was too occupied in trying to live life that I forgot to be flexible and take what comes along. I’ve been holding onto this idea of what the good life, what living a life, is supposed to be and I’ve been blind to the reality. Maybe all those annoying bills, the crazy ex-girlfriends, the diets, and the beer - oh God the beer - are indications that I missed the bus on life and am now doomed to be stuck in the tortuous service industry where my soul will slowly rot away.
I need to jumpstart my life with a new battery but where can I find it? Will I once again be too rigid in my quest to find that new spark that I will miss it when it is in front of my face?

“Dammit college boy, stop staring into space and steak that fish for that customer.”

-This is why we have a constitution, people!
-If you exercised your constitutionally guaranteed powers and rights, your lives as mainstreeters with soccer practices and swim meets wouldn't get so screwed as often.


But this would mean you'd have to stop watching Survivor and American Idol. But I digress. Why exactly should fighting for more power within the machine matter?
Here's why I believe, in my not so humble way, that caring about these things matters. It matters because it directly impacts how we all live our lives, because like it or not we're all interconnected in this world. What happens to one affects the others in unpredictable ways, and because of this it is wise not to ignore the world outside our walls.


It becomes a tad difficult to provide for family, health, and stability when the basis of your substance is not in some measurable way controlled by you, but rather, owned by people lacking the slightest congruence of social values. Like, for example, the need of people with limited incomes and means to save money and plan ahead. The yearning for social stability in part derives from the fact that most of us live lives that requires constant vigilance and rational use of our limited resources. By and large we don't have deep pockets to burn through.
Unlike those that control most of the wealth of this country. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/


The kicker to all of this is that the reason why we have constitutional rights, people, is for everyone to have a fair shake in the bargaining table of life in the United States. All citizens are citizens equally under the law, right? But I'm not getting the sense that this is how people are behaving.


What enrages me most is that, no matter where I go these days, the undercurrent of frustration and resentment is always there. People find themselves in straitened circumstances because of property taxes increasing, layoffs, or any other equally detrimental circumstances. Often times, a lot of these mishaps could have been avoided if the people had bothered to go to town hall meetings, had pressed their local governments. But I see no such organization.


So here’s what I’m doing. Look above you will see links to the Declaration of Independence. Try reading it. If you feel we are fighting the same battles today, then we need to stop living like children and do something. If you feel the same way as me, I leave the floor open to you in my blog

Its no wonder to me how the aristocratic gentry of America can lay off people by the millions for the gluttony their pals committed on the stock market. Middle class America has made itself a pawns with the ambigious values known as the middle class myth. As long this a social class as a whole doesn't act to empower itself or preserve its power, it will lose its position.

The combination of Soccer Moms and 9-5 routines aimed at preserving a total farce: the simple stable life with the house and kids. The middle class myth IS a farce when you stop ignoring divorce rates or inconvenient statistics on childhood poverty. Or the fact that social mobility in this country is no different than the banana republics of South America. If people truly believed in what they say they believe in, like a stable house with a family, how is it America has such an abysmally high divorce rate among other things?

This is how:

-Americans are conditioned to think that everything within their orbit is within their control. People are naturally afraid of larger forces they can't control.

-Since taking care of hearth, home, and fun time takes precedence over being involved, its child's play to erode the middle class's social power. If they get angry, lay them off, then say it was their fault. Do that for several decades they will get mindnumbed into thinking it was all unavoidable.

-The triumph of optimism over realism. If you just will it, it will happen.

Combine it all and its no wonder that, flood of college degrees aside, the whole middle class did nothing to fight the incremental repeal of Glass-Steagall in the 1990s. Did nothing during the lay off craze beginning in the 1980s. Did nothing to fight lawyers attempting to fight Sarbannes Oxaley. Most of all, we can count people to NEVER stand up to business elites b/c to fight business elites means to be a communist.

People gripped with the middle class myth cannot and will not separate honest business from corruption in the top ranks, will swallow what the boss says b/c no one do anything that will jeopardize their house and family.

Think about it this way. If standing up for yourself ever meant being thrown into the streets, to be pooped on by employers, the truth is that one side has way too much power than the other. Today in America doing the right thing and standing up to employers means to be fired, and biting unemployment.

It should have never gotten that way people!

Everyone in the middle class thought that someone among their ranks would do the 'right' thing can campaign for a fair share for years. As long as they all thought that, no one bothered to act, b/c they all thought someone else would. Thus no one did anything.

Upward mobility is dead because people with high positions and power generally DON'T like new comers, and when they all view the middle class with disdain, its probably not surprise that they would start denying opportunities en masse to everyone else under them. It'll always be dead while people continue to play by rules that don't work.

But please don't take my word for it, that its hard to maintain anything in this world unless you first aren't willing to learn the world, here is an author that hits on much of these themes entire. Please visit this link!

http://www.amazon.com/Bright-sided-Relentless-Promotion-Positive-Undermined/dp/0805087494

Irony comes in many shapes and guises. It was ironic that Galileo, a poor man with revolutionary views on the cosmos ended up vilified by elites who in their heyday claimed to be open to “intellectual” debate. It is ironic that we live in a globalizing age where a bomb that goes off in Cairo effects stock markets in a few seconds, yet most of us in our sadly gated communities couldn’t name our neighbors. It is also ironic in my view that blaming students for being unmotivated intellectually tends to come from faculty and administrators, in response as to why colleges have become dull intellectual places with lackluster international performance records.

So here is my view. Stop blaming the students so uncritically, and let’s start blaming the faculty. And let’s not set up a bogeyman of school boards that don’t seem to care, or City treasurers with a miserly grip on the coffers. Now here is how I ground this shift in finger pointing.

Firstly, it’s the faculty who set the curricula. It’s the faculty that develop their study guides, their tests, and run their classrooms. It’s the faculty that are largely control the monopoly on information in the classroom; after all, it’s none other than the professor that gives the A or the F. So let’s use common sense: it’s the faculty that deem ideas rational or not, correct or not, while they have their golden moments in the classroom. For all these reasons and more, I’m going to abandon the coquettishly fashionable view that sees the student as the captain of the college seaship. In my new view, it’s really the faculty that are captains of the vessel.

This is not an indictment against grades or homework. This is an indictment against those that find unmotivated students filling the classrooms. Faculty are stewards of the boat. If the students are unmotivated to learn, unmotivated intellectually, in my perspective, this results from faculty who are also equally unmotivated intellectually.

Now all finger pointing is only critical of me to say. We live in an era facing incredible economic pressures. We have a recession, a two-front war, a sliding value of the dollar, rising economic giants India and China, collapsing populations in the West and booming populations in the East. Perhaps students aren’t motivated intellectually nowadays because what’s being said in the classroom does not link the ideas on the chalkboard to the hard reality outside. It’s a question of priorities- while professors keep their paychecks and tenured status; students are being grinded through a mill that constantly reminds them of how unmotivated they all are.

If faculty had to face the same grim realities of a sunken labor market that would be one thing. However in my surmise, this is not true. If this were really true, then how it is time and again I meet students so completely oblivious; trying to live up to the stereotypical uncouth, ‘I don’t know why I’m here’ mystique of the college experience. I once blamed the students 100% for this, but not now. This happens because faculty, with their exalted ivory tower thrones, continually feed misinformation about what awaits students when they leave. “Study what you want, focus on what you enjoy,” or “look at the income earnings of college degrees overtime,” etc. A lot of times these statistics are so ambiguous it’s hard to directly refute, and why would we? It would be a tad unsettling to go to college and yet know the worth of your degree was questionable at best.

What this chipper viewpoint does is alter reality. See, great winners, like chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, good football teams, etc, grow in performance from training and studying victories AND failures, from knowing how they are weak and why. Its not a question of pessimism; its common sense. How often are we treated to statistics of college graduates stuck at Starbucks or McDonald’s for five years straight? Of MBAs living hand to mouth in a labor market that simply hasn’t provided the jobs? If I saw faculty alerting students to the bad as well as the good, this article would be unnecessary.

However I don’t see that happening and in such dark times it’s distressing. What is happening in effect is the mill is running young minds in on highly warped yet overly optimistic views on the economic realities facing them after graduation. This is a betrayal of a whole generation at work. So yes it is a question of priorities: do we ruffle the feathers of a Ph.d that hasn’t seen the unemployment lines stretching, or do we finally let go of this mystique of college as being a bastion where the unkempt looking and oblivious can rest assured great times are always just around the corner? It’s our youth vs. injured pride. There should be no question about which priority gets put first.

Now its only polite to offer a solution since I pointed blame. Those students and faculty that would agree with me how utterly idiotic it is to always and only point to the good and great and not the bad and ugly about college and its aftermaths need to meet together. We need to meet together and start a new counter movement in our school so that we can really strive for the best. Instead of sweeping all this under the rug and then blaming the students for ignorance and lethargy, let’s actually TRY to think innovatively for once to save this generation from being chewed up in the grist mill of a nearly bottomless recession economy.

Why this Recovery is a Recession

Fact: Unemployment rate rises to 9.8 percent as 263,000 jobs are cut

-AP News

Fact: -5.3% change in real annual earnings 2000-2008 for full time worker males with a

Bachelors (18-24), and -1.2% change for females with a bachelors (18-24)

-Michael Mandel: “Yet More on Young College Grads” Businessweek

Fact: Newsweek’s August 3rd cover featured a balloon with the lettering “The Recession is Over! But good luck surviving the recovery!” Then not to skip a beat, the illustrious Harvard Business Review (even the ink on its pages wreaks of prestige) takes the cake with an article in its July/August 2009 edition titled: “Constant Change: Leadership in a Permanent Crisis.” Without even bothering to tackle the thorny depths of what permanent change really means one thing is certain-this is no recovery with any sort of confidence with the people that really matter: Main Street America.
Main Street America is America. This is not a matter of speculation, it is an indefensible fact of what a country is-the people, not the territory. People make the country. When America feels no confidence in its economic direction, one can only wonder when people will stop giving authorities the benefit of the doubt simply because they have authority. In today’s case the nation is obviously still hurting too badly to have any sort of confidence in its economic future. Go to the sort of ‘job fairs’ they have in Chicago these days if you really doubt this.

Others may argue that this is just a pessimistic message and I counter that it is not. Stating the obvious is not pessimistic. What is lacking now is real legitimacy. Authorities that are continually optimistic while the country thinks otherwise do not state reality. When real earnings for male college grads have slipped for the whole decade, among rising unemployment and other facts, the legitimacy behind the data that Newsweek and other major news outlets have used: a rising stock market, do not hold legitimacy because the numbers do not reflect the reality for Main Street America.
The Stock Market fell precisely because the proper fundamentals behind the numbers-business/finance fundamentals-were not practiced. Banks that give out loans to customers that cannot repay their loans are not practicing fundamentals. Fortune 500 companies that regularly practice accounting fraud are simply not practicing fundamentals. So what must be argued is that, while the Stock Market might show improvement because of proper fundamentals, it also might not. This is not a contradiction when the Stock Market is understood for what it is instead of what Wall Street wants it to be. The Stock Market is there for the public trading of corporate stock (hence stock market, a market for stocks). The scrolling stock numbers are just indexed summaries of trading. Remember what Enron taught us in the 1990s, that the valuations behind a company’s stock may reflect fraud or simple hubris.

This is not to say that American business is wholly bad, American business is the reason why America owes its high living standards. However, Corporate America since the 1980s onwards has had long history of largesse and corruption. If you need any proof of that observe the psychological biography of Corporate Elitism in the book Den of Thieves, by James Stewart or The Smartest Guys in the Room, by Bethany McLean. That one bank, corporation, or accounting firm after another for the last twenty years has been indicted or bankrupted by corrupt men is not surprising. It happens when Main Street America does not exercise rational scrutiny in the lords of the land: Main Street’s employers. Until we exercise some scrutiny into the logical grounds of how authority figures declare a recovery when the rest of us feel stuck in a recession, we will continue to have recessions that are recoveries.

It's because they think we're stupid, people.

Because when we're stupid, officials start getting awards for doing their jobs. Ben Bernanke, the Harvard-educated scholar of the Great Depression, who did not see this 'Recession' coming, suddenly received the Time Person of the Year Award, for doing his job. Ostensibly, so goes Time's reasoning in a nutshell, Bernanke deserves the award because were it not for his decisive actions in 2009 in coordinating with other banking officials in the U.S. and around the world, the Recession would have certainly become a Depression.

But never mind the logic of the situation. The hard truth of men like Ben Bernanke is that, mathematics formulas aside, they dabble and delve in Social Sciences, not the Natural Sciences. You just can't predict or prove any roughshod formula, dictate, theory or creed in Social Science precisely because of the fact that these kinds of things aren't repeatable; the circumstances that created them constantly change.

What follows is this: Ben Bernanke’s occupation, while a hard one, is by no means an occupation with reputable success or failure benchmarks. It's easier to be an Einstein in physics than it is to be an Max Weber in sociology. We simply have no idea whether or not Ben Bernanke’s actions merit such an award. That’s the hard life of the field he chose to take up. His job as Fed Chairman is to enact stable monetary policy. If the economy rebounds because of his actions as Fed Chairman, then he is simply doing his job as Fed Chairman. The Federal Reserve itself is there to help guide and enact monetary policy, after all.

If Ben Bernanke coordinates with other central bankers in other countries, people, it might be a sign he’s just doing his job, because he understands that the globalized nature of the economy these days makes international coordination essential. Thus, Time has given the man an award for just doing his job, and logically we will never know if his actions really merit acknowledgement or not.

Giving people awards for simply doing their jobs is a bad precedent. It's enough for some people to get Nobel Peace prizes. But enough is enough. Stop giving people praise for doing their jobs.

And the only reason it happened was because they (the powers that bestow awards) seem to think we (people without the power to bestow awards) are too dumb to recognize this obvious fact and voice the ridiculousness of it.