"Fortunate" to just have a job

According to Randstad’s 2009 World of Work survey, 83% of workers surveyed feel fortunate to still have a job.

Nothing could be better testament to the success of the ReThuglican program. In one short generation we've gone from being a country of empowered, unionized workers, to being a country of cowering sheep people ... groveling sheeple who are grateful to their corporate masters for keeping them around as others get the axe.

Add crushing personal debt and destroyed home values, and you've got a recipe for serfdom.

I'm sure the Karl Roves of the world snort and smirk every time they hear some tea-bagger parrot the party talking point that health insurance reform is the real attack on our freedom.

Bush union busting ... busted?

Govexec.com reports that leaders of some of the largest federal employee unions are set to aggressively pursue a broad set of legislative priorities when Congress returns on Tuesday.

One of the first issues on the horizon is the fate of the Defense Department's much-hated National Security Personnel System (NSPS).

A panel appointed by the Obama administration to examine NSPS has recommended that NSPS be substantially reformed. However, both the House and Senate versions of the 2010 Defense authorization bill contain unreconciled provisions that would repeal NSPS unless DoD makes a convincing case for retaining it within a year.

Matt Biggs, legislative director for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, said his members felt that repealing NSPS was a necessary first step if the administration wants to pursue broader personnel reform. "Our delegates at the convention, even the ones who are not federal employees, [believe] the whole intention of NSPS was to bust unions and dismantle the federal civil service," he said. "They gave us our marching orders.... Anything they want to do, if it's any way related to NSPS, it's going to be toxic, it's not going to have employee buy-in."

Is living on Earth ... killing us?

Maureen Cavanaugh and Natalie Walsh on NPR's These Days have posted up the transcript of their conversation with paleontologist Peter Ward.

Ward's new book, The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?, has a very different take on nature and extinction.

Named for Medea, the subject of a Greek myth telling of a pitiless and vengeful woman who killed her own sons, Ward's book argues that Mother Nature is not the benign loving Gaia of many tree huggers. Rather, Ward argues that Nature is particularly good at rubbing out life -- as it has in five major extinctions (that we know of).

Where Ward finds common cause with environmentalists is in his belief that our future depends on our doing something. But rather than doing something to counter man's bad acts, Ward focuses on the need to engineer our way around Nature's inclination to extinguish us.

Heady stuff.

In that same vein, I also highly recommend The next ten thousand years;: A vision of man's future in the universe by Adrian Berry.

Nazis

The jerks -- e.g., self-styled funnyman Glenn Beck -- who liken health insurance reformers to Nazis are truly despicable.

On the other hand, evidence continues to mount that the Bushites were more like Nazis than anything we've seen since 1945.

For instance, now comes forward a medical ethics group which says that CIA physicians monitoring 'enhanced interrogation techniques', and studying their effectiveness, was tantamount to unlawful human experimentation a la Dr. Josef Mengele and his cronies.

Nice work, Bushie! You continue to embarrass the shit out of us all long after you caused your party's electoral drubbing in 2008.

Ted Kennedy, "admitted Liberal"

Yup ... that's what Renee Montagne said on the NPR this morning.

Let me go on record again as being an "admitted Liberal" myself.

And f*ck you, Renee and NPR.

Rest in peace, Ted.

Obama buckles like a belt

From NPR:

Bowing to Republican pressure and an uneasy public (sic), President Obama's administration signaled Sunday it is ready to abandon the idea of giving Americans the option of government-run insurance as part of a new health care system. (more)

Shocked? Not me. Max Baucus had quit this fight ... before it even started.

UPDATE: Congress Daily says, not so fast...

The vacation gap

According to a story this morning on NPR Morning Edition, men who take vacations tend to live longer.

The Washington Post Leadership blog seconds the idea that wise time management combined with regular vacations are a sign of good leadership.

Unfortunately, the U.S. is the only developed country where paid vacations are not a right protected by law.

Aw yeah ... freedom!

Personnel chief calls for better attitude toward civil servants

Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry called for a dramatic shift in attitude toward federal workers during a conference in Washington on Monday, saying it was "a matter of necessity" in order to attract the necessary resources and personnel to government.

Biden seat "caretaker" Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) is also speaking up for civil servants. "It's bothered me for the last almost 30 years that people just feel it's perfectly okay to denigrate federal employees," Kaufman said yesterday. "It really, really bothers me, because they do make incredible sacrifices."

And from the Gov.exec comments:

Amen! In my experience with three different agencies, most of the mid-level managers I've dealt with had, whether consciously or not, embraced Ronald Reagan's accusation that they were the problem, not the solution. As a result, they were apologetic about working for the federal government. In interactions with private industry, they almost always assumed the private interest was right, and that the government's position was wrong. The personnel problems we now have are, I believe, largely a result of the outrageous abuse of civil servants that began in earnest on January 20, 1981.

The Era of Gigantic Arseholes

If you're looking for a textbook example of how to be a dangerously ineffective leader, look no further than Michael Lewis' article, "The Man Who Crashed the World," in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

It's the story of Joseph Cassano, the jackass who ran AIG Financial Products from the end of 2001 to 2008. Lewis describes the "reign of terror" of this "cartoon despot" that ended up crashing AIG ... and maybe the entire economy.

In his govexec blog, Scott Eblin condenses the thread:

What most people probably don't realize is that AIG Financial Products began in 1987 and, for 15 years, managed risk in a reasonable way by insuring the debt of blue chip firms like IBM and GE. Under Cassano, AIG FP moved into insuring subprime mortgages to the point where those mortgages represented 95% of the company's portfolio. To simplify a complex story, people below Cassano started to see huge impending problems with this but could not get him to listen to them.

This was the pattern that had been established by Cassano over his years heading the unit. His game was to bully, scream and intimidate his staff into submission and then make sure they were very well compensated to incentivize them to put up with him. Here's one paragraph from Lewis' article in which people who worked for Cassano explained what it was like to work for him:

"The culture changed," says a third. "The fear level was so high that when we had these morning meetings you presented what you did not to upset him. And if you were critical of the organization, all hell would break loose." Says a fourth, "Joe always said, 'This is my company. You work for my company.' He'd see you with a bottle of water. He'd come over and say, 'That's my water.' Lunch was free, but Joe always made you feel he had bought it." And a fifth: "Under Joe the debate and discussion that was common under Tom [Savage] ceased. I would say what I'm saying to you. But with Joe over my shoulder as the audience." A sixth: "The way you dealt with Joe was to start everything by saying, 'You're right, Joe.'"

Just in this one excerpt we have a succinct list of what insecure, lousy leaders need to do if they want to destroy their teams and their organizations:

• Intimidate people
• Yell at them
• Encourage them to walk on eggshells with you
• Conflate your ego and the organization
• Discourage dissent
• Make money or job security the only incentive to stay

Hmm. So this isn't about Shrub and Dick Cheney?

UPDATE: This interview in the Times with David C. Novak, chairman, chief executive and president of Yum Brands, gives some hope that all American industry isn't run by giant arseholes. Monet quotes include:

The best leaders I’ve known really take an active interest in a person. And once that person demonstrates they have skill and capability, they try to help them achieve their potential. That’s always been my thinking about management. If you have someone who’s smart, talented, aggressive and wants to learn, then your job is to help them become all they can be.

I think the best leaders are really pattern thinkers. They want to get better. They’re avid learners. They soak up everything they can possibly soak up so that they can become the best possible leader they can be. And then they share that with others.

What I think a great leader does, a great coach does, is understand what kind of talent you have and then you help people leverage that talent so that people can achieve what they never thought they were capable of. The only way you can do that is to care about the people who work for you. No one’s going to care about you unless you care about them. But if you care about someone, genuinely, then they’re going to care about you because you’re making a commitment and an investment in them.

You show you care by really taking an active interest in the people working for you, and you care enough to give them direct feedback. People are starved for direct feedback. People want to hear how they can do better. Too many leaders don’t provide that feedback. So if you take an active interest in someone, you take an active interest in sharing with them your perspective on what they can do to improve.

Sadly, most of the Federal managers -- leaders, if you will -- I've worked for had a very different view of "leadership." It could be boiled down to, "My way or the highway." And if someone didn't march lockstep, or if they had different kinds of talents than the mainstream workers in the organization? The "leader's" main goal was to knock down that person's square edges so they'd fit in a round hole -- or else make that worker's life utterly miserable.

Federal real property mismanagement

Elizabeth Newell writes in Government Executive magazine that Federal agencies are "making strides in management of real property." Nevertheless, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has told lawmakers that the challenges that led real property management to be placed on GAO's high-risk list persist, and that the new administration must ensure continued progress.

Having worked in three agencies managing Federal real property, I have to say this is utter baloney. If 10 of 15 agencies have scored a "green" rating, it's only because they know how to play the reporting game. I'm sure these 10 agencies have indeed "fixed" the specific issues identified by earlier GAO critiques. But on a practical level, nothing has really been fixed.

The main problem I found during my Federal real estate career was that the vast majority of Federal realty specialists are under-trained, under-qualified, and poorly led. Many were miserable failures as private sector Realtors. But they met the minimum experience criteria for low-level Federal realty service. Then they just showed up long enough to gain seniority.

Some agencies like DoD have made efforts to address this problem through mandatory credentialing such as under the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA). But the basic education and training requirements of DAWIA were too little and too late. Indeed, in my experience the Navy and Army are among the very worst examples of realty incompetence. The old dogs currently mismanaging the government's valuable assets were simply grandfathered in.

In my opinion, real reform will require at least two major changes:

1. No one should be managing Federal real property without at least a bachelor's degree in a business-related major (and preferably with a JD or MBA); and

2. The entire work class needs to be rebranded. The "realty" brand has been too thoroughly discredited through years of public exposure to private sector Realtors whose primary skill sets seem to include a lot of BS, the ability to drive and talk at the same time, the ability to bake open-house cookies ... and some degree of ability to fill in blanks on pre-printed forms. As a result, I think most agencies with realty functions tend to view their realty practitioners as being minimally qualified. That part may be true enough. But then these agencies extrapolate from the low quality of their realty specialists to behave as though real estate management were minimally important to the agency's "true" mission. Which is like saying that the quality and value of a family's home is minimally important to the success of the family, no?

A re-branding from "Realty Specialist" to something like "Capital Asset Manager" or "Infrastructure Specialist" -- together with aforementioned raising of the bar qualifications-wise -- might just cause Federal managers to rethink the importance of this work. At least it would be a start.


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Palin: Retreating Or Just Reloading?

That's the question Ron Elving asks on his NPR blog. Personally, I agree with Josh Marshall:

It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Either Palin is resigning ahead of some titanic scandal (which should emerge in short order if it exists) or her resignation was triggered by an even more extreme mental instability than we'd previously suspected.

I'm even more disgusted with John McCain for having asked us to put this lunatic a heartbeat away from the presidency. But what irks me even more is Scott Slimin' Simon and his little FauxNews pal, Juan Williams, trying to spin this debacle to Palin's benefit on this morning's Saturday Edition.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'll not donate a dime to NPR or its affiliates until they're fully rid of wankers like Simon, Williams, and the Sunday morning war whore.


UPDATE: Still on NPR, there's also this.

Glenn Greenwald was on NPR yesterday to talk about their policy of refusing to call torture by its proper name, and while he was waiting to go on he listened to NPR's ombudsman explaining their policy:

She also said — when the host asked about the recent example I cited of NPR's calling what was done to a reporter in Gambia "torture" (at the 20:20 mark) — that NPR will use the word "torture" to describe what other governments do because they do it merely to sadistically inflict pain on people while the U.S. did it for a noble reason: to obtain information about Terrorist attacks. That's really what she said: that when the U.S. did it (as opposed to Evil countries), it was for a good reason.

For the record, here's what she actually said about NPR's piece on Gambia:

In that case, these were strictly tactics to torture him, to punish him, versus in the United States, and the way that it's used, these are tactics used to get information. The Gambian journalist was in jail for his beliefs.

So ... according to "liberal" NPR, when we abuse prisoners for our reasons, it's not torture.

Fucking wankers.

NPS v. Gollyfornia

Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer, reports that California could lose millions of dollars in federal grants and the National Park Service could seize land in six parks, including Angel Island, if the state goes through with a proposal to close 219 state parks.

My new hero, Jon Jarvis, is a regional director of the National Park Service. Jarvis sent a letter to Schwarzenegger on June 8 warning him that the federal government could take back closed parks that were given to California under the Federal Lands and Parks Program.

I'm sure Mr. Jarvis is going to become yet another target for Uber-Right thugs bemoaning abusive, power-mad Feds. But this is, By God, the federal government I thought I hired on with back in the day. Instead, I ended up working for a succession of hand-wringing whimps, self-serving petty tyrants, and misguided simps who thought their main job was to toady up to industry and business interests.

Hopefully, this bold action marks a fundamental shift in the way the federal government views itself. These lands, after all, belonged in common to all the people of the United States. If the RePuglicans in Gollyfornia aren't willing to live up to the bargain they made when they accepted these prime park lands, then they should gracefully accept the consequences.

Student Loan Relief ... Finally

Alyssa Rosenberg in govexec.com reports that students and young professionals interested in public service careers just got a graduation gift from Congress and the federal government on Wednesday. On July 1, a new law went into effect that will help keep payments on some student loans affordable, and provide dramatic loan forgiveness to students who commit to 10 years of public service.

"When I was going to school, my fear wasn't how I was going to pay student loans off, it was, 'How do I get a student loan?'" said Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry, during a press conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "What we've done to this generation is in many ways worse ...We've saddled you, we've put an albatross around your neck that weighs you down for the whole beginning of your career."

The 2007 College Cost Reduction Act does two things. First, it establishes the income-based repayment program, which allows all students with qualifying loans to stretch their repayment period up to 25 years. If they are earning 150 percent of the poverty level or below, they do not have to make payments on their loans. If they are making more, their loan payments are capped at 15 percent of what they earn above 150 percent of the poverty level.

Only loans made to students (not their parents) are eligible for income-based repayment. Students can pay off Stafford, Grad Plus and Perkins loans that have been consolidated into a guaranteed federal loan through the program. But private loans, or loans that are not guaranteed by the federal government, are not eligible.

The second provision -- the public service loan forgiveness option, authored by Rep. John Sarbanes, D-Md. -- provides additional assistance to students who enter government or nonprofit jobs. If they work in public service, student loans they have not paid off after 10 years will be forgiven in their entirety.

Sarbanes on Wednesday said careers at all levels of government and at 501(c)(3) nonprofits could qualify students for loan forgiveness, citing everything from emergency management to work in public libraries. In a nod to younger workers' career mobility, he also emphasized that the 10 qualifying years of service don't have to be continuous: Employees can move between the public and private sectors, and qualify for loan forgiveness at the end of 10 total years of service.

One caveat is that employees must have made at least 120 monthly payments on the loan while in a qualifying job for their remaining debt to be erased. Payments made on or after Oct. 1, 2007, count toward the 120 minimum.

"At a time when our president ... has issued this call to service across the country, recognizing that we have significant shortages in many parts of our government workforce and we need talented people, recognizing that nonprofits can't afford to pay people more to keep them in that job, this is perfectly timed," Sarbanes said.

Sarbanes also said he hoped the program would provide an incentive for educational institutions and states to consider innovative loan forgiveness programs to entice students into public service careers.

Johns Hopkins University President Ronald Daniels praised Sarbanes for his work on the loan forgiveness option, and introduced several graduates of Hopkins' college and School of Advanced International Studies who are considering public service careers. SAIS graduate Robert Miller said his education had left him with $100,000 in student loans, $25,000 more than he'd made in five years as a Peace Corps volunteer and a legislative aide on Capitol Hill. And Sonia Starker, a recent graduate of the university, said loan forgiveness could be transformative, turning "what could be short acts of service into lifelong endeavors."