The real “welfare scum”

Also originally published on Examiner.com--GF

 

No, it’s not the clients, my fellow welfare recipients—for I’ve been eligible for welfare before, and, even though now steadily employed, may still be eligible for some continued welfare benefits such as limited Medicaid assistance.  No, the real “welfare scum” are the officious, frequently rude, case workers and their superiors I’ve encountered regularly in Indiana’s welfare system: whether in the centralized Family and Social Services (FSSA) bureaucracy I deal with by phone that’s located in Marion, Indiana; or the decentralized bureaucracy I have the misfortune to encounter in the offices and on the phone of FSSA sub-agency Department of Family Resources (DFR) in Marion County (which encompasses the whole of where I live, Indianapolis).

 

These “welfare scum” have, because of my need for welfare in the not-so-long-ago past, my present uncertain status, and my vulnerability when such benefits were denied, have created very real personal problems for me.  Problems, I suspect, not limited to me alone, but encountered by others denied benefits; but because of my education (university degree plus training as a paralegal), I was (and am) able to navigate through and overcome the frequently cumbersome and opaque appeals process when benefits have been wrongly denied.  In this way, I suspect, I’m quite unlike a very sizeable number of welfare clients and applicants turned down, who were simply too discouraged by the complexity of the process to even file an appeal (and part and parcel of the complexity is the difficulty in finding a pro bono lawyer, whether through overworked, understaffed, Legal Services or elsewhere). 

 

But welfare benefits have been wrongly denied me three times to date, early February, 2014; and as proof of their being wrongly denied, I adduce that, upon appeal for each and every time benefits were denied me up to the present, a total of three times, I won the appeal and had the benefits restored.  That’s a 100% success rate for me on appeal!

 

But, let me add, in two of the appeals my benefits weren’t restored until six months after the appellate hearing—that’s typically how long it takes for a ruling to be rendered.  In another case, it took well over a year:  a year just to get an initial hearing, then another three months waiting for the ruling.  But this is what’s typical—and just as typical is the long wait, usually at least a calendar month, from the time of filing the appeal till the actual scheduling of a hearing.  Meanwhile, while on appeal benefits are usually not continued, which in the case of food stamps, can be especially devastating.  Although once my appeal was won I did get all my back food stamps—often as much as $1,200 worth in one lump sum—it also meant I didn’t have them to contribute to my food budget for the prior six months, which, not surprisingly, was a major hardship.  After all, one has to eat in the here and now; one can’t postpone it for six months!

 

Obviously, then, the concept of “welfare scum” needs to be expanded to embrace not just the individual case workers and their supervisors, but the whole working process, the whole paraphernalia, of the FSSA and DFR, the whole operation of the system of wrongdoing from the decisions of the individual case worker all the way up to the directors of the system who put this onerous process in place.  A system that works much to the detriment of those who actually do qualify for welfare benefits, the successful first-time applicants and clients in the first place—whom the system makes implicitly “undeserving chiselers” who have to prove and continually re-prove their worthiness.  Unlike the real welfare chiselers, the corporate beneficiaries of government largess, from the granting of a no-bid contract to Haliburton for rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq to the Wall Street firms who benefitted from the George W. Bush/Barack Obama bailout, to the continued subsidies for the behemoth oil companies, corporate agriculture, and myriad other private firms who get Uncle Sugar to provide them with public assistance for growing their profit margins!

 

A vivid illustration of how this works in practice is given by my exchange on the socialist New Politics website with Barry Finger, Managing Editor of the New Politics hard-copy journal, and himself a retired employee with the Social Security Administration—where he himself knew, had to deal with, his fellow employees who were themselves “welfare scum” gatekeepers “protecting” Social Security disability payments from the alleged “undeserving.” 

 

As for the particulars of my experiences with the FSSA/DFR, I relate below the details of the three times I had been wrongly denied benefits.   The first case, after waiting a year for the appellate hearing, the appellate judge herself couldn’t see any justifiable reason why I had been initially been denied benefits, period.  In the second and third, which are related in my comments to Barry Finger, I had been denied benefits because the case worker who had taken my pay stubs documenting work earnings for the past 30 days used the total amount earned for the year (some four months) as the alleged amount of my monthly earnings, thus not only overstating my monthly income by $2,000 per months, but also attributing to me an annual income of $42,000—which would make anyone wonder why I had applied for welfare in the first place!  The third was an even more wretched farce, where I had been denied benefits because I was allegedly in England going to school, all of which happened because a hacker got into my address book and sent out a spurious e-mail stating I was stranded in England, please send money, and my case worker e-mailed back the allegedly “stranded” me, “When are you coming back?” which is incredible in itself; but then when the allegedly “stranded” me e-mailed back that I was in school (which, of course, directly contradicts my being stranded!), I was denied benefits for allegedly not being an Indiana resident—all of which was related with an absolutely straight face at my appeals hearing by the FSSA/DFR representative!  (I wonder if the FSSA/DFR representative had any second thoughts whatsoever when I showed up in person at the hearing with a witness who could testify that I was indeed living in Indiana, and had been—when, instead, I was “supposed” to be in school studying in England!)

 

But Barry Finger wrote a most appreciative reply to my relating of the above, a reply informed by his own experience with the Social Security Administration gatekeepers he himself encountered in his 32 years as a federal employee there.  My comment and his reply are here:  http://newpol.org/content/public-sector-workers-and-crisis#comment-151691. A very enlightening exchange indeed on how the system works, which I urge all to access, read thoroughly.

 

Several commentators on the left have written in response to my welfare tales of woe that it is not the case workers at the bottom of the welfare agency feeding chain who are responsible for the malfunctions of the system, and that, ideally, there needs to be an alliance between the welfare clients and the lower-level welfare agency workers themselves against the supervisors and those who make welfare eligibility policy, the top administrators, political appointees at the very top, and the politicians who put the welfare system and its workings in place in the first place. 

 

While all of this would be very nice, would, perhaps, even come about in an ideal world, in practice this works against itself to the detriment not only of the workers, but more crucially, of the clients (and new applicant potential clients) themselves.  For the workings and setup of this very system of welfare “assistance” ends up directly pitting the clients and applicants against the case workers—for they are the first tier of gatekeepers designed to keep clients and applicants out, and not let them in.  First, because the case workers themselves often see themselves as guardians of the system’s integrity against the automatically-assumed “chiselers” who apply for welfare in the first place—and case workers who are pro-client, who fight for the rights of the clients against the system, usually burn out or are dismissed, so they don’t normally last long in the system, period!  Such persons simply aren’t congenial to bureaucratic survival, so don’t usually survive—unless they manage, somehow, to keep themselves low-profile.  Second, the very way the system is set up, it’s the case worker him/herself who makes the initial decision to deny benefits, with this initial decision almost automatically upheld, given the stamp of approval, all the way up the supervisory pipeline.  So, when a welfare client appeals an adverse decision, the first thing that has to be appealed is the case worker’s initial decision, with the client (or his/her lawyer or other representative) arguing before the administrative judge why this was wrong; while the welfare system representative usually defends the initial decision, or rarely, admits that mistakes were made, which will usually only remand the matter back into the system for reconsideration.

 

Currently I have another appeal coming up for a hearing in mid-February, resulting from an officious case manager who got angry and arbitrarily cut off my initial interview to re-determine eligibility, and concurrent with that, an adverse decision rendered because I didn’t give my current IRS filing status—which I wasn’t asked to provide in the first place!  Any resemblances to my actual experiences and the ordeal of protagonist Joseph K. in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial only demonstrates that Kafka was depicting actual reality, not nightmarish surreal fantasy!

 

Last, and I really must mention this, as I’ve directly experienced this with Marion County DFR, is that jobs there are seeming sinecures for African American employment from the receptionist on up, and added onto the usual rudeness clients face when dealing with the FSSA/DFR is the attitude of far too many of these African American Marion County DFR employees toward white clients and applicants:  they are looked upon as having personally owned their great-great-great grandmother as a slave!  This may be due primarily to Indiana social backwardness, but it is something I’ve personally encountered.  (Self-disclosure:  I am white racially, though I do try vigorously to manifest a color-blind attitude; and have never actually been accused of racism by any African American, though I have by certain whites of the political left.)

 

Thus my portrait of the real individual and social “welfare scum” as I have directly, unfortunately, encountered such in Indiana.

Work, fatigue, frustration, and—finally!—creativity again

Also originally published on Examiner.com--GF

 

Exhaustion from my previous long-term job at Amazon.com essentially killed my creativity and desire to write the first few months of 2014, from January into early April, when I lost that job.  I was too busy fighting work fatigue to do much of anything else—my life had essentially reduced itself to work, sleep, eat, recover from work on my days off, and then work again.  The few days I had off I mostly just lay around inert.  A real creativity-killer indeed, and also a real killer of desire to do anything but loll around, letting the fatigue and muscle soreness heal itself before I returned to work again.

 

Indiana itself is a killer as well of creativity and the urge to write.  The tsunami wave of Indiana’s hidebound mediocrity overwhelms even the talented and creative one, drowns that person literally body and soul, chokes off the creative urge as it chokes off the better part of one’s personality and talent.  It so overwhelms that the simple urge to create and write is no longer there, that all desire to write and create now becomes totally submerged.

 

That was especially so in my case those prior four months, those months where, even at age 67, I was financially forced to hold down a physically exhausting full-time job at the Amazon.com warehouse in Whitestown, Indiana.  (On which I’ve written before for examiner.com, having previously worked for Amazon at Whitestown, and at another Amazon warehouse in Central Indiana; see George Fish, “Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work,” January 20, 2013; this article will be subsequently re-posted on this blog.)  My most recent job at Amazon as an order picker required me to walk 10-15 miles each 10-hour shift four days in a row.  It’s a job that pushes one physically to the limit, especially for an older worker such as myself, as it would severely challenge the physical capabilities of even a twentysomething, and makes each shift worked the equivalent of an Army boot camp hike, or several strenuous gym workouts done back-to-back.  But in addition to just the demands put on the body by all that walking is the demanding quota system of orders to be picked in an hour, an exacting computer-determined and computer-monitored system that makes the picker but an appendage to the order-processing machine, with every motion, every order picked, every order bundle placed on the conveyor belt, rigidly calibrated and monitored down to fractions of a second. 

 

A New Yorker article earlier this year pithily summarized this well:

 

Amazon employs or subcontracts tens of thousands of warehouse workers, with seasonal variation, often building its fulfillment centers in areas with high unemployment and low wages.  Accounts from inside the centers describe the work of picking, boxing, and shipping books and dog food and beard trimmers as a high-tech version of the dehumanized factory floor satirized in Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”  Pickers holding computerized handsets are perpetually timed and measured as they fast-walk up to eleven miles per shift around a million-square-foot warehouse, expected to collect orders in as little as thirty-three seconds.  After watching footage taken by an undercover BBC reporter, a stress expert said, “The evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.”  The company says that its warehouse jobs are “similar to jobs in many other industries.”

 

(George Packer, “Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?”  A Reporter At Large, The New Yorker, February 17, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/17/140217fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all.)  Indeed, a co-worker of mine at Whitestown told me that a fellow picker who’d worked during the Christmas rush brought an odometer to work, and calibrated that, during this busiest, most demanding, of peak seasons, a picker actually walked 20 miles during a 10-hour shift.  Ironically, warehouse jobs at Amazon are among the better-paying jobs in Central Indiana, and are sought after; after losing my Amazon job in April, I got another warehouse job through a temp agency, same as with Amazon, but had to take a $2.00 an hour pay cut.  While the work at my new job is not much easier or less demanding that at Whitestown, it only pays $9.50 an hour compared to the $11.50 an hour I was making.  In Central Indiana, Amazon’s pay is on the high end of what’s paid warehouse workers; unskilled temp jobs at other warehouses only pay within the $9.00-$10.00 an hour range.

 

Moreover, although a college graduate, I have found myself for the past few years, same as many other college graduates, having to work unskilled physical labor because those are the only jobs available in Brain Drain, low-education, low-skill, low-wage, job-hemorrhaging Indiana.  Documentation of these crucial Hoosier lacks is extensive, and below I will list a substantial part of that documentation. 

 

On the Brain Drain and its impact on the college graduate population, there are, for example, two articles of mine: George Fish, “Indiana’s Brain Drain: The problem that won’t go away,” examiner.com, August 3, 2009, which will be re-posted on this blog; and George Fish, “Add another Frustration to Being Unemployed: A Case in Point from Indiana’s WorkOne State Employment Agency,” New Politics, December 12, 2011, http://newpol.org/content/add-another-frustration-being-unemployed-case-point-indiana%E2%80%99s-workone-state-employment-agenc. See generally George Fish and Dave Fey, “Mediocrity—a Hoosier affliction,” Bloomington Alternative, July 12, 2009, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039.  According to the Status of Working Families in Indiana, 2011 report, issued in April 2012 by the Indiana Institute for Working Families, http://www.incap.org/statusworkingfamilies.html, p. 20, 60% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state, a key reason being lack of jobs.  Further, in the “Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet” contained in Fish and Fey, op. cit., http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf, 46.6% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state within one year of graduation (citing data that originally appeared in the Indianapolis Star).

 

On Indiana’s per capita income, although it has increased 9.8% from 2006 to 2011, according to Hoosier Data webpage provided by Indiana’s Department of Workforce Development, going from $33,087 in 2006 to $36,342 in 2011, Indiana’s per capita income in this time has actually dropped as a percentage of the national per capita income, from 86.8% in 2006 to 85.9% in 2011. (http://www.hoosierdata.in.gov/dpage.asp?id=2&view_number=1&menu_level=&panel_number=2.) Standing at $38,812, or 87.1% of the national per capita income, in 2013, Indiana’s per capita income ranked only 39^th among the states.  But Indiana ranked 34^th  in 1983, 28^th in 1993, 36^th in 2003, so while per capita income has grown, it has declined compared to growth at the national level—Indiana continues to fall behind due to job loss and low wages.  (STATS Indiana, compiled by the Kelly School of Business, Indiana University, http://www.stats.indiana.edu/sip/inc/inc2_18.html.) As the Indianapolis Star reported, “Income for Indiana residents last year was $38,812 per person, a 2.3 percent increase. That compares with $44,543 for the nation, a 2.6 percent increase.  Indiana’s income ranking has dropped in recent decades, down from 30th in 1980, and 21st in 1950. The drop has been tied largely to the decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs.” (Maureen Groppe, Star Washington bureau, “Indiana’s per capita income ranks 38^th among states,” Indianapolis Star, March 26, 2014, http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2014/03/26/indianas-per-capita-income-ranks-th-among-states/6934411/.) Even in recovery, Indiana still continues to lose jobs.  For example, while Indiana gained 144,007 jobs in the three months September-December 2010, during this same period it lost 131,387 jobs, for a net gain of only 12,620 jobs. (http://www.bls.gov/cew/ew10table14.pdf.)  And even though Indiana’s unemployment rate continues to drop, and in April 2014 stood below the national average at 5.7%, that still leaves 182,900 Hoosiers without jobs. (http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.in.htm.) [Jobs, unemployment data from the Bureau of Economic Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor.]

So statistically one could say I’ve been one of the lucky unlucky ones, having generally secured unskilled labor employment through temp agencies since 2003, even though, as a college-degree holder, not the work I would desire by any means.  But, as indicated, this “luck in unluck” employment took its toll on me creatively and as an active writer, and that certainly generated frustration and chagrin.  However, and felicitously, since April Fool’s Day that creativity and urge to write has actively returned, and I’ve been on a somewhat consistent writing jag since then, having written several poems which I’ve shared in fellowship at the Tuesday afternoon gatherings of poet colleagues here in Indianapolis.  And despite the economic hardships involved with my new employment, I have gained in not being so overwhelmed with fatigue I could not create, only sleep and loll around in utter exhaustion after a grueling workday and workweek.  A mixed yet palpable gain for this poet/economist/laborer/journalist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dispatch from the work shift from hell

 

Also originally published on Examiner.com--GF

 

The job I lost June 20, 2014, which I’m about to detail below, was truly like herpes, a “gift that keeps on giving.”  For five weeks now after the loss of that job I still continue to have the leg pains that job engendered, requiring me to take 1600 mg. of ibuprofen daily just to be able to walk and stand without pain; but as of now the only thing that’s substantially changed is that while the pain has attenuated, it only reduced my need for ibuprofen from 1600 mg. daily to a “mere” 800!  Ah, such a lasting “gift” from a job that was a lived descent into the lower rungs of Dante’s hell!

 

As was typical of the “employment opportunities” in Central Indiana, the job I worked was yet another unskilled warehouse temp job through a temp agency, another in a seemingly endless cycle of only temporary employment—where, as usual, the “opportunity” of “temp to hire,” i.e., the job turning into a permanent, full-time position as, if one’s considered “good” enough, the company hiring one through the temp agency will take the temp on as one of its own.  But reality is, though the dangling of “temp to hire” is ubiquitous, it actually occurs only 27% of the time, according to statistics.  It’s bait dangled, and as such, is a lot like bait-and-switch, where, at the end of the assignment, one still lacks permanent, reliable employment and must instead scrounge around for more strictly temporary “temp work opportunities” through the various temp agencies.

 

Yet I was grateful for this job when it first occurred, coming as it did after a month unemployed and not qualifying for unemployment compensation. That followed my loss of employment at the Amazon.com warehouse in Whitestown on April 5 where I had been for nearly six months—which was long as such jobs usually go.  The new job was at another warehouse run by a major national corporation, this one the book publisher and distributor RR Donnelley in Plainfield, another significant commute from my residence in Indianapolis.  Both jobs shared the trait that they were physically demanding; and I’ve written notably before on examiner.com on just how difficult work is at Amazon. (See “Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work,” January 20, 2013, and “Work, fatigue, frustration, and—finally!—creativity again,” May 28, 2014, which will subsequently be re-posted on this blog.)  However, while Amazon is a horrendously demanding place to work, at least it pays a fairly decent wage as far as temp warehouse employment in Central Indiana goes, $11.50 an hour for the day shift, and $12.50 an hour for the night shift.  Further, the temp agency that hires for Amazon, Integrity Staffing Solutions, has perks available for its employees at Amazon that are unheard-of with other temp agencies, perks such as the ability to acquire penalty-free time off work. 

 

 

The temp agency that employed me at RR Donnelley, Employment Plus, provided no perks; instead it had, and enforced, a penalty point system for being absent or late for one’s work shift no matter what the reason. In fact, I had been burned twice by Employment Plus before, in late 2011 and late 2012, but had no place else to go when it offered me employment again in May 2014.  Employment Plus does like to brag on its website, http://www.employmentplus.com, how well it services its industry clients and how many awards it’s received from employer organizations, but that’s because it’s quite willing to cater to whatever the employer demands, even (or especially?) at the expense of the employees it provides!  But I don’t write this out of any invidious desire to single out Employment Plus: as a temp employee ever since September 2001 who’s worked for several temp agencies, I can honestly say that there are no “good” temp agencies to work for, only a Hobson’s choice between more tolerable and less tolerable, which is either exacerbated or mitigated by the type of work actually available at any given time.   Or in other words, only what amounts to a practical choice between what’s bad and what’s worse!

 

I worked at RR Donnelley from May 7 until about an hour-and-a-half before my shift was scheduled to end on June 20, being summarily fired and escorted from the building by the officious manager who, due to his goatee and shaved head, reminded me of a bearded version of Saturday Night Live’s Coneheads in appearance, and Godzilla in temperament. 

 

 

Central Indiana warehouses tend to be rather badly managed, and in this RR Donnelley was the worst I’ve encountered.  A morass of dysfunction, equipment malfunctions and breakdowns, a conveyer belt system for feeding products that was frequently overloaded with more product pulled and ready to ship than it could handle, and a management that, when it was on the floor and not in the office, simply strutted around and barked orders, despite not having any real idea of what was going on—but lack of knowledge was never allowed to interfere with barking orders and rendering summary judgment, no matter what!  Such was integral to my being summarily fired for being upset and having shouted out my anger and frustration at almost having my fingers crushed due to an equipment malfunction that was a regular occurrence on the particular task I worked, but of which the big boss, the Conehead, was previously oblivious.  So, yes, I was partially responsible for blurting out an angry obscenity, but who wouldn’t do such under such conditions?  I was in an edgy and vulnerable emotional state of exhaustion at having worked over six hours virtually without respite, handling a nearly-impossible shift dealing with an extremely overloaded conveyor belt system.  Just this hapless worker trying desperately to keep pace with a tyrannous ever-flowing conveyor belt!  Then the taping machine, which taped the boxes in which I packed stuffing so that they were ready to ship, developed the regularly-recurring malfunction that prevented it from taping, and though I had never repaired the malfunction before, I did know what to do, having watched others do it repeatedly.  And so I fixed the malfunction, no help whatsoever from my more experienced co-worker, who stood there staring at me, dumb and silent as a rock.  But the machine started before I had expected it to, and only my quick reflexes prevented my fingers from being caught between two pieces of metal moving together to make a vise for holding the box—while my co-worker, who had contributed to the problem, stood there Sphinx-like; staring at me absolutely wordlessly as though she didn’t know how to talk or react!  And so I blurted out an epithet that my immediate supervisor saw as “upsetting” to the other employees, and she escorted me to Mr. Conehead, who couldn’t have cared less about what I was upset about, and cared even less that I’d almost crushed the fingers of my left hand.  All he knew was I was upset, and so he blurted out demands that I cease being upset.  And when I couldn’t, the combination of ruefulness, anger at both my co-worker and at my near miss, plus extreme fatigue for being terribly overworked for a measly $9.50 an hour, $2.00 an hour less than what I’d received at Amazon despite actually working harder,  he escorted me out the building; but before he completed the task of escorting, he reprimanded me once more as I stopped to put on my watch (we weren’t allowed to wear watches while on the job, as they were considered hazardous,  something that could get caught in the rollers of the conveyor).  One simple solution to my anguish does come to mind, and I’m sure the reader catches it—just let me sit down and become calm again after my trauma.  Ah, but such is not allowed in the workplace of today.  No, you aren’t allowed to simply sit down when the unexpected happens, you must either be working when it’s not scheduled break time, or be out of the building.  No rest for the “wicked,” which means us, the very employees who make the business operate in the first place!

 

Truth is, up until that incident, my immediate supervisor had regarded me as an able employee, someone who actually did my job better than my two regular co-workers.  But “upsetting the work environment” for any reason whatsoever, even a good one, is simply a Big No-No which is to be dealt with harshly.  Production must flow, even in the case of a conveyor system that itself was inadequate to handle the volume placed on it, which was constantly breaking down, and where the ancillary equipment frequently malfunctioned—but with no actually certified maintenance person on duty to fix it, just supervisors who jerry-rigged as best they could, even when they didn’t really know what they were doing.  Another reason why RR Donnelley gets an F for its management.

 

While I was rueful over having the paychecks stop so abruptly, I also regarded this loss as a mixed blessing.  I had felt terribly used on this job, working my butt off for $9.50 an hour; and the day I was fired, Friday, was also a payday with my quarterly auto insurance bill due, leaving me essentially with nothing.  $9.50 an hour is actually poverty wage, no way around it—a far cry from economic sustainability, which my job at Amazon had at least provided.

 

I’d been walking or standing on hard concrete since November 2013, something quite hard on one’s legs, especially for an older worker like me—one past his mid-sixties but with no choice but to work anyway.  My legs had been consistently sore for a good half-year, and the leg cramping had actually been exacerbated by the statin for cholesterol my doctor had put me on at the end of May.  But even when off the job for the next month, and also having been taken off the statin, which can cause muscle aches, the leg pain had only subsided, not disappeared; and I still needed ibuprofen to make it through.  But on July 22 I started a new job with a different temp agency, one in which I get to sit down while working, and in which I am not subjected to the tyranny either of a computer-monitored quota system or the speed of a conveyor belt.  So I actually have a job now I like, where the work pace is not ruthlessly demanding, and where I feel comfortable.  And though I didn’t qualify for unemployment compensation this last time I was off, the combination of paychecks once again flowing and working at a job I actually like makes me optimistic for at least the near future; this even though my new job pays only the poverty-level $9.50 an hour, but which is supplemented by a monthly Social Security check.  And my total time unemployed in 2014 has only been 65 days, so I’ve had it much worse.  Simply put, I finally lucked out and am living a Life of Riley, with the proviso that my Riley has only modest expectations needing fulfillment.

 

But in the workplace of today, employees are regarded as expendable inputs and not persons; the notion of workers’ rights is nonexistent and considered a quaint throwback to an earlier time; and managerial fascism is the norm, not the exception.  A far cry for the work environment I knew in the 1960s and 1970s.  But that was back in a time when unions were strong, active, and even tolerated by management; so even if one worked in a non-union workplace, the norms of the union workplace still set the general work norm.  No more.  In our “leaner and meaner” business environment, work norms harkening back to the 19^th Century have become the rule now in the 21^st.  Older workers like myself can still remember when it wasn’t this way, but virtually any worker under the age of 40 only knows workplaces in which managerial fascism is the norm, and is not only ubiquitous but seemingly unchangeable.  Managerial fascism and low pay is now the new “normal,” and while some places can be far worse than others, there is now virtually no “good” job any more than there is a really “good” temp agency.  Of course there is at least a theoretical solution to this problem, and it’s spelled U-N-I-O-N, but in this age of a much diminished union movement and the widespread use of temps instead of regular workers, more a theoretical than a practical solution for most workers, unfortunately.  And that is why for so many of us the best that can come our way is a move from the lowest rungs of Dante’s hell to higher, less oppressive and onerous, rungs.  We’ve lost the capacity to attain the good, and most of us can only hope to attain a lesser evil we can at least live with.

 

 

Mediocrity in the State of Indiana, 2014: an update

This article was also originally posted on Examiner.com.  I'm re-posting many of my old Examiner.com articles here on this blog, because they are still highly relevant and informative--GF

 

I’ve been writing regularly on Indiana’s overweening mediocrity ever since my associate David Fey and I did a workshop on Hoosier Mediocrity at an event in Indianapolis in May 2009 and wrote our presentation up in an article, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier affliction,” that was published in the alternative newspaper Bloomington Alternative on July 12, 2009, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039.  (The presently on-hold Bloomington Alternative was published/posted online in Bloomington Indiana, which is home to the main campus of Indiana University, from which both Fey and I graduated.)  And much of this later writing was posted on examiner.com since then, notably August 3, 2009’s “Indiana’s Brain Drain: The problem that won’t go away;”; April 24, 2012’s “Indianapolis: Super Bowl city not so super;” the highly-regarded, extensively-praised article of March 12, 2013, “Indiana’s FSSA and the shredded Hoosier safety net;”  its follow-up, April 20, 2013’s “Indiana mediocrity extends to government services;”  July 25, 2013’s nationally re-posted “Work in Indiana and make less than in 1967;” and another article on the ill-functioning FSSA, the Family and Social Services Administration, umbrella agency for all welfare, child protective, vocational rehabilitation and mental health/addiction services,  and its horribly malfeasant provision of vital social safety net provisions to the poor, nastily (but deservedly) titled, “The real ‘welfare scum.’”  That title was chosen for two telling reasons:  first of all, it is how most Hoosiers actually view the recipients of welfare; and also, because the FSSA’s delivery of welfare, vocational rehabilitation and mental health/addiction services themselves to those who really need them is as poverty-stricken as its recipients.

 

In this I often wrote first-hand, about what I as a Hoosier worker, welfare recipient, and taxpayer had actually experienced.  Indiana, unfortunately, is a bastion of mediocrity, and few Hoosiers care—which is the pity stemming from both its aggressively hidebound, active right-wing organized by the Republican, Tea and Libertarian Parties, and its soft, queasy, frequently well-meaning but milquetoast “progressives,” who are content to act in ways that symbolically (in their eyes) “Speak truth to power,” but actually only “Beg ‘Pretty please’ from power.”

 

A good part of this mediocrity arises from the low educational attainment of the Hoosier State.  Indiana ranks only 31^st among the 50 states plus the District of Columbia in percentage of its population with at least a high school diploma; and those states with lower high school graduation rates are mostly confined to the traditionally poor, low-wage and low-education Old Confederacy, plus those states (California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona) which have had a large influx of Mexican and other Latin American immigrants without a high school education.

 

And among the 12 states comprising the Midwest—Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Ohio, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota—Indiana ranks 11^th  out of the 12, with only Illinois, with 86.4% of its population graduated from high school compared to Indiana’s 86.6%, ranking lower.

 

Indiana’s ranking is even more dismal when it comes to higher education, that percentage of the population holding a Bachelor’s degree or higher.  Its rank here is 44^th out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, with only 22.5% of its population 25 or older having attained at this level; this compares to the national average of 27.9% of the U.S. population 25 or older having attained at least a Bachelor’s degree.  Among the 12 states of the Midwest, Indiana’s ranking is dead last.  It’s a little more mixed among those with advanced degrees, which comprise not only Master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s, but also professional medical and law degrees—here Indiana ranks 38^th among the 50 states plus the District of Columbia at 8.1%, and 9^th out of the 12 states comprising the Midwest.  The national average is considerably higher—10.3%.  And because this category includes holders of professional medical and law degrees, rankings here include doctors and lawyers as well as those who’ve attained advanced academic degrees.  Of course, it is a sobering fact that the vast majority of legislators at both the state and federal levels have law degrees—even as public disgust at legislators is at an all-time low!  (Figures extrapolated from U.S. Census, “Table 233.  Educational Attainment by State: 1990 to 2009,”

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0233.pdf.)

 

Clearly, Indiana has a crisis in educational attainment, a major cause of its overwhelming across-the-board mediocrity.  Yet the Indiana government’s own Commission for Higher Education is oblivious when it comes to the crucial question of “What’s to be done about it?” stating baldly on its “Overview” page on its website, http://www.in.gov/che/3142.htm,

 

According to 2012 Census data, only 34.4 percent of working-age Hoosiers (25-64 years old) hold a two- or four-year college degree; the national average is 39.4 percent. Indiana has made the Big Goal of 60 percent higher education attainment by 2025 a centerpiece of its higher education policy, and data suggest that if Indiana does nothing, only 41 percent of Hoosiers will have a degree by 2025.  It is vital to address this issue, as data from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University suggests that by 2020 over 60 percent of the expected job vacancies in Indiana will require a postsecondary credential. 

 

Yet this goal of 60% by 2025 is palpably unrealistic, given that as of present, 60% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state due to poor employment prospects, (Indiana Institute of Working Families, “Status of Working Families in Indiana, 2011” [released April 2012], http://www.incap.org/documents/iiwf/2012/Final%20Draft-Status%20of%20Working%20Families%20in%20Indiana,%202011.pdf, p.20; in 2011, 41.3% of Indiana’s workers with a Bachelor’s degree or higher suffered long-term unemployment, ibid., p. 14.); and with the Indianapolis Star stating in 2009 that 46.6% of Hoosier college graduates leave the state within one year of graduation. (“Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet,” http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf, p.4, contained in Fish and Fey, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier Affliction.”) Furthermore, according to the Institute’s “Status of Working Families, 2012” report, released July 2013, 82% of Indiana’s college enrollees are only attending part-time, due to work and family obligations. (http://www.incap.org/documents/iiwf/2013/Status%202012%20Final.pdf, p.28) 

 

Moreover, according to the same report, “a majority (54 percent) of all jobs are still middle‐skill jobs—requiring more than a high school diploma, but less than a four‐year degree, while only 47 percent of Hoosier workers have the appropriate skills and credentials.” (p. 26) Given all this, how is it even conceivable that Indiana will achieve the Commission for Higher Education’s goal of increasing by nearly ¾ (i.e., raising by 174.2% the percentage of college graduates who must also stay and work in Indiana to meet the Commission’s goal!) the percentage of Hoosier college graduates, especially in light of Indiana’s notorious and still-continuing Brain Drain?

 

This is but one example of how Indiana’s continuing mediocrity feeds upon itself and paves the way for future mediocrity; while the Hoosier agencies supposedly dealing with the problem continue to only dream, setting palpably unrealistic higher education attainment goals that can’t, and surely won’t, be met.   And against the economic backdrop of Indiana’s per capita income continuing to drop due to job loss and replacement of manufacturing jobs with considerably lower-paying retail, warehouse and service jobs.  With all this occurring while Hoosier income inequality vastly increases—very noticeably in Indianapolis, but also in other cities in the state. (Brian Eason, Indianapolis Star, August 11, 2014, “Report: Wage gap growing rapidly in Indy area,” http://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/hamilton-county/2014/08/11/report-wage-gap-growing-rapidly-indy-area/13900371/.)  

 

Yet, it’s clear from the article that Indiana’s own state Economic Development Corporation and Secretary of Commerce are only “whistling in the proverbial dark” and painting overly optimistic pictures of resurgent growth in manufacturing, the mainstay of Indiana’s industrial economy, but a mainstay that has massively hemorrhaged jobs since 1999, leading to the continuing long-term drop in both wages and per capita income in the state.  This traditional mainstay is being rapidly replaced, however, by low-paying warehouse jobs, filled in the great majority by temp workers contracted through temp agencies.  (See on this Gregory Travis, “CIVITAS: Indiana’s warehouse economy—revisited,” Bloomington Alternative, October 19, 2008, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2008/10/19/9782; also, George Fish, examiner.com, “Extreme heat and uncertain employment—realities of Central Indiana’s job market,” November 15, 2012; “Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work,” January 20, 2013; “Work, fatigue, frustration, and—finally!—creativity again,” May 28, 2014; and “Dispatch from the work shift from hell,” July 27, 2014.)  

 

Mediocrity in education, mediocrity in employment, mediocrity at the top levels of Indiana’s own state government executive—such is the true State of the State, 2014.  But what is to be done about it?  What will my fellow Hoosiers do about it?

 

I addressed this question precisely in an examiner.com article I posted on October 30, 2013, “Why do we take it?” where I wrote:

 

The short answer is, because we’re sheep. Most notably here in Indiana, where sheepishness and passivity are widespread cultural traits that Hoosierdom demands conformance to, along with the demand of not expressing “negativity.” Passivity, provincialism, smugness, complacency, conformity, cliquishness—these common Hoosier cultural traits make acceptance even of the most outrageous and injustice a “way of life” to be responded to with unbridled optimism that “things are bound to get better,” and a direct silencing of the “negative” critic who just won’t shut up—and thus disturbs everyone else!

 

The sentiment I expressed above was also echoed in a quote that came across on Facebook from the late distinguished radical historian Howard Zinn, 1922-2010, who wrote:

Civil disobedience is not our problem.  Our problem is civil obedience.  Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.  Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.  That’s our problem.

 

Which puts strictly Hoosier mediocrity and its sheepish acceptance into a broader context, one that relates the FSSA to war, that relates war on the Hoosier poor to war on poor people worldwide, and that notes the crisis of blind obedience everywhere to such blind obedience here in Indianapolis, in Evansville, Fort Wayne and elsewhere, even in the bucolic college-town islands of Bloomington and West Lafayette.  And Howard Zinn himself, who lived and taught in Boston, has a notable Indiana mediocrity connection:  he was singled out by name by former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels as an “anti-American academic,” writer and thinker whose work should be specifically banned from Indiana’s public secondary schools and universities!  Even as today he is President of Indiana’s Purdue University, and claims to defend academic freedom!  (Fortunately, this received extensive national press coverage.  See, e.g., Gawker, July 17, 2013, “Mitch Daniels, President of Purdue, Tried to Ban Howard Zinn’s Books,” http://gawker.com/mitch-daniels-president-of-purdue-tried-to-ban-howard-813676742; Joseph A. Palermo, Huffington Post,  September 29, 2013, “Mitch Daniels, Howard Zinn, and the Politics of History,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/mitch-daniels-howard-zinn_b_3677477.html, and Mitch Daniels’ speaking in defense of himself also in the Huffington Post: Jon Ward, “Mitch Daniels: I’m ‘More Devoted to Academic Freedom’ Than Critics in Howard Zinn Controversy,” October 30, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/mitch-daniels-howard-zinn_n_4178180.html.) 

Interestingly enough, in the above article, and despite Daniels’ claim that he wanted Zinn’s popular, widely-read (2 million copies sold) A People’s History of the United States to be banned from secondary schools only, not universities, it was the use of the book in an Indiana University humanities class that first drew it to Daniels’ attention—and ire—as Governor!  This class, which could be taken by teachers for professional development credit, drew specific memos for action from Daniels himself as Governor, in direct e-mails to aides:  “This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state” and “Sounds like we need a cleanup of what is credit-worthy in 'professional development' and what is not."       

 

But also in 2014, both the Indiana Pacers NBA basketball team and the Indianapolis Colts NFL football team lost in the playoffs.  Something far more distressing to my fellow Hoosiers than statewide mediocrity, screwing over poor people, horrible lack of educated people in the state, and inability to garner truly skilled, decent-paying employment—that in itself being confirmation of continuing Indiana  mediocrity! 

 

Australopithecus hoosierensis

This article also originally appeared in Examiner.com--GF

Contrary to accepted opinion, Indiana is not populated by and large by Homo sapiens, but rather, by a deceptively human-appearing species of nasty, stupid, erect-walking ape, Australopithecus hoosierensis.  Australopithecus hoosierensis differs markedly from its cousin, Australopithecus mississippiensis, in that, while Australopithecus hoosierensis professes to love music, and often inflicts itself on others with this profession by doing fifth-rate karaoke versions of third-rate country and pop songs, it cannot sing the blues, and thinks “My home is in the Delta” refers to a frat house!

Needless to say, this designation, Australopithecus hoosierensis, goes over poorly with that half of the allegedly adult Indiana population that does not believe in evolution.  This half is thus prone to complain volubly, “I ain’t descended from no ape!  I is an ape!”   Then there is that that invariably appreciative and supportive Hoosier work supervisor (hah!), who is often given to say to an underling:  “You made ten mistakes this morning.  You did the work of an idiot.  If I wanted the work of an idiot, I would’ve done it myself!”

 

Then there is that classic cultural characteristic of Australopithecus hoosierensis, doing things according to Indiana ‘Round to It Time (“I’ll do it when I get ‘round to it.”).  Needless to say, this can often cause consternation, especially to those not accustomed to Hoosier ways.  Consider this little dialogue that went on when someone came into a repair shop to check on an item he’d brought in for repair some time ago:

“I was just checking on that small appliance I brought in for you to repair.”

“I haven’t gotten ‘round to it yet.”

“But it’s been ten years!”

“I said I’d do it when I got ‘round to it!”

But that’s nothing compared to Indiana “I Woulda, But…” Time.  This is heard frequently in the Hoosier state, “I woulda, but…,” followed by some excuse that one is expected to automatically accept as a perfectly good and valid reason, no matter what it is. To do otherwise is considered very bad form.  Here’s a typical example of what I mean:  “I woulda, but…well, I got drunk instead.  And then, because I was drunk, I had to fuck the dog.  And, by the time I finished fucking the dog and sobered up, it was too late.  But I woulda!”

Australopithecus hoosierensis is not the only unusual fauna found in Indiana.  The Hoosier state is home to those other weird (by non-Hoosier standards) but common denizens, the Two-legged Pigs and the Two-legged Sheep.  Two-legged Pigs are especially prevalent in Indiana among politicians, notably Republican and Tea Party ones; among “community leaders,” businessmen, many labor leaders (which are actually an endangered species now in “right-to-work” Indiana), numerous clergy and “spiritual leaders,” and, naturally of course, bosses and managers.  Two-legged Sheep comprise the vast majority of the rest of the population, especially voters, and are characterized by their constant passivity in the face of everything while bleating loudly, “Baa, baa, baa,” at anything that disturbs their desired brain-dead tranquility.  The Two-legged Pigs, for their part, constantly bark, “Oink, oink, oink” authoritatively as though they were giving orders they expected to be obeyed without question.  The Two-legged Sheep then respond with bleats of “Baa, baa, baa” to the all the “Oink, oink, oinks” that are uttered by marching off, mindlessly and herd-like, to be turned into lamb chops.  

 

 

 

     

A bad forum advocating a really horrible idea

This article also originally appeared in Examiner.com.  While I stand behind what I wrote below, and believe that what I wrote is essentially accurate, I may have overstated the anti-college opposition of the KI EcoCenter participants; but that was because the presentation was so incoherent, so definitely below the usual high standards of KI forums, that I may have given more coherence to what was actually said than it deserved.  I may have read coherence into what was just confusion, and thus the participants' stated objection to me, that they "didn't completely say that," may be somewhat true due to this incoherence and confusion--GF

 

Last Tuesday, October 28,2014, a group that I’ve usually admired, the KI EcoCenter (KI) of Indianapolis, Indiana, http://www.kiecocenter.org, held a public forum, “College Isn’t the Answer,” in which the various panelists advocated directly for—let’s face it—ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and giving money to black people as “reparations” for slavery instead of intellectual improvement of the black communities of Indianapolis and the U.S., by coming out squarely against college education.  But that’s putting it generously, as my thumbnail description of the forum gives the “discussion” that ensued by the panelists and the approving audience participants a far greater coherence and understanding of the issues than actually ensued.  In reality, what transpired was incoherence, intellectual confusion of the worst sort, constant comparing of the proverbial apples to oranges, massive tendentious omissions, lack of a truly serious approach, and significant omission of data and evidence.  Instead what was proffered—in all seriousness!—was a pseudo-populist “left black nationalist”  exercise in derision and self-abnegation, a rather hypocritical posturing by black college graduates themselves on how they were supposedly duped by becoming college-educated; a masochistic display of anti-intellectualism by the panelists made all the more pathetic by the basic fact that, without their supposedly worthless college educations, they would’ve lacked even the basic erudition and coherency to present their own presentations against college!

 

Yes, their very articulateness (such as it was—really not at all at the high level KI panel participants have presented in the past) in arguing against college, and thus de facto for ignorance, would not have been possible even at this disappointing level had it not been for the panelists’ own college educations!  Their position, as presented by these three college-educated African Americans, became simply a whining complaint of “Don’t go to college! We’ve been there, it’s not worth it.  Savor your mere high school-educated ignorance instead, despite our token lip-service to the general notion of education.  Do as we say, not what we ourselves did!”    

 

This display of articulate self-abnegation by the three black panelists was of course echoed by the one token white panelist (himself hand-picked by KI and given a voice, I take it, in name of “diversity”), who himself was also another self-abnegating college graduate.  This panelist offered to entertain us by deliberately tearing up his college diploma that evening; but that was a “promise” left unfulfilled (undoubtedly for the better).

 

These four panelists—the three African Americans Paulette, Imhotep (usually referred to simply as M.) and Khalil, along with the token white panelist, John—are all people I’m acquainted with as an active supporter of KI in the past, and it is no pleasure for me to trash them.  But I feel obligated simply because I am a lower-rungs-of-the-socio-economic-ladder college graduate myself, a working-class white man who worked hard to achieve my degree; a college degree and educational immersion I myself find invaluable in enabling me to do my avocation of writing prose and poetry for publication, something that would not have been possible without it.  And so, while my degree has not paid off for me economically in terms of a good job, it has contributed immensely in granting me a sense of self-worth, in giving me a fulfilling life, and making me a positive contributor in the cause of social and economic justice for all, African American, Hispanic, other ethnicities, as well as my own white working class—all those excluded from the American Dream by the 1%, whose domination of our lives the Occupy movement made us so rightfully aware of.  Getting that degree (Bachelor’s in economics from Indiana University, supplemented by later paralegal training) gave me an education in the broadest and most proper sense, it opened for me the vast realm of knowledge, enabled me to commune with the greatest minds of humanity past and present—something that would not have come about had I remained a mere high school graduate, or even as someone with only some college.

 

This, and more, I tried to articulate in the technically open and extensive, but actually perfunctory and limited, audience discussion of the panelists’ remarks.  Needless to say, my remarks in favor of education were completely ignored by the panelists themselves, who were too absorbed in promoting their own anti-intellectual shtick to “bother” with me.  But I was “answered” with vociferous objection by audience members who had only high school educations themselves, or who were disgruntled college dropouts, themselves inadvertent advocates of the value of higher education through their own angry denunciations of that which they didn’t have themselves, but which they disdained because they lacked it. Confirmation of a positive good by denunciation of it as worthless by those who had never possessed it in the first place!  Or else, trashing at the hands of those who failed to realize the value of what they themselves did possess, resentful discarders of the gold at their feet in favor of the tawdry glittering tinsel of ignorance their pseudo-populism inclined them to embrace in its stead.

 

As I stated above, I’ve long been a supporter and enthusiast of the KI EcoCEnter, which I first encountered at a community jobs forum it held in October 2012, and on which I published a very extensive-praising post in my “Politically Incorrect Leftist” BlogSpot blog, http://politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=7. But lately, KI has allowed its ideology of “black cultural nationalism” as articulated by Maulana Karenga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maulana_Karenga), to weaken the quality and multiracial appeal of its earlier work and public forums; most recently it has focused less on its organizational philosophy of “social entrepeneurship” and “bootstrapping” as positive aids to the empowerment of the primarily working-class African American residents of Indianapolis’ Near North Side neighborhood where it exists, and more on being an angry, and at times highly incoherent, megaphone of black grievances against what it claims is an all-encompassing structure of “white privilege;” something this decidedly unprivileged member or the white working class finds very much at variance with actual reality, and who objects strongly to Paulette’s and M.’s insistence that I, struggling just to get by, also partake of.  This vague, generalized, all-encompassing “white privilege” so “politically correct” to assert, but which is so factually compromised, truncated and rebutted by so much of white working-class reality.  This “privilege” I allegedly have despite only my receiving Social Security standing between me and homelessness—something I’d hardly call a “privilege”! 

 

Sadly, I find KI moving from being “pro-black,” which it should be, to being more openly “anti-white,” except toward those whites who uncritically subordinate themselves to KI’s “cultural nationalism.”  To me this is a disservice to what was so positive in KI’s earlier activity, and which garnered my strongly admiring allegiance and support in the first place.  I feel uncomfortably on the receiving end of “reverse racism.”  Not that whites, and especially my own white working class, haven’t done a lot to harm African Americans; they certainly have.  But they themselves are also Bob Dylan’s “pawns in their game” who ride only “the caboose of the train;” they themselves are also the inarticulate and dispossessed victims of whole hierarchies of economic, social and institutional power held by the overwhelmingly (but not entirely) white ruling 1%, which oppresses and subordinates both white and non-white in very similar ways, and increasingly, to very similar, if not exactly identical, degrees.  While white people can be said to have a relative “advantage” in many (but not all) cases vis-à-vis African Americans, this is far from an absolute “privilege” that ensures whites always come out on top, are always psychologically satisfied, materially sated, and economically secure, no matter what their socio-economic status.

 

And yes, while whites too often can be openly racist, and even virulently so, this is far from being a “benefit” to them, is far from a “psychological bonus” they not only receive but profit from; rather it is a liability, a delusional sense of superiority, a pernicious illusion that blinds them not only to the commonalities of oppression they share with their brethren of color, but makes them dupes of Occupy’s 1% (really 0.01%).  The 1% (or rather, 0.01%) who comprise those corporate and financial elites and their satraps who manipulate far too many ordinary white people as puppets, who set them against people of color as (often eager) attack dogs,  but who are still tightly leashed by the 1%.  “White privilege” is thus an often-unacknowledged liability that undermines the white working class every bit as much as it oppresses African Americans.

But back to the “College Isn’t the Answer” forum.  The forum based its anti-college position on two very bad articles which appeared in the Washington Post (a dead giveaway in itself of how the anti-intellectual initiators of the forum themselves profited from their own college degrees—knowing about these articles, knowing about the Washington Post as a primarily college graduate-appealing elite source of information and opinion in the first place):  “sociologist and writer” (nothing more)  Tressie McMillan Cottom’s  “No, college isn’t the answer. Reparations are,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/no-college-isnt-the-answer-reparations-are/?mc_cid=a19a9ef833&mc_eid=[UNIQID]&mc_cid=9f4ac1282f&mc_eid=[UNIQID]) and Valerie Strauss’s blog, “No, algebra isn’t necessary — and yes, STEM is overrated,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/no-algebra-isnt-necessary--and-yes-stem-is-overrated/2012/08/26/edc47552-ed2d-11e1-b09d-07d971dee30a_blog.html) which reprints a New York Times Op-ed by one Roger C. Schank, described as “a cognitive scientist, artificial intelligence theorist, and education reformer.”  These two articles are at best but half-truths zealously overstated. 

 

Cottom tries to make a case that only reparations are the solution to the problem of glaring economic inequality (as though it were only a problem for the black community, which is blatantly false), and counterpoises reparations for the past enslavement of African Americans to African Americans today getting a college education, which she sees as just another way of perpetuating black inequality through substantial black college-graduate unemployment. Which is an undoubted fact of our economy still not overcoming the Recession of 2008 (Cottom is correct here), but which has also meant high rates of unemployment and underemployment for college graduates as a whole, not just for African Americans (and which is really a problem that goes back to the 1970s and has continued since, only exacerbated, but not created, by the ongoing recession). 

 

Schank states baldly, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” “You can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about macroeconomics or trigonometry…,”  and that our supposed societal obsession with math and STEM all goes back to a claim made in 1892 by the president of Harvard University of what should be taught in high school.  As with Cottom, Shank is half-right (but remember, half-right is also half-wrong!).  Yes, “The average person never does abstract reasoning,” but that’s really a problem more than a superfluity, a problem well-articulated by 1920s iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” The same with “You can live a productive and happy life without knowing anything about macroeconomics[.]”  All we have to do is look at the level of public political discourse and electoral appeals in this 2014 election to give the lie to the beneficence of these statements of fact.   The simple fact of the low level of political discourse, open demagoguery, and statement both of half-truths and outright lies in the 2014 electoral appeals, plus the facile (but fallacious) appeal of free market-fundamentalist economics making supposed experts out of people such as Paul Ryan and even Ayn Rand, shockingly exposes how We, the People are directly harmed by voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning” and who vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics.”  Voters who “never [do] abstract reasoning” and who vote “without knowing anything about macroeconomics” frequently determine through their ignorance just who our political leaders are—and through them, what social and economic policies are put into practice!  Proof positive that ignorance is far from bliss, though ignorance may be popular, deliberately promulgated and disseminated, and even celebrated (the Tea Party being a stellar example of the last).

 

As one who studied mathematics extensively, I myself can attest that its value lies not so much in the mathematical formulas taught but in its overwhelming value as a heuristic, i.e., as a means to understand and practice the daily art and science of problem-solving, something that confronts each of us every day.  Through mastery of math we come to mastery of logic, of logical inference and deduction, how to employ reason correctly, and what is valid and invalid, relevant and irrelevant, evidence on which to base our solutions, our daily decisions.  That is math’s overwhelming strength in “practical” affairs, and is precisely why algebra, plane geometry and trigonometry are taught in our high schools, or should be; and why, given our reliance on statistical information today, statistics and probability should also be.  If that’s “elitist” or not narrowly “practical,” so be it!  As a person of the left who considers the Jeffersonian ideal of “An aristocracy of talent in a democracy of opportunity” to be one of the hallmarks of a good, just and equitable society, I say the teaching of “abstract reasoning,” math, and yes, even “macroeconomics,” is necessary to move us forward in the “democracy of opportunity,” made more of a reality by the Civil Rights and labor struggles of ordinary people than it was before, to become more of what we need to be—a society where those in charge truly represent an “aristocracy of talent” as opposed to the “oligarchy of mediocrity” our political and societal leaders represent today.

 

And as a college graduate who found specific value in that college education, I openly state that all that comes about easier when the masses of ordinary people have access to broad means of education, both formal education and self-education as a lifetime project, through greatly improved primary, secondary, and yes, higher education.  Yes, there are many things wrong with higher education as it exists today—its frequent detached elitism, its cost, its increasingly strictly vocational orientation, its often chilling effect on imagination, creativity and independent scholarship which it should foster instead—but the correction of these major faults depends on deepening the educational experience, not simply throwing it out as an unneeded irrelevancy the way the panelists did at the KI forum.  Because, for all the faults of higher education today, it certainly beats ignorance!  Which is precisely where the panelists of “College Isn’t the Answer” would lead us—inadvertently to be sure, but also inexorably.

 

Furthermore, if we wish to see an example of a society where college is disdained, and where ignorance is enshrined, we need only look at our own Indiana, which ranks 42^nd in the nation in the percentage of its people with at least a Bachelor’s degree, and which ranks last in the Midwest as such.  The Hoosier State is a bastion today of poor job opportunities, abysmal social services, and extreme right-wing politics, and these are all interconnected with our fellow Hoosiers’ lack of education; our notorious Brain Drain, where college graduates leave the state in droves because of lack of suitable jobs for them; and our poor primary and secondary schools, which directly impact on employment opportunities, the lack of which, along with the state’s hemorrhaging of previously unskilled but high-pay manufacturing jobs, has consistently caused Indiana’s per capita income to drop.  Drop so significantly that, today, Indiana ranks 39th in the nation in per capita income when in the 1950s it ranked in the 20s.  As Philip Powell, Associate Professor of Business at Indiana University-Bloomington told the Indianapolis Star as far back as 2009 and which has remained unchanged since, “We’re stuck. We’re stuck because we don’t have the knowledge base we need in the labor force. A lot of that is because of our really mediocre primary and secondary educational system.”

 

(For documentation of the above, see George Fish and Dave Fey, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier affliction,” Bloomington Alternative, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039, and the accompanying “Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet,” http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf; Though some of the statistics cited there are old, sadly, the trends referenced by them are not.  For the overweening right-wing character of Indiana politics, see, Bryan K. Bullock, Truth-out, June 27, 2014, “The Ultra-Right-Wing State Nobody Mentions,” http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/24552-the-ultra-right-wing-state-nobody-mentions.)

 

Sadly, the KI EcoCenter’s forum, “College Isn’t the Answer,” represents just a “left-wing” pseudo-populist variant of that virulent anti-intellectualism so continually prevalent in U.S. society that’s so eloquently scored by noted science popularizer and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov (himself a Ph.D. in biochemistry): “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”  It is unfortunate that an organization, KI, which I have thought of so highly, decided to perpetuate that.