2011 - %3, June

Advice to Self: Don't Quit Your Day Job

—By

| Thu Jun. 23, 2011 11:15 AM PDT

Editors' note: Mac is spending a month in her home state of Ohio, reporting on the Wisconsin-style showdown involving Republican Governor John Kasich, public employees, unions, teachers, students, and struggling middle-class families.  

Let's just dispense with the most disheartening things I heard yesterday from a career adviser: It's much harder to find a job now than it was when I graduated from Ohio State University 10 years ago. Several years ago, most of the people coming to this Continuing Education Department were alumni who had careers but wanted new ones; now it's mostly people who got laid off. Because the job market is so saturated with applicants, employers can be more demanding and picky. It's important to find a job that you're happy in because you'll spend most of your life doing that, though admittedly everyone, even people who love their jobs, would prefer to not work.

I met Jeff Robek the other day at career-exploration workshop, one of many programs the Columbus Metropolitan Library has been offering since its librarians started getting overwhelmed with requests for job-search assistance in 2008. I made an appointment to talk with Robek, and while I was at it, I got myself job-counseled.

After all, it would be statistically surprising to no one if I got laid off. In that event, Robek would be a good person to talk to, because I'd probably have to move back to Ohio from San Francisco. I'd need the cost of living decrease, since I'd probably stay unemployed for a while: Before the econapocalypse, the general rule was that it took one month of job searching for every $10,000 in annual salary earned. Nobody's crunched a new stat for the new order yet, but Robek says that, anecdotally, what used to take three to six months often now takes six to twelve. He adds, "Or even longer sometimes!"

And um, I was an English major. "Overall, it's harder to find students employment in their field" in the last couple of years, says Stephanie Ford, director of OSU's College of Arts and Sciences Career Services. Not as many employers are participating in job fairs; those that do consistently cancel. The 64,000-student OSU graduates many, many people with the same academic qualifications as me every year. Now that so many people from the skilled workforce are getting laid off or downsized, new grads have to compete with them. "It's a double whammy" for graduating seniors, Ford says. "They're competing with a more talented applicant pool, and there are fewer jobs to compete for."

OSU students are therefore being advised to step up their game by doing internships, building rock-solid resumes before graduation, and mastering professional communications so they can email and interview like pros right out of the gate. Ford agrees with Robek that it is "more of a challenge" to find jobs now than when I graduated, no matter how crazy your qualifications. I invite anyone who doubts this to browse the resumes of Mother Jones' most recent crop of interns, who between the seven of them speak Russian, Farsi, Dari, Arabic, Italian, French, Spanish, and Hebrew and have worked at places like PBS' Frontline (two of them), NPR, NBC, New York Press, the Miami Herald, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Sierra, the ACLU, the FTC, and the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

Fairly recently, Robek advised a local alum who was a journalist about my age. He had worked in the field for years, but had lost his job due to cutbacks. He searched and searched for work. Committed to staying a reporter, in the end he moved to DC and took an unpaid internship. "If the field you're working in has no opportunities, it might be time to find something else you're passionate about," Robek said.

"My...'skills' as a journalist are awfully...specific," I told him. "It's hard for me to imagine how they might transfer over to a different and lucrative career."

He nodded and said, "Yeah."

Alright, fuck it. After reading my editors' special report on the "do more, earn less" economy, I announced that I'm moving to France anyway. I should probably get a complementary career for my impending new life. "I want to be a farmer and make cheese," I told Robek. (A career-compatibility test names skills I do not have—like mechanical competence—as good fits for this. But I'm totally a match for the corresponding values: Tradition. Practicality. Common sense!)

In the case of a career switch, the first thing Robek counseled me to do is gather a lot of information: What do farmers really do? What's it really like? I'd need to interview some. When I told Robek I'm way ahead of him—I worked on farms for several months in my early 20s—he said I should still get an update on the state of the field, then figure out what to do to break into it. Look on Monster, stalk LinkedIn, try to get in on the ground level. In this employer's market, where bosses know what they want and can demand exactly that, I have to be able to give it to them. Which in this instance—and in many of Robek's clients' instances—will probably involve going back to school, so it's a good thing I bothered getting a master's degree. In writing.

By the time I'm done with all that, perhaps the economy will have turned around. Robek is starting to see signs of progress. In the last six months, some of those people who already have careers but are just looking to switch are feeling secure enough to come back to his office. A year ago, he was lucky to have 80 job postings on the Buckeye Job Board. "Right now, there are 200."

Speaking of Buckeyes, my temporary landlord/roommate Anthony, was one, too, and he has just been informed that he's lost his job. "Rejected by the Ohio State University!" he said when he opened his laptop after getting home from work tonight. "They just sent me a letter." He'd applied for a position that he has years of direct experience with, but clearly a lot of other people did, too. He didn't make it to the interview phase at his alma mater.

Plus: For much more on our "work more, earn less" economy, including the jobless recovery, see our current package on The Great Speedup.

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There's a Foxx Guarding the Ag-Policy Henhouse

—By

| Thu Jun. 23, 2011 11:09 AM PDT
Know your farmer, know your food? Oh no, you don't, says Virginia Foxx.

In my post on the recent House Republicans' assault on progressive ag policy, I mentioned the move to shut down USDA's Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative. The sponsor of the amendment that did the dirty deed is Rep. Virginia Foxx (R.-N.C.)—who, it turns, out, represents my district in Congress. This is the sort of thing she gets up to when she's not defending children from the scourge of gay marriage, or lashing out at undocumented workers (who, incidentally, form the backbone of our area's Christmas tree and nursery industries.)

As I mentioned in my previous post, Know Your Farmer is essentially a website. it gathers up and spotlights a hodgepodge of existing programs, funded by the 2008 Farm Bill, that direct modest amounts of money to rebuilding local and regional food systems and supporting new farmers.

That's actually a significant service. The USDA's own site is infamously unwieldy and impossible to navigate. Without Know Your Farmer, the few progressive federal ag programs we have—for example, ones that that help make farmers markets accessible to low-income mothers, or help small farmers launch profitable food businesses—would likely wither on the vine.

[Read more]

Meet the Panda Dog

—By

| Thu Jun. 23, 2011 9:24 AM PDT

The Chinese have surpassed us as the world's biggest auto market, bested us at the renewable energy game, and are years ahead of us on high-speed rail technology.

Now they've beaten us to the "Panda Dog."

There's a new fad among Chinese pet owners that involves taking your domesticated canine to a grooming salon and having it washed, trimmed, and dyed to resemble an exotic animal. Think fluffy chow-chows as baby pandas and golden retrievers as mini-cheetahs or micro-tigers.

Photos currently making the rounds on the blogosphere include images from a dog pageant in China's Henan Province. The dogs on display look confused and not particularly ecstatic.

[Read more]

Quote of the Day: Cantor Bails

—By

| Thu Jun. 23, 2011 8:33 AM PDT

From House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, explaining why he's bailing out of budget negotiations with the Obama administration:

I believe that we have identified trillions in spending cuts, and to date, we have established a blueprint that could institute the fiscal reforms needed to start getting our fiscal house in order. That said....Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases....Given this impasse, I will not be participating in today’s meeting and I believe it is time for the President to speak clearly and resolve the tax issue.

Roger that. Trillions in spending cuts already agreed to, but there can't be one dime in tax increases of any kind. Would any conservative apologists like to continue pretending that Democratic aversion to spending cuts is pretty much the same kind of thing as the Republican jihad against tax increases? Anyone? Ross?

Pawlenty Rocks the God Vote

—By

| Thu Jun. 23, 2011 7:37 AM PDT

The religious right is Tim Pawlenty's to lose.

In a recent poll of leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)—which includes representatives from a number of evangelical organizations around the country—45 percent named Pawlenty as their preferred Republican candidate. Coming in a distant second with 14 percent: Mitt Romney.

In the NAE press release announcing the poll, Leith Anderson, the group's president, points out that Pawlenty's strong showing "might be expected since he is so often identified as an evangelical." It doesn't hurt that Anderson is Pawlenty's pastor at Wooddale Church—a shared history that the release fails to mention.

Pawlenty's religious fervor distinguishes him from Romney, the current frontrunner. It's central to his presidential narrative. But that's not likely to help him much with the broader Republican electorate:

Among Republicans, 59 percent hold a favorable view of [Romney], according to a Bloomberg National Poll, while only 16 percent view him negatively. He’s also more popular than unpopular with independent voters by a 10 percentage point margin. . . . [Pawlenty] is viewed favorably by 29 percent and unfavorably by 11 percent.

And then there's this:

While the poll shows more than half of Republicans are dissatisfied with the current choices in the field, an overwhelming 85 percent want candidates seeking their support to focus almost entirely on economic issues, not social ones.

Of course, social issues define the evangelical right. Meaning that Pawlenty would be well advised to aggressively broaden his base, and court some of that 85 percent that's begging to hear more about jobs and smart investments and less about abortion and traditional marriage. Because if polls like Bloomberg's bear out, most Republicans just don't care what the NAE thinks.

GOP Mind Games, Job-Killing Edition

—By

| Thu Jun. 23, 2011 7:32 AM PDT

It's an article of faith among congressional Republicans that, if you repeat a talking point often enough, no matter how inaccurate it is, it will eventually take root in the minds of Americans. Case in point: A new Bloomberg poll finds that 55 percent of Americans believe spending and tax cuts are the best way to lift the US labor market and lower unemployment, now at 9.1 percent, as opposed to more government spending.

That's straight out of House Republicans' "cut-and-grow" playbook, in which the road to economic prosperity entails slashing corporate tax rates and billion-dollar cuts to "job-killing government spending."

Except that's not true.

Alan Blinder, a Princeton economics professor and former Fed vice president, thoroughly debunked the GOP's claims on Tuesday in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "The GOP Myth of 'Job-Killing' Spending." Blinder writes:

The generic conservative view that government is "too big" in some abstract sense leads to a strong predisposition against spending. OK. But the question remains: How can the government destroy jobs by either hiring people directly or buying things from private companies? For example, how is it that public purchases of computers destroy jobs but private purchases of computers create them?

Blinder easily knocks down claims that the 2009 federal stimulus—roughly $600 billion in spending and $200 billion in tax cuts—failed to create jobs, pointing to Congressional Budget Office data that shows the net job gain was at least 1.3 million and perhaps as high as 3.3 million. What's more, Blinder debunks the idea that the federal deficit and the uncertainty that comes with it has caused companies to scale back business investments, which in turn impacts hiring and economic growth. Except such investment soared in the past year, increasing 14.7 percent. Ultimately, Blinder argues for another round of stimulus—specifically, giving businesses that grow their payrolls a tax credit—while calling for a serious long-term deficit reduction package.

And Blinder isn't the only expert to dismantle the GOP's economic position. In an interview with Yahoo News' Lookout blog, a former top economic aide to George W. Bush said the GOP's cut-and-grow agenda doesn't make any sense. "That wouldn't square with the way we normally think about economic activity in a depressed economy," said Andrew Samwick, now an economics professor at Dartmouth. Samwick, like so many other economists, points out that increased spending is a proven way to ramp up hiring and spark economic growth. Slashing spending does the opposite.

Yet Republicans have hammered away with their cut-and-grow mantra so much that they've convinced a majority of Americans to believe the unbelievable. You've got to hand it to Republicans: They may be wrong, but they are convincing.

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House Republicans Aim Pitchfork at Food-System Reform

—By

| Thu Jun. 23, 2011 7:00 AM PDT

I've complained once or twice in the past that US farm policy, even under Obama, favors corporate-led, highly dysfunctional agriculture. That's true on balance, but it doesn't tell the whole story. If you dig into the topic, you'll find that sustainable-food activists have been working for decades to place progressive, community-oriented programs into the ag-policy mix. These hard-fought victories, won during once-every-five-years Farm Bill wars, are vastly outweighed by things like the government's corn-ethanol fetish, or its hyper-aggressive trade policies. 

But the food movement's political gains are real, they're fragile, and they need defending. And they're under withering attack from the GOP-controlled US House, which passed a fiscal 2012 agriculture appropriations bill that if signed into law would snuff out US farm policy's green shoots like an herbicide-spewing crop duster snuffs out weeds. The D.C.-based National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the best watchdog/lobbying group we have on ag-policy issues, delivers the grim news on what the House bill would do. Here's a few highlights, summarized by me.

[Read more]

Should Jon Huntsman Run as an Independent?

—By

| Thu Jun. 23, 2011 5:57 AM PDT

Every presidential candidate talks about the importance of "independent" voters. But in an interview with Kasie Hunt, former ambassador to China Jon Huntsman takes it a step further:

In an interview with POLITICO, Huntsman made clear that he plans to capitalize on election rules in New Hampshire and South Carolina that allow independent voters to cast ballots in the GOP presidential primary.

"These are wide open primaries, we forget that," Huntsman said, predicting an independent turnout in New Hampshire as high as 40 percent. "[I] think, given the fluidity of the race in these early states, that we stand a pretty good chance, and we're putting that to the test."

The former Utah governor's strategy is an attempt to make a virtue out of necessity. His moderate positions on the environment, immigration and civil unions —and his time as Barack Obama's ambassador to China—are formidable obstacles to victory in a party where the energy is concentrated in the conservative core.

By Huntsman's own admission, his party's shift to the right has left him considerably out of step with the conservative base—a problem that's been reinforced by a string of polls, which show him bringing up the rear. So what's a professed Obama admirer and former moderate Republican governor to do? Nate Silver, riffing off of Huntsman's new anti-war push, tweets an unlikely scenario: "Independents want quick withdraw from Afghanistan too. Does the possibility of running as an independent enter into Huntsman's calculus?"

No Pesticide Permit? No Problem!

—By

| Thu Jun. 23, 2011 3:00 AM PDT
Spraying herbicide near a Florida canal.

In 1996, the Talent Irrigation District in Oregon set out to kill off aquatic weeds in irrigation canals by spraying herbicides in the water. But in addition to a lot of dead weeds, it got a lot of dead fish—92,000 steelhead salmon. Since then, legal battles have raged over how the government should regulate pesticides used on or near waterways.

On Tuesday, pesticide users marked a possibly major victory in that battle, as a bill that would allow them to bypass the Clean Water Act and spray pesticides over waterways passed through the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee.

Currently, once a pesticide has been deemed safe by the EPA, there's nothing to compel users of the pesticide to follow guidelines in the Clean Water Act for minimizing how much pesticide makes it into streams, lakes, or other water bodies. But in the long wake of the Talent incident, in 2009 a federal court ordered the EPA to require pesticide users to get a permit before they could spray into water.

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We're Still at War: Photo of the Day for June 23, 2011

Thu Jun. 23, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Staff Sgt. Matthew Easly prepares to plot a waypoint during the Land Navigation event at the Army Reserve Best Warrior competition at Fort McCoy, Wis., Tuesday, June 21, 2011. Easly, a native of Sacramento, Calif., is representing the 807th Medical Deployment Support Command at this year's competition. A driving rain and strong winds added an additional element of difficulty to the event that started at 3 a.m. and finished six hours later. Photo via US Army.