The Boss, Part II

     In 1952, my two older siblings were in grade school, and my sister Nancy had left for kindergarten. My mother must have seen that freedom was just around the corner, when all her kids were finally in school, so she decided I had to go to nursery school -- and I was therefore the only child in my family to enjoy the advantages of early education.

     We lived in the New York suburbs, near the College of New Rochelle, and the sisters at this Catholic institution had opened a nursery school. You didn't have to be Catholic to go there, but it helped, and so my mother signed me up.

     I was excited about going to school. My brother and two sisters went to school every day, and I didn't want to be left behind. So my mother bought me a new outfit, and a little knapsack, and every day she drove me over to New Rochelle. She'd park the car, walk me by the hand over to the playground and put me in the capable hands of the nuns.

     At first I found school a little unsettling. I didn't know any of the kids. I was especially wary of two big Irish kids, Billy and Colin, who swaggered through the playground, throwing sand at the girls. I was also intimidated by the nuns as they swirled around in their big black and white habits. And I didn't want to have to lay my head down on the table and take a nap at 11 a.m. I was never tired. I didn't want to take a nap!

     One day my mother decided I could take the bus. She walked with me up the block from our house to the main cross street. I had on a new jacket to ward off the September chill, and a hat with earmuffs. When not in use, which was most of the time, the earmuffs were tied back over the top of the hat, with the fur showing on the outside. It was pretty cool. Already, in nursery school, I was trying to look cool.

     However, in my heart I wasn't cool at all. I was kind of shy, and I didn't know if I liked the big uncaring world beyond my neighborhood. When the bus pulled up to our corner, and the door opened, I stared at the three big steps that led into the cavern of the bus -- and burst out crying.

     My mother looked in my face, then pulled me close and gave me a warm hug, reassuring me and telling me that everything was going to be fine.

     I looked back at her, took a deep breath, then turned back to the bus. I climbed up one step, two steps, and then I peered down the length of the bus -- a big empty space with strange little faces peering out from behind the backs of the seats. I could hear the rumble of the motor, and feel the vibrations in the bus. I looked down at the floor, staring at the little ribs in the black runner that led down the aisle between the seats. Then I turned back to my mom and burst into tears once again. My mom looked over my shoulder at the bus driver and gave a nervous laugh. "I don't understand," she said. "He did fine in school all last week."

     My mother finally took me off the bus and walked me back to the house. I missed that day of school. The next day she drove me to school again.

     I didn't like nap time at school, but I did like recess. The playground was paved over with asphalt and surrounded by a chain-link fence. A single tree towered over the play area. It provided plenty of shade over the sandbox. And it had several low, spreading branches which were fun to climb. I liked to scramble up to the second or third branch of the tree and survey the playground, pretending the school was my castle and I was king of of the playground. From my perch, Billy and Colin didn't scare me. And I also noticed a girl, Wendy, who had pigtails and lots of teeth and a dirty face, and was clearly tougher than the other girls and seemed to boss them around.

     There was a storage shed at one end of the playground where we kept bats and balls and blocks and pirate paraphernalia. And also a step ladder. One day I brought out the ladder "Hey, let's play fireman!" I called.

     A couple of boys came over and helped me carry the ladder over to the tree. We looked around at the girls, asking for a volunteer to climb up into the tree and let us rescue her. We needed a damsel in distress.

     Most of the girls either ignored us, or shook their heads, indicating there was no way they were climbing into the tree. But then Wendy stepped forward, saying she would volunteer. Before I could even say anything, she jumped up onto the first branch, then scrambled higher and settled onto a branch. Then she started yelling, "Help. Fire! Help! Help!

     Billy and Colin ran over and jumped into the sandbox and threw sand around, pretending to douse the flames. I positioned the ladder against the tree, ran up the steps, climbed onto Wendy's branch and helped her climb down to the safety of the sandbox.

     We started playing fireman every day at recess. Wendy always volunteered to be our damsel in distress, and I was always the fireman who saved her. Wendy and I became friends, and we climbed the tree together, and played fireman, and then Wendy started to sit next to me in the classroom and she began to call me "Sir."

     "You don't have to call me 'Sir,'" I told her.

     "I like to," she replied.

     "So do you like me?"

     "I like your hat," she said.

     With Wendy at my side, I became recognized as the fire chief. Other kids, even Billy and Colin, deferred to me in the sandbox. In the classroom, Wendy and I were picked to hand out supplies, or to demonstrate a project. We were pressed to the front of the room for story time, and when I was picked as one of the kickball captains, I always chose Wendy as the first person to be on my team.

     Eventually, I came up with enough courage to start taking the bus. I was then instantly qualified to join the elite group of boys -- including Billy and Colin -- who made fun of kids who got a ride to school from their parents because they were too "little" to take the bus.

     But one day, Billy and Colin cornered me in the bathroom to challenge my new-found authority at nursery school. I tried to bluff my way through. I reminded them that I was the one who picked kickball players -- and no one wanted to be among the last chosen. I mentioned Wendy, and how the two of us were the prime players in the fireman game. The two boys backed off, but I could tell the challenge wasn't over. I was not the biggest or the baddest kid in nursery school. I had to think of something.

     Over the next few days, as the boys kept eying me, I stuck close to Wendy. I knew instinctively that the only reason I was a big shot in nursery school was because Wendy liked me. Nevertheless, I liked being boss -- being called on by the teacher, leading the kids on the playground, having Wendy call me "Sir."

     Billy and Colin found me up in the tree, at recess a few days later. They pressed me about why I got to boss people around. Why did I always have to be the fire chief?

     I finally thought of my brother, and our little escapade in the playhouse in our backyard. And so I looked Billy in the eye, and gave Colin a cold stare, and then I told them in conspiratorial tones : Okay, you win. You can be bosses.

     They nodded in agreement, as though I'd finally seen the light.

     So, I told them with as much authority as I could muster, that I was appointing both of them assistant fire chiefs. They both smiled; they'd confronted me and gotten what they wanted. What they didn't realize was that by accepting their appointments as assistants, they were acknowledging that I was the top chief.

     And so it happened that my two buddies settled for being little bosses. I took over as the big boss. And Wendy kept calling me "Sir."

How to Get a Job

     In my last blog post I complained about the lack of jobs, especially the lack of decent jobs in our American economy. I admit to a certain personal interest in this. I've been one of those underemployed individuals since the last recession in 2002. Going on ten years. I don't work in construction, real estate or finance, so the housing boom of the 2000s did me no good.

     I'm not counted in official government figures for the long-term unemployed. I'm deliberately overlooked. So are a number of my friends who have been struggling along with occasional consulting jobs or freelance work, at a small fraction of the salary they used to make when they were middle-manager types.

     So I thought, maybe I should see if I could come up with some ideas for improving the job picture, since I'm the one complaining about it.

     Uhhh ... this is going to be a short post.

    But I'm not the only one with no ideas. Certainly the Republicans didn't have anything that worked very well, relying on old-fashioned trickle-down economics. They gave tax-breaks to the rich, in the hopes that rich people with even more money would somehow start hiring more employees. Maybe a few extra butlers and chauffeurs did get hired, but it didn't make a dent in the unemployment rate.

     The other Republican idea was to give the banks lots of free money, again hoping they would make loans to home buyers and car buyers who would in turn spur production in the auto business and the construction business. This maneuver did help out the car companies a little bit, at great cost, and Ford and GM have hired back a fraction of the workers they laid off in 2007-08. It has not worked for the construction business, since the only people buying real estate are investors taking advantage of desperate people behind are on their mortgages. And the few regular people who want to buy a house usually find they don't qualify for a mortgage from banks that have suddenly made their lending standards tighter than a rusted screw.

     Banks were also supposed to lend that free money to small businesspeople to expand their businesses and hire new workers. The trouble is, most small businesses are not interested in expanding in a weak economy. So instead, the bankers pocketed the money as "bonuses."

     If the Republican ideas for creating jobs were old, inefficient and largely ineffectual ... well, at least they had ideas. The Democrats have no ideas at all. They've simply continued with the Republican policies -- giving free money to the banks, extending tax breaks for the rich, keeping interest rates artificially low. Why should we be surprised? The architect of the Democratic strategy is the same as the architect of the Republican strategy -- Ben Bernanke.

     I happen to like Mr. Bernanke, and I think he's a very smart man. I felt the same way about Jimmy Carter.

     One thing the Democrats have done is debase the dollar, and that does seem to have helped a little. When the dollar is worth less, American goods are cheaper abroad, so it's easier for our companies to sell their products and services around the world. The export business is up, and employment is up too. Computer companies, which do a lot of business overseas, have been making money and hiring people. As MerCyn pointed out, just yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that California's information technology sector added 5.3 percent more jobs in March. And a company like Caterpillar, which sells farm equipment around the world, has seen its profits grow as tall as Midwestern corn -- and Caterpillar has been hiring. Just one small example: Caterpillar is currently signing up about 600 people to staff a distribution center in Ohio.

      All these efforts have produced some growth in employment. As I pointed out in my last post, the American economy last month created 244,000 jobs, the third month in a row that businesses have added more than 200,000 new jobs. But as I also pointed out, after a precipitous three-year decline, we have a long, long way to go to get back to a vibrant economy that will provide opportunities for ourselves and our children. Experts have estimated that at the current pace of job creation, the economy won’t return to full employment until 2018.

     So what else can we do? Bernanke will probably continue to lower the value of the dollar to increase our exports to the world. That's a good thing. We should probably lower taxes on American corporations (rather than increase them as some liberals are saying), but that should be coupled with some sort of incentive program to hire Americans rather than people in other countries. We could (but probably won't) lower the payroll (aka Social Security) tax. After all, every employee costs a company an extra 7.5 percent for its share of the payroll tax, and it's just one more reason not to hire on another person.

     And speaking of the "extra" costs that companies take on when they hire an employee, one significant way to encourage corporations to hire more people would be to get the health insurance gorilla off their backs -- by converting to some kind of national health-care system.

     As for what you and I can do -- well, it seems that education and training are the keys to a decent job. I know (again as I reported in my last post) that the New America Foundation, in an April 2011 report called "The American Middle Class Under Stress," claims that our underemployment is not due to a lack of skills, but to the new structure of the job market. The report cites people with college degrees doing jobs for which a college degree is not necessary -- including one out of every eight waiters and waitresses, and more than one out of eight parking lot attendants.

     Nevertheless, I also saw a news report on this year's college graduates in California. Kids graduating with engineering degrees are getting an average of three job offers each. Not too shabby.

     It reminds me of the old joke about the theater major coming out of college, asking what lines she should learn -- and the response was:  "Would you like fries with that?"

     It seems obvious, but our kids are not listening. They should not automatically jump into a liberal arts college. They should instead consider a vocational school that teaches them a real skill. If they do go to college, they should not major in sociology, women's studies or theater arts. They should major in engineering, information systems or nursing. And learn another language like Spanish, German or Chinese.

     When I met B a few years ago, I had just lost a job, and she had just lost a husband. At the time, I thought about going back to school. But I felt that I had paid my dues. I was tired of working, and I sure as hell didn't want to start over. Now, seven or eight years later, I'm doing essentially the same work I did before I lost my job -- except I'm doing it part-time, at half the price, with no benefits.

     B, on the other hand, decided she would go back to school. She worked part time, and took classes in the evening, and there were times when she wondered why she was doing this at her stage of life. But she persevered, and at age 55 graduated with a master's degree. Now she has a new career ... with health insurance, vacation time and all those other benefits we used to have.

     So don't ask me how to get a job. Ask B!

The Missing Word

     A new jobs report came out last week, saying the "number of Americans filing for jobless aid rose to an eight-month high, clouding the outlook for an economy that is struggling to gain speed."

     Economists had expected unemployment claims to fall, but instead new claims rose 43,000 to 474,000, the highest since mid-August. Other reports, according to Reuters, showed weaker employment growth in the manufacturing and services sectors in April, while hiring by U.S. small businesses has almost ground to a halt.

     So why should those of us who are retired care about the job picture?

     For one thing, workers are consumers, and consumers support 70 percent of the economy. With fewer people working, the economy will never fully recover and our living standards will inevitably decline. With fewer workers paying taxes, states will never be able to close their budget gaps, and the federal government will sink further and further into debt.

     Workers also pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. A smaller workforce means less money for seniors, less money to pay Medicare bills.

 
     And here's the disturbing long-term trend. Since 2000 the U. S. population has increased by almost 30 million people. But as this graph shows, we have the same number of jobs -- actually not quite as many jobs. That means, compared to ten years ago, there are 30 million more Americans who are not working.

     The government reports that the unemployment rate has inched down to around 9 percent, from a high of over 10 percent. But 9 percent is pretty bad. And the only way anyone can even get to 9 percent is by not counting the millions who have dropped out of the workforce -- people too discouraged to look for work, but who would gladly take a job if they could get one. The broader rate of unemployment, which includes people who work part-time but want a full-time job and people who have given up looking for work, is 16 percent, nearly double the official rate. (And you can count me, and several of my friends, in that 16 percent.)

     To add insult to injury, we not only have fewer workers, they are making less money. Yet they have to support more people who are not working -- people on unemployment, people on Social Security, and people in their own households who may once have been working but no longer are -- or who may be expected to work (such as recent college graduates) but aren't.

     The most recent report says that wages increased 1.9 percent in the last year. But inflation increased 2.7 percent. So even ignoring the unemployed, we are a little bit poorer than last year at this time.
 

     One major problem is that middle-income jobs are disappearing from the economy. Many administrative and managerial jobs have been replaced by low-income jobs in retail, restaurants and tourism. The share of middle-income jobs in the United States has fallen from 52% in 1980 to 42% in 2010, while low-income jobs have increased from 30 percent to 40 percent of total employment.

     And while it's easy to blame our schools and our kids, the problem is not a lack of skills, but the structure of the job market. According to a recent study by the New America Foundation, some 17 million Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree. For example, 30 percent of flight attendants and 16 percent of telemarketers have bachelor’s degrees even though this credential is not necessary for these jobs.

     And there's another reason why we should care. We're at the stage of life when we're supposed to cultivate our generative qualities. When we get to our 60s, our own ambitions and selfish concerns are supposed to take a backseat to those who are following us. We're supposed to extend our concerns into the future and care about the next generation, and the one after that. Don't we want our children to have the same, or better, opportunities than we had? Don't we want to pass on to our grandchildren a better world, one where they can live a decent life, and fulfill their dreams?

     On Friday there was one mildly optimistic note. The American economy created 244,000 jobs last month, the third month in a row that it has seen more than 200,000 new jobs. After a precipitous three-year decline, private employers have been adding jobs for a little over one year. That's the right hand side of the graph up above. But as you can see, we have a long way to go. Experts say at the current pace of job creation, the economy won’t return to full employment until 2018.

     So is it any surprise that Americans are losing faith in the economy, even in their society? What does the future of democracy hold for us if it cannot create jobs, produce higher incomes, and make our futures more secure?

     Jobs. That's the missing ingredient in our economy. So I, for one, would encourage our president, the congress, our state governments -- and everybody else -- to think about that one missing word. Jobs. Because more jobs and better paying jobs are the key to solving our other economic problems, from the federal deficit to the funding (and fairness) of Social Security and Medicare.

     Having a better job, or even having  a choice of jobs, might also lift our spirits a little bit.

Turning Over a Rolling Stone

     I don't know why, but I consider this clip completely mesmerizing -- so I thought I'd share. It's the lead guitar part of "Gimme Shelter" as played by Keith Richards, from the 1969 album Let It Bleed.

     If you like this, you may want to know that there are a number of other "isolated tracks" on youtube, and many of them offer a whole new perspective on a song. Another one I thought was pretty cool:  the isolated keyboard and bass track for "Get Back" by the Beatles.

     By the way, as I'm sure Rolling Stones fans are aware, Keith Richards recently published his autobiography, Life. The book came out in paperback just this past week. I must admit I haven't read it, but according to all reports, it covers the lead guitarist of the world's greatest band (or depending on your taste, age or point of view, the world's second or third greatest band) and his marathon journey into music, Mick, marijuana and money -- and also a few things that don't alliterate, such as sex and heroin.

     Enjoy!

Remember Her?

     I was at a church rummage sale this past weekend and came across a videotape of an old movie that reminded me of this woman. I didn't buy the tape -- who has a tape deck anymore? -- but I wonder if you can guess who she is. Don't scroll down and cheat!

     The woman was born in The Bronx in 1931. Her given name was Anna Maria Louisa Italiano. She graduated from high school in 1948 and went to the Actors Studio in New York, and later to the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women at UCLA.

     She appeared in several early television shows under the name Anna Marno, then changed her name again when she made her film debut in a 1952 movie called Don't Bother to Knock, a thriller starring Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe.

As a young actress

     She was unimpressed with the studio system that ruled Hollywood in the early 1950s, so she moved back to New York to appear opposite Henry Fonda in a play called Two for the Seesaw. For her role as Gittel Mosca, who falls in love with Fonda's character, she won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play.

     Her big break came in 1960 with the role of Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher in the play The Miracle Worker. Two years later she reprised the role in the movie version, and won the Academy Award for Best Actress, beating out several high-powered stars of the time including Katharine Hepburn.

     A few years later she received a second Academy Award Best Actress nomination for her performance in the Pumpkin Eater, a film based on a British drama with Peter Finch playing her philandering husband. But this time she lost out to Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins.

     Her most famous role came in 1967 when she took on a part as a family friend and "older woman," for which she received a third Oscar nomination for Best Actress. This time she lost to the woman she beat in 1960, Katharine Hepburn, who played the mother in the groundbreaking race-relations movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

     In the meantime, she met comedian Mel Brooks backstage at the Perry Como Show. The two stars got married in 1964, and in a rare instance of a long-running Hollywood union, they stayed married for 41 years, until she died in 2005. They had one son, Max Brooks, who became a writer on Saturday Night Live and has published several books involving Zombies, apparently (although I do not keep up on the Zombie literature) from both a dramatic and humorous point of view. Max, a 1994 graduate of Pitzer College, in Claremont, Ca., will give the keynote speech at this year's Pitzer commencement ceremony on May 14.

     The old movie I saw at the rummage sale was, of course, The Graduate. And the person I'm thinking of is Anne Bancroft, who at age 36 played the iconic role of Mrs. Robinson, the neighbor who seduced Benjamin Braddock, played by 30-year-old Dustin Hoffman, in this quintessential Baby Boomer movie.

In The Graduate, 1967

     Just as an interesting footnote, The Graduate was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Anne Bancroft for Best Actress, Dustin Hoffman for Best Actor, Katharine Ross for Best Supporting Actress. But the movie garnered only one win:  Mike Nichols as Best Director.