Author: Working Stiffed

The Deep State Coup of Trump Will Kill Economic Recovery

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There is a deep state coup in the works right now that stands to destroy the Trump-driven economic recovery we are currently experiencing, as well as our constitutional republic. This is a most frightening development for the millions of Americans who are finally starting to get back on their feet after suffering economic destitution during Obama’s divisive, un-American eight-year reign. Lies and misery will be that clown’s legacy.

I make this observation from personal experience, not force-fed, regurgitated talking points from MSM or alternative media outlets. During Obama’s last five years in office, I came close to losing everything I had worked hard to attain throughout my 35-year career, including my home.

Proof of Trump’s Economic Recovery

I enjoyed a moderately successfully career in middle management until the company I worked for was acquired by a competitor in 2011. That’s when my nightmare began. I was one of many casualties of the merger & acquisition (M&A) craze that has infested our economy in the 21st century, antitrust laws be damned. Monopoly is not only a board game, it’s the new normal for Corporate America.

I wasn’t immediately concerned when I was displaced, because I was very good at my job and had excellent references. I wasn’t prepared for the radical changes that had taken place under Obama’s then two-year tenure as president.

I soon discovered that the gig economy was being peddled as the new norm and full-time jobs had disappeared. Obamacare made employers resistant to hiring full-timers and I found myself competing against a flood of H1-B Visa employees or cheap offshore labor. I was stuck in a transient employment hell world. Since I live alone and support myself, this was a disastrous situation.

As the years ticked by, I found myself lurching from one short-term “gig” to the next, sometimes going months between assignments. While I waiting for Obama’s “hope” and “change” to kick in, I nibbled away at my modest nest egg until it was almost depleted. And when I needed to withdraw money from my 401(k) to pay my bills and eat, I was penalized, despite being just a few years short of the being eligible to withdraw these funds without penalty.

Obama never waived these penalties or offered any assistance to the middle class workers who were sliding into impoverishment; in fact, he worked overtime to hasten our demise by pushing for the job-killing, globalist screw job known as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He had fundamentally transformed America, all right, but not in the way he led most of us to believe he would when he bullshitted us into voting for him (twice, in my case).

Because of Obamacare, I went without insurance for two years. I couldn’t afford it and, to add insult to injury, I was subjected to penalties, which, duh!, I couldn’t afford, either. Medicaid wasn’t an option, because I managed to keep a couple of thousand in the bank.

For the first time in my life, I was uninsured and I was over 50. The blows kept coming and, like millions of other middle class U.S. citizens, I was sliding into the abyss. When I hear people say now that they wish Obama was still president, I’m sorry, but I want to hit them in the face with a shovel.

The day that Trump was elected, I had not had a single job prospect in five months and my home (which I love so much) had been on the market for a month. As hard as it was to have real estate agents show my beloved home, I prayed I could sell it before I ran out of money. I knew that if Hillary Clinton won, it would be game over for me.

I’m not surprised there’s an opioid epidemic; millions of Americans like me were made punch drunk with despair during Obama’s presidency. I never succumbed to the need to numb my pain or disengage from my hideous reality, but I can certainly understand why some people chose that dark road.

I was on my knees praying to God for an answer; a way out. Days later, Trump won the election and my life was transformed almost overnight.

Four days after Trump’s election, I got an offer for a full-time job. The pay wasn’t great, but it allowed me to pay my bills and take my home off the market. It was a real job with benefits. My phone started ringing and my email was filling up with job prospects (they still are). It was unreal! Four months later, I got another job making twice as much money. There is no question that Trump made all of this happen.

It didn’t surprise me to hear this week that during the first six months of Trump’s presidency, a million jobs were created and that investors in the stock market have made $4 trillion! And now that Trump has deep-sixed the Obamacare penalty and is tightening up immigration and work visa policies, wage growth is starting to become a reality after decades of stagnation!

The deep state doesn’t want to let Trump “Make America Great Again.” They are censoring or downplaying reports of the Trump recovery and they are openly calling for a coup.

Former CIA Director John Brennan, along with former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, went on Wolf Blitzer’s show a couple of weeks ago and called for a bipartisan Congressional coalition to remove Trump from office if he fired special prosecutor Mueller (the Clinton operative who was appointed to investigate Trump-Russian collusion, despite no evidence that any crime was committed).

A few days later, former Vice President Al Gore went on James Corden’s show and said that a “challenging event” is imminent regarding Trump. Really? What? An assassination, maybe? Why these treasonous piles of excrement haven’t been arrested, thrown in a dungeon and charged with sedition and/or treason is beyond me. Clearly, these traitors, minions of the deep state, are planning a coup.

Let me tell you something: the millions of Americans who are just starting to crawl out of Obama’s economic destitution pit are not going to take this lying down.

The elites and snowflakes who flipped out when Crooked Hillary lost, insist on calling us homophobic, misogynists and/or racists. They refuse to acknowledge that we voted for Trump, because we were being suffocated into nonexistence as a result of Obama’s policies…the same policies that Hillary Clinton was committed to maintaining and expanding.

These accusations were particularly hurtful to me as a lesbian who fought for LGBT rights in the 80s and 90s. I lost a lot of friends, as a matter of fact: people who have known me for decades unfriended me on Facebook and no longer speak to me. I thought these people knew and cared about me, but the mass mental illness that has resulted from the constant stream of hate and lies MSM and Hollywood are vomiting every minute has distorted their sense of reality.

Millions of friendships, marriages and family relationships all of over the country have been destroyed by this massive, collective manipulation. What the globalist, deep state propagandists are doing is positively diabolical.

As hurtful as these losses have been, I know they won’t compare to the devastation we will experience if we let these treasonous, un-elected members of the globalist deep state “eliminate” our president. It will mean the end of our country and dark days for all Americans.

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When Your Manager is too Busy to Manage

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You just started a new job and you discovered that your manager is too busy to manage; they’re not available to provide you with any sort of orientation, thorough understanding of the expectations they have of you or the resources you need to achieve those expectations. Sound familiar?

We hear it in every job interview: hiring managers say they’re looking for a “self-starter” who can “jump in” and “run with the ball.” We should run… for the nearest exit, but how many of us can afford to these days? “Self-starter” terminology is the calling card of a “drive-by” manager who will have zero time for you from day one, but who’ll expect you to hit it out of the park while blindfolded.

You’ll spend too much time hunting them down to get clarity or direction on a project; sometimes you’ll need to catch them on the way to the bathroom, and they’ll wave you off by telling you to look for stuff on a network drive filled with hundreds of mysteriously labeled folders or the company’s poorly designed intranet site, which has limited search capabilities.

Sometimes, they’ll tell you to reach out to “Jack” or “Cindy”…and neglect to tell you their last name or function. This is how EVERY major company in the U.S. runs these days.

Often, there isn’t even someone on your “team” who can provide you with any guidance in your manager’s absence. I remember when companies filled departments with people who served a specific function. Today’s masters of the universe assign one person to handle the workload of three or more people. That’s why the corridors of Corporate America are filled with bleary-eyed zombies who frequently miss lunch and subsist on 10 hours of sleep a week. It’s a wonder any organization can run at all.

Limited or non-existent support personnel are not the byproduct of the wonders of technology; they’re the result of bipolar leadership enamored with achieving “economies of scale;” translation: if they hire fewer people, they get to keep most of the money. And they do.

Data from annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) found that in 2014, senior executives made 949 times more money than the average worker; a far greater margin than the 271:1 ratio the Economic Policy Institute reported last month. How far have we fallen? Fifty years ago, the ratio was only 50:1.

Dis-organization Structure

You may have noticed that your company has a boatload of executives who make fat salaries and either do nothing at all, or they spend their days behind closed doors with other senior management/executive colleagues reviewing PowerPoints of plans or strategies that will never be implemented (either because of lack of funds or because other priorities emerged to make that priority obsolete before they broke for lunch).

Sometimes, they’ll forget to tell the minions putting in late nights and weekends working on the now-obsolete priority project that it’s been scrapped until days (and many work hours) later.

Most mid-sized or large organizations have a C-suite Chief “Something-or-other” Officer who reports to the CEO. The unpopular member or idiot of the C-suite bunch is undermined with a “non-C” title of executive vice president; reporting into the ruling classless are too many senior vice presidents, vice presidents, assistant vice presidents and directors—this is where all the “Game of Thrones”-like activity takes place.

While the execs indulge in leadership turf wars and useless, daylong meetings, the managers, specialists or coordinators (who are excluded from the Big Dog huddles) handle the day-to-day activities that keep the lights on, despite not being involved in any key decision-making discussions.

This would all be laugh-out-loud funny if wasn’t so physically, emotionally and, yes, fiscally detrimental to the well-being of all employees. C-suite wannabees are so caught up in the politics of managing up and jockeying for position that they don’t lead their employee(s) or keep them up to speed on important company- or industry-related issues; often, worker bees get their company information from external media sources.

But somehow, they are expected to know all and to deliver on a moment’s notice. Sometimes, you’ll get a call or email at some ungodly hour of the night or on the weekend with an “urgent” request to handle something in an hour that would ordinarily take a week.

The odds are good that your boss received the information or request more than a week earlier, but they just got around to opening the email…or they knew about it, but were so busy with other “priorities” that it fell through the cracks and now they’ve made it your monkey at (literally) the eleventh hour. Obviously, you should have been included in the meetings on the issue.

Dysfunction Junction

At some point after a couple of months on the job, your drive-by manager may become inpatient with having to “micromanage” you, because you run everything past them before sharing it with high level stakeholders. Because of their lack of sleep, they forget that the week before they told you to run everything past them. How do you manage sleep-deprived, malnourished, overwork-related psychosis? And how can you not be paranoid that your contributions might be off the mark?

Should you point out to your boss that they are habitually unavailable to provide appropriate guidance to help you get to the level where you can feel comfortable with your output, or do you shut up, wing it and hope you get it right? Lose-lose. If you miss the mark too often, you’re out of a job. And if you tell your boss he or she is a lousy manager, you’re out of a job.

What happened to “working smarter?” It seemed to begin its slide into oblivion around the 2008 financial collapse, and now it looks like they finally slapped the toe tag on it. That’s too bad.

I recall when a well-staffed team led by a capable director got things done quickly and efficiently. Companies that are top-heavy with low- or unproductive executives, drive-by managers and one or two disconnected worker bees are spending a whole lot of money to yield little or nothing in return. We’re not overachieving; we’re just overworked…and overdue for smarter, focused and attentive leadership.

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Disposable Job Applicants: Today’s Dehumanizing Recruiting Practices

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The three biggest lies in the world are: “the check is in the mail,” “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” and when recruiters tell you “we’ll get back to you.”The dehumanizing recruiting practices that recruiters and/or human resources (HR) professionals employ these days are downright reptilian in nature. Now that the gig economy has produced an endless supply of desperate job seekers, job applicants are disposable.

Call me...maybe??? Not reptilian recruiters
Call me…maybe??? Don’t expect a response from a reptilian recruiter.

I addressed this unfortunate trend in my first post for this blog last year and it looks as if things have gotten even worse. It doesn’t matter if you do a preliminary phone interview or if you’re called back for multiple face-to-face interviews and are a runner-up for a position, the odds that a recruiter or HR contact will get back to you if you aren’t chosen for a job are slim to none. And don’t even think about asking for feedback as to why you weren’t hired; they can’t be bothered.

I had an experience with Deutsche Bank a while back that made my blood boil. Their recruiter found me on LinkedIn and, after a preliminary phone interview went well, I was asked to come in for a face-to-face interview with a handful of people who interacted with the position they sought to fill.

I was asked to come in two more times to meet more people and then…nothing…no call or email thanking me for my time and informing me that they hired someone else. After getting the big rush, I found myself getting the bum’s rush.

I emailed the recruiter weeks later and got a curt response saying that I didn’t get the job (which I already knew), and she completely ignored my request for feedback; I wanted to know why, after being brought in numerous times to meet an army of people, I wasn’t chosen.

That feedback can be helpful when interviewing for future positions. This was a courtesy that HR recruiters (back when they were known as personnel department staff) readily provided. Besides, I didn’t even apply for the job; they sought me out, so how dare they blow me off?

I went out of my way to accommodate them, despite the expense involved with multiple interviews (commuting, wardrobe, portfolio material, etc.). You can barely afford these expenses when you’re unemployed.

Return to sender: applicant unknown

More recently, I was contacted by a former employer who seemed eager to bring me back into the fold; I had had some success with the company a few years back and still had some friends there, so I was excited about the possibility of going back. After a phone interview that went well, the hiring manager seemed eager for me to come in the very next day for a face-to-face interview with his VP.

Inevitably, he couldn’t make it happen, because they were planning to leave on a two week tour of the company’s facilities the day after and they were super busy. I wasn’t surprised they couldn’t make the meeting happen, but I assumed we would reconnect when they returned.

It’s been five weeks and I’m still waiting. I sent the hiring manager a LinkedIn message more than a week ago and he hasn’t responded. I have no idea if they decided not to fill the job (it was a newly created position), or if someone internally didn’t want to rehire me or if they found someone cheaper. At this point, I guess I’ll never know.

This scenario plays out over and over. I’m at the point where I don’t trust any “good” interviews anymore. I’m not alone; my friends tell me they are experiencing this phenomena, as well. There’s simply no follow-through anymore. If you aren’t selected for a job, you’re expected to just vaporize, no questions asked.

You can get whiplash from this type of interaction. No wonder record numbers of people have stopped looking for work; who has the stomach for this type of abuse? When you lose your job and struggle to find work, you’re already operating with a diminished self-esteem. Being disposed of in such an inhumane manner can destroy what little mojo you have left.

A message to recruiters

Here’s the thing: it’s not okay. So what if you have hundreds of candidates to choose from? Your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) bots do most of the work for you, anyway. If you reach out to a handful of prospects and take up their time (and money) with phone, Skype or in-person interviews, your job doesn’t end if the hiring manager doesn’t choose them for the job.

Call or email them and let them know they didn’t get the job and, if possible, why. It’s not that hard to do, or time consuming…and it’s the right thing to do. Karma can be a bitch, you know. And in this gig economy,  if this is how you roll, it’s highly likely that someday soon you will be the one waiting for a call or email that will never come.

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American Workers are Less Productive: No Job Security, No Motivation

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American workers are not feeling the love. A lack of job security, combined with increasing responsibilities (and fewer resources) has resulted in exhaustion, low morale, lack of motivation and (drum roll please)…lower productivity.

The U.S. Department of Labor said last Tuesday, that productivity fell 0.5 percent in the second quarter of 2016, while labor costs rose by 2 percent. U.S. worker productivity has been weak for the past five years and stands at 1.2 percent, less than half of what it was before the 2007 recession, when it was at 2.6 percent.American Workers are Less Productive

Many economists say Americans are working more to create less, because workers have outgrown existing technology. As a result, we can expect “restraining” of wage growth and more layoffs. And so the epidemic of myopic economics continues.

Don’t these geniuses realize that reducing financial incentives and increasing employee workloads as the result of layoffs will only drive productivity down further? These “experts” may know the price of everything, but they know the value of nothing.

U.S. workers today are routinely being pushed to their mental and physical breaking points. Workplaces are toxic work environments staffed by people either in the midst of a psychotic break or on the brink of one. The stench of fear and uncertainty lingers in every cubicle, assembly line, water cooler, coffeemaker and non-subsidized vending machine.

It doesn’t help that employers like Disney, Toys ‘R Us, Xerox, Pfizer, and Microsoft are turning to “insourcing” of H1-B visa workers in order to lower their payroll costs, despite posting record earnings…and then they force their poor displaced American employees to train their “guest” worker replacements or forfeit their severance.

Corporate Hunger Games?

As an unwilling participant of the gig economy, I’ve been flitting in and out of different corporate offices for the past four years. The mass psychosis and/or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) I see is alarming, but not surprising.

When you experience three or four (or more) reorgs a year and know that on any given day you could walk into work and be handed a severance package, even if you’ve been a rock star employee (damn those surprise mergers!), it’s bound to damage your psyche to some extent at some point. And at the end of the day, you become aware that there is no “i” in team, but there is one in “survive.”

This past year, I’ve had two assignments where the person responsible for training me held back information I needed to know in order to do my job. Both women were overworked and clearly needed my help, so I can only conclude that they felt that if I knew as much as they did, they wouldn’t survive the next reorg.

They obviously felt it was safer to be overworked to the point of mental and physical exhaustion than to have the well-trained help they desperately needed. How sick is that? Still, they survived round after round of layoffs and salary dumps, so I suppose it’s not an unrealistic fear to expect to be replaced by a contractor who probably made less than they did.

Needless to say, this epidemic of fear and loathing in workplace after workplace makes it hard to stick to a new employer, even when you do a good job under most challenging circumstances. It’s like an endless loop of different movies made with the same script. Sometimes, I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

No rest for the corporate weary

This environment of perpetual job insecurity has scared workers into being on the job 24/7. According to a study by Project Time, more than half of U.S. workers left unused vacation time in 2015. In fact, over the past 15 years, American workers have been taking less and less vacation time.

These poor souls likely feel that if they take time off, their bosses might replace them with an intern or hourly contractor…or worse, that someone of importance may decide that their department functions just fine without anyone in their role.

These are the same people who make work calls after dinner and send emails at 11 p.m. on Saturdays in an endless quest for validation and job security. It’s madness! But this is exactly the frame of mind that bipolar CEOs value in their employees.

Rising labor costs? No shit!

Hiring people costs money, and when your business model involves having a revolving door of “talent,” even if you’re replacing 20 full-time employees with 10 gig contractors or H1-B visa guest workers, you’ll end up throwing a lot of good money after bad. Recruiters, equipment and training costs add up.

And then there is the learning curve. It takes a while (sometimes years) before most employees achieve optimal knowledge of their company and/or industry. Many employers learn the hard way that inexperience can be pretty costly, especially in industries that are heavily regulated.

And how many times have employers carelessly displaced long-time employees, only to find they also unwittingly displaced a lot of company knowledge that their low-cost millennial or H1-B visa colleagues didn’t have? Too many; but they repeat the process, anyway. Einstein said the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. So, there you go.

And while we’re on the subject of insanity: If a company wants to treat employees like disposable widgets, then they should stop asking employees to participate in charitable drives in the company’s name. This is inconsiderate at best, and perverse (or even sociopathic) at worst.

Also, I’m not sure why this isn’t obvious, but it’s never a good idea to have leadership team members spew empty rhetoric about “teamwork” and “commitment” at employee or town hall meetings in the same breath that they announce layoffs. What is up with that? I can’t think of a better way to incite workplace violence or corporate espionage. Seriously.

When I worked at Philip Morris in the 90s, we were hit by lawsuits left and right while dodging regulatory challenges by the FDA. If our then CEO had followed today’s popular strategy of slashing headcount and hiring cheap labor, the company probably would have folded before the end of the millennium.

Instead, they doubled down on staffing up, paying above average salaries and they had the best benefits. They understood that if they were going to survive, they needed a knowledgeable and dedicated workforce. Not only did the company survive, but it thrived…the stock split multiple times during the 90s and they’re still around today.

If employees feel valued, enjoy support, and know that if they do a good job, they’ll not only stay employed but they can expect to be promoted and rewarded financially, well…there’s no end to the growth a company can experience. Until “leaders” rediscover the core fundamentals of entrepreneurial success, true growth and peak productivity will likely remain elusive.

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A Casualty of the Gig Economy: My Life in the Brave New Workplace

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A lot is written about the trendy, flexible perks of the gig economy. Sure, it can be “liberating,” if you have a husband or wife who is a high-powered lawyer or doctor and you can “gig” with abandon between sessions of binge-watching “Orange is the New Black,” but for those of us in single-income households, these new “alternative work arrangements” are nothing short of a nightmare that keeps us on the constant brink of financial disaster.

The gig economy is even harder on people over 50; we’re less likely to be able to slide into consecutive contract positions as effortlessly as workers who are in their 20s or 30s.

Last week, my latest “gig” ended prematurely, because the multi-billion dollar medical device company that had hired me just three months earlier decided to dump all the contractors in my business unit. This was the “first wave” of their third reorg in six months.

This was supposed to be a one year assignment…so much for honoring our contract. I didn’t see this one coming, because several managers had sent my manager unsolicited compliments about my work and I really liked it there.

I actually thought I had a shot of staying on and eventually becoming an FTE (full-time employee). My hiring manager even dangled that possibility during my interview. Huh…foolish mortal. At the end of the day, I was just another anonymous blip on some overcompensated executive’s spreadsheet.

Health care or wealth care?

This scenario was déjà vu all over again for me; the gig I had before this one — this time with a multi-million dollar health care system that is owned by a multi-billion dollar global chemical company (chew on that alliance for a while) — ended exactly the same way after only four months. Again, I was told this was a one year assignment, and again, I was caught under the wheels of a budget-cutting reorg.

It’s not just small- or medium-sized budget-conscious businesses that treat their workforce like the girlfriend they like to sleep with but will never marry, its billion dollar health care conglomerates, and equally flush Wall Street and Silicon Valley mega-employers.

If they can’t afford to hire people at a decent wage and provide benefits, who can? Of course they can; they just don’t. And they have our government’s blessing to treat us like disposable napkins…wipe and toss.

After a lifetime of steady, salaried middle-management employment, it’s hard to find yourself unprotected as an independent contractor. Gone are jobs that pay a living wage that increase with time for work well done, humane work hours, job security, health insurance, pensions and other traditional benefits.

We no longer have rights or unions to protect us and keep us steadily employed. In fact, the globalist-owned media has been waging a successful propaganda campaign to demonize unions for years, while our politicians (beginning with Ronald Reagan) have been simultaneously gutting the rights of unions and union members.

This is a tragedy, especially since gig workers can go weeks (or months) without work and we live in fear of getting sick or injured, because if we can’t work, we can’t earn money. Frankly, I could use a strong union right about now.

And when we do find work, it’s usually through temp agencies we’ve never heard of (some are offshore). They place us and pay us (while taking a piece of every hour we work). All we can do is hope that, since they have our social security number and all of our proprietary information, that they don’t sell our identity to some cyber criminal or exploit it themselves.

What’s to stop them? I’m not aware of any protections in place. Again, this is not a priority for our “representatives” in government.

The curse of NAFTA

The table was set for our growing transient workforce with the passage of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). We have Bill, and yes, Hillary Clinton to thank for this travesty. NAFTA gave greedy corporate chieftains access to unlimited cheap, offshore labor and officially placed the middle class American worker on the extinction list.

The post-NAFTA war against the middle class began when companies started getting rid of our pensions; phase two involved outsourcing tech support and customer service to countries that provided cheap offshore labor for U.S.-based companies.

Eventually, with the assistance of bought-off members of Congress, greedy corporate titans started bringing in foreign workers through H1-B visas. The rationale was that there weren’t enough qualified people in this country to fill the many “jobs” they were creating.

This is a lie, as the recent Disney IT employee fiasco proves (they let go of their U.S. IT team, imported foreign workers to fill the positions at lower wages, and forced the displaced workers to train their replacements or forfeit their severance packages).

Other companies have, and continue, to follow Disney’s example. Mainstream media has (surprisingly) covered this issue, and still not a peep from Congress or Obama.

Elizabeth Warren did recently mention the need to address this issue, but to date, she hasn’t introduced any legislation to remedy the situation, so who cares what she thinks? She’s paid to fix these things. So, get to steppin’ Betty.

To make things worse, our taxes are used to provide these companies with subsidies. So, essentially, we’re paying for our own funeral.

More than half of all jobs created since 1995 were non-standard jobs, which include part-time workers, contract workers or self-employed people, according to a report published in May 2015 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

While our politicians hammer us with wedge issues like gun control, whine endlessly about the “humanitarian” need to let in an an endless stream of unvetted refugees and pat themselves on the the back for enforcing the “Dreamer Act,” they ignore the plight of their constituents, the  American worker.

The American middle class is dying, and while Congress and Obama administer the last rites, it’s becoming obvious that there won’t be anyone left to attend the funeral.

At my most recent “gig,” I worked with some people who had been employed for anywhere from six to 18 years. The only three people “hired” within the past year, including me, were contractors…not one FTE.

One of the “vested” employees often griped about the threat of her bonus being sub-par this year. She knew that I had a solid career as a salaried management employee until recently and that, despite being good at my job, I couldn’t find a similar role in this economy.

She sympathized with my circumstances, but I could tell she didn’t think she was at risk of experiencing a similar fate…after all, what happened to me only happened to “other” people, not her. I wish I could tell her that she’s right, but I know better. The reality is that if we all don’t push our representative to fix this now, my gig worker misery will have a whole lotta company soon.

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Cognitive Dissonance and the LGBT Response to the Orlando Mass Shooting

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Orlando. Pulse Nightclub. A night that will live in infamy. As a lesbian liWorkingStiffed_Orlando Strongving in Florida, the Orlando mass shooting hits close to home for me, literally and figuratively.

While the Orlando massacre was an unspeakable tragedy, and we mourn the heartbreaking loss of too many young lives, I have to admit that I am dismayed by the LGBT community’s naïve and myopic failure to acknowledge this atrocity for what it is: radical Islamic terrorism.

This is not your garden variety hate crime, people; and banning assault weapons won’t stop future attacks. Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS during the attack. It’s no secret that ISIS has been targeting and murdering gays throughout the Middle East and that mosques throughout our country, including the one in Fort Pierce, FL that Mateen attended, preached that homosexuals should be murdered.

Obama calls this attack an act of “homegrown extremism,” but he refuses to acknowledge the Islamic root of that extremism. How can you defeat an enemy, if you refuse to identify them? You can hate Donald Trump all you want, but his take on this issue is spot on.

Jihadis also like to employ suicide bombers. How do you propose we ban or regulate them? Besides, when have criminals or terrorists ever followed the law? And, for that matter, what good is passing laws when the ones already in place are selectively enforced to appease politically correct sensibilities?

Then, there is the embarrassing systemic incompetence of our alphabet agencies. Mateen was interrogated by the FBI several times a couple of years ago and was still issued gun permits and was allowed to work as a security guard and subcontractor for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), no less. How the f*** does that happen? Who’s running our “intelligence” network, Barney Fife?

Oh, and so much for the NSA spying apparatus keeping us “safe”…I guess Mateen bypassed their radar, because they have their hands full monitoring white guys and veterans who hate Obama or Hillary.

This threat requires more sophisticated thinking

Let’s call out the elephant in the room that no politician, including Trump, is brave enough to point out, shall we? These terrorists are targeting us, because while we’ve been busy tweeting, taking selfies and posting to Snap Chat and Instagram, the bankers who own our politicians used our military to invade the Middle East under false pretenses and to depose rulers who didn’t serve us (really, them…the bankers).

How would we react if China or Russia overthrew our government, occupied our country and accidentally killed thousands of innocent citizens during bombings and drone strikes while they searched for what we would probably call freedom fighters?

True homegrown extremism: angry white guys

As for the non-jihadi mass shooters, those (mostly white) guys are a product of our broken economy and Big Pharma’s profit-driven assault on our bodies and minds. It’s not hard to spiral down into anger and despair these days; the spiking suicide rate among middle-aged white people confirms that.

The media plays a significant role in this. After all, we are constantly told that we live in a “consumer-based” economy, but when close to 100 million people in the U.S. aren’t working and there is no (or little) financial support available for U.S. citizens facing economic devastation, you can go sideways in a hurry, I imagine.

And to keep us docile and uninformed, news programming is saturated with mindless coverage of celebrities, instead of unbiased reports about economic or political issues that should be of importance to us. The overall message is that the key to happiness is to be as rich and famous as George Clooney or the Kardashians.

That’s not an easily attainable goal, especially when most of us can’t find or hold jobs (thanks to the go-to recipe for increasing shareholder value that calls for displacing hundreds, or even thousands, of people at a time).

Because our leaders can’t be bothered to work on improving economic opportunities for Americans, physicians are confronted with increasing numbers of broken, disenfranchised people. And they do what their pharmaceutical sales reps encourage them to do: they immediately place these unfortunate people on a steady diet of SSRI drugs, even though most MDs know that side effects include suicidal thoughts…or (ahem) violent tendencies. Problem…reaction…(dangerous) solution.

Others, (especially those who can’t afford prescription drugs and/or don’t qualify for Medicaid), are getting sucked into the heroin epidemic that seemed to materialize as soon as we “liberated” Afghanistan and started growing and importing heroin into this country. Voila! A perfect recipe for mass psychosis.

Instead of “Orlando Strong” we need to get “Orlando MAD”

So, what will stop mass shootings? For starters, putting wedge issues like trannie bathrooms and gorillas on the back-burner where they belong (although these concerns are worthy of discussion, they should not suck all of the air out of the room 24/7). Understand that the powers that be are using these issues to distract you from the big time criminality taking place in Washington and on Wall Street.

We need to focus on electing people who will represent us and throw out (and even arrest) the traitors in government who sold us down this river of insecurity, fear and loathing.

Our new representatives should then get us the hell out of the Middle East and other regions of the world where we don’t belong, prioritize bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., work to create more jobs…and, (drum roll, please)…reign in Big Pharma’s assault on us through overpriced, often damaging drugs and “anti-psychotics.”

Oh, and for God’s sake, the last thing we need is to allow Hillary Clinton to steal the presidency; in addition to her many crimes against humanity, as head of the State Department, our own Lady Macbeth was the midwife who oversaw the birth and growth of ISIS, so guess who has Orlando blood on her hands?

Politicians, led by Obama, and their mainstream media lackeys are working WorkingStiffed_PinkPistolsovertime spinning the narrative that this is solely a gun control issue and/or a homegrown homophobic hate crime; this is misleading at best and criminal at worst.

Sadly, many of my fellow LGBTers are guzzling this Kool-Aid. Thank God for enlighted LGBT groups like the Pink Pistols; they understand the folly of giving up your rights for “security.”

What makes this all the more perverse is that Obama and Congress are ignoring or supporting policies that actually jeopardize our safety: they are allowing our borders to stay wide open, they secretly import hundreds of thousands of unvetted Muslim “refugees” (BTW: Mateen was an employee of G4S, a global security firm used by the DHS to move illegal aliens around the country) and they refuse to deport illegal aliens from Latin America who commit crimes (even repeat offenders). Ask yourself, why?

As our modern-day prophet, George Carlin, once wisely observed: Terrorism involves a series of acts intended to put a civilian population in a state of panic, fear and uncertainty in order to achieve some political goal.

San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, the Boston Bombing, and now Orlando…no outcry about the religious, pharmacological, geopolitical or economic motives for these heinous crimes is allowed to be discussed in mainstream media (and dissenting voices are called racists or “conspiracy theorists” and are routinely censored by Facebook and Google and mainstream news sites). We’re just told that the magic remedy is to ban the guns. Again, why?

Tyrants throughout history have understood that disarming citizens is essential for complete domination. And this is accomplished so much easier when you can do it with the support of “useful idiots” (as Joseph Stalin called his brainwashed, compliant citizens).

To understand why, consider what Obama’s close friend (and current Chicago mayor), Rahm Emanuel, said while still at the White House: You never let a serious crisis go to waste. Indeed.

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Carly Fiorina: From HP Board Meetings to Iowa Bored Meetings

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Carly Fiorina’s hapless bid for the presidency should serve as a warning to all self-important corporate executives: Your hubris may not play in Peoria…or Des Moines, Iowa. The exception, of course, is Donald Trump…but then again, Trump didn’t need to slide on his belly, kneecapping smarter coworkers out of his way on his climb to the top; his daddy handed him a successful real estate empire.Carly Fiorina's Presidential Run

After making her mark at AT&T by plowing through a (probably small) crowd of female wannabe executives (from secretary to CEO!!!), Carly Fiorina was tapped to lead Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 1999. Her bipolar self-importance, coupled with her intense, ferret-like gaze, allowed her to become an extremely well-compensated poster girl for diversity in the tech industry. How cool was she to head a company in an industry dominated by men?

Six short years and many bad (often heartless) decisions later (the Compaq acquisition and her penchant for outsourcing everyone and everything top the list), she flushed away 50 percent of the company’s value and 30,000 jobs. In the end, Carly’s greatest achievement at HP was her resignation; the stock shot up 7 percent when she announced she was leaving the company.

This former tech “mogul” didn’t even have the common sense to purchase her own domain name. Instead, one of the many former HP workers that she displaced snatched up carlyfiorina.org and used the site to mock Carly and expose the extent of her relentless need to destroy jobs…in her own words. For example, after being asked how she would handle the layoffs at HP if she had to do it again, she replied: “I would have done them all faster.” O-kay.

Carly has been running for office (and losing) ever since, trying to regain a large canvas on which to paint her human carnage. Such pluck is admired by corporate board members who love putting tenacious, self-centered people in charge of companies…people who don’t mind getting a little (or a lot of) blood on their hands to achieve “economies of scale,” but in the real world, people like Carly are rightly shunned for being the psychopaths that they are.

After a career of failure, scandal, and a complete lack of empathy for the people whose lives she carelessly destroyed as HP’s CEO, politics beckoned. As a former corporate CEO, she didn’t feel the need to start at the bottom, so she ran for senator of California against the Yoda of female politicians, Barbara Boxer (who quickly schooled the “secretary-to-CEO” upstart). And now she wants to fail up to president and become the Republican Party’s Hillary Clinton. Such hubris. The Onion humorously captured her delusional aspirations, as only they can.

I suppose it’s easy to think you’re the cat’s pajamas when you spend years addressing a captive audience of employees who applaud and laugh at your bad jokes at town hall meetings. Still, there’s a big difference between addressing an audience of employees who depend on your approval to keep their jobs and addressing American voters, such as those at the Iowa caucuses this week, who you have to depend on to get the job.

Like all bipolar CEOs, when she does face rejection, she folds like a cheap suit. After a poor showing at the Iowa caucuses, she skipped town and her own party. No need to thank the few people who worked on her behalf; it was time to move on and be a world leader pretend at the next stop on the campaign trail…the New Hampshire primary.

Carly, like Hillary Clinton, are examples of what is wrong with too many women who achieve power. As a woman myself, I have to admit that I preferred working for men. Many of the women I worked for who had high aspirations viewed me as a threat (even though I never shared their C-suite aspirations) and felt it necessary to neutralize my contributions or even to take credit for my occasional good ideas. I can honestly say that I have inadvertently helped a lot of these women move up that coveted ladder without so much as a thank you from them.

I wish I could say that all women leaders are wise, gentle souls who have an innate desire to better the world and nurture the growth and development of other women, but that hasn’t been my experience. I can’t imagine what Carly did to her female coworkers during her meteoric rise up the corporate ladder at AT&T.

On some level, you have to blame the environment…with so few opportunities for women to break through the glass ceiling, I can see how an ambitious woman can turn into a psychopath trying to squeeze through the eye of the needle of achievement. Still, until we can level the corporate and political playing fields and the Lady Macbeth syndrome becomes the exception and not the rule, voters (and employees) need to proceed with caution.

This is the problem I have with identity politics. I’d love to see a woman become president (I wish Elizabeth Warren had decided to run), but I don’t support voting for a powerful woman just because she’s a woman. Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina are flawed, power-hungry, mentally ill women. And the reality is that after a life time of stepping on other women to get ahead, well…they don’t like other women, so why give them your vote, ladies? Neither would make a suitable first female president and it troubles me that so many women are blinded by ovaries wrapped in a power suit.

While it’s easy to single out Fiorina as a narcissistic, psychotic product of corporate dysfunction, the reality is that C-suites at companies nationwide are filled with Carly Fiorinas and even more bipolar or psychologically damaged men.

I wonder how different the corporate landscape would be if leaders were selected by employees, instead of by corporate board members who see personnel as “human resources.” A little more humility and a lot less hubris in leadership would be appreciated.

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Obamacare Has Sentenced Me to Death

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Yes, it’s true. Obamacare has sentenced me to death…and financial destitution. I feel it’s important to address this issue on this, the last day we are told to register for Obamacare without incurring an unconstitutional tax penalty.

I have been without health insurance, which I cannot afford, for a year-and-a-half and I live in a state that does not extend Medicaid to people in my position. As a result, I am one serious disease or accident away from certain death.Obamacare Tax Penalty

After dutifully paying taxes for close to 40 years, helping to send other people’s kids to school (I don’t have kids) and funding food stamps and benefits for thousands of people, my government is repaying me by turning its back on me during my hour of need…and penalizing me for my new-found destitution, to boot.

How did this happen? I am a 52-year-old woman who was last employed in a full-time position with benefits four years ago; I was part of a group purge after my company was acquired by a competitor.  This scenario is familiar to most of you, I’m sure. I thought I’d find another job with benefits easily, but I was wrong.

As The New York Times recently reported, women over 50 account for half of all long-term unemployed people. After remaining steadily employed in good, white collar lower management positions for more than 30 years, I was suddenly an unwilling participant in the trendy new gig economy out of necessity.

For this I owe a big thanks to Bill Clinton and NAFTA, which destroyed the American middle class by allowing companies to ship jobs overseas and import H1-B visa “guest workers.” Now, many of us find that we’re unemployable more than 20 years before we can collect a pension (if we even have one) or Social Security (if it will still exist by then).

My new reality involves going months without work, or “contracts,” and even when I do get a temporary contract position, my “clients” periodically cut my hours without warning. As a result, I made less than $10k last year.

Needless to say, I can’t afford the so-called affordable insurance Obama promised. According to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health care exchange marketplace, I’d need to pay $550 a month for a policy with an $8,000 deductible. And what good is a subsidy when you go months without any income?

A low-cost, pre-Obamacare catastrophic insurance policy would be helpful right about now. Unfortunately, Obamacare-less forces me to buy an overpriced policy with a high deductible, so that I can share the privilege of paying for some dude’s Viagra prescription and pediatric dental insurance (like I said, I don’t have kids).

To make things worse, I’m about to get hit with the Obamacare penalty…and this is on top having to drain my savings and take hardship withdrawals from my 401(k) (which I am also about to be unfairly penalized for) just to survive in our “new normal” transient, gig economy that mainstream media finds so hip and trendy.

I’ve decided that if something happens to me health-wise, I’m just going to die, because if I am hospitalized, I stand to lose my home and what little I have left, so why bother sticking around?

If you like Obamacare, it’s probably because you don’t need it

I am so tired of brainwashed Obamacare defenders crowing about the 12 million Americans who couldn’t get insurance before now having coverage. Frankly, in a country of 330 million people where close to 100 million are out of the workforce (many not by choice), that’s a drop in the uninsured bucket, so bragging is totally uncalled for. Maybe they’re promoting this “success” because they know that math-challenged Common Core students are easily impressed by any number you throw at them.

Obamacare supporters are also quick to blame states that don’t extend Medicaid. Why? Should citizens of states that aren’t on board with Obamacare be penalized? There wasn’t a Medicaid referendum in any state that I am aware of.

And, if Obamacare is supposed to mandate affordable insurance for all, why didn’t it nationalize Medicaid? At the very least, it should exempt those of us who live in Medicaid-deprived states from Obamacare.

And then there’s the pre-existing condition clause. Sorry, Obamacare defenders, but I’m not down with being stuck with the rest of this ugly baby just for that one benefit. Besides, a single-payer health care solution would take care of pre-existing conditions just as effectively. As it stands, the insurance companies are offsetting their pre-existing condition “losses” with double-digit rate increases each year.

Not surprisingly, I find that the strongest supporters of this crony capitalist screw job are people who have employer-paid health insurance or at least make or have enough money to overpay for their insurance.

I know a couple of people who used to sing the praises of Obamacare….until they lost their jobs, were forced to join the gig economy, and had to actually rely on Obamacare for coverage. Needless to say, both have now joined the repeal Obamacare bandwagon.

It’s unconstitutional

The lie Obama sold us (among many) when he was promoting this travesty was access and affordability…and, of course, we couldn’t keep our doctors, after all (not that we can afford them now anyway, so I suppose this is a moot point for those of us who inhabit the Obamacare penal colony). I admit that I bought the spin. I even voted for the lying clown. What we got instead was a gun to our heads forcing us to purchase an overpriced product from PRIVATE companies or face hefty, escalating tax penalties.

No income limits were set; whether you make $10k (or less) or $100k a year, if you don’t buy insurance, you get taxed. Seriously? How is that legal? Or fair? First of all, people who make less than $30k shouldn’t pay ANY taxes, never mind have tax penalties imposed upon them.

And if Obama was so hell-bent on insuring us, why didn’t he mandate maximum premium amounts that insurers could charge? Say, $200 a month? Let’s call Obamacare what it is: a blank corporate welfare check to the insurance companies.

Not a peep from presidential candidates

NOT ONE presidential candidate has addressed this travesty. Several running for president are sitting members of Congress. They’ve taken a two year paid vacation on our tax payer dime to attend fundraisers and campaign for an office most don’t stand a chance of winning. Must be nice.

NOT ONE of them (including our socialist man of the people, Bernie Sanders) can be bothered to spare a moment to introduce legislation NOW to at least waive the “Cadillac tax” penalty. No, instead of nuking the toxic provisions of Obamacare, Congressional members voted to repeal the whole thing, knowing that the president would veto the resolution….pure theater…or political masturbation.

As a member of Congress you have a unique opportunity to demonstrate your leadership abilities through legislation, and there’s no time like the present. That’s probably the ONLY advantage you have over Donald Trump. Talk is cheap. So, why not lead by example? Because, frankly, too many of us don’t have a year to wait for action…nor do we trust empty campaign promises.

Speaking of leading by example, I invite Obamacare defenders to show me how great it is by contributing funds to pay my Obamacare tax penalty and/or my monthly insurance premiums. On second thought, the way our economy is going, maybe you should hang on to your money…you’ll probably need it to pay for your own “affordable” Obamacare insurance someday.

 

 

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Overqualified and Over 40: You Don’t Get What You Don’t Pay For

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It’s become obvious to me that the mission statement of most mid- or large-sized companies in the U.S. is : “Know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” How else to explain the epidemic of underemployed and unemployed people over 40?

A Business Journal contributing writer recently explained why companies don’t want to hire people over 40. Below are the reasons he was given by people who hire:

If they hire an experienced, mature worker at a salary that is clearly below what he/she should earn (should being the operative word here) they’ll be gone as soon as something better comes along

Working Stiffed response: So…pay them what they should earn…duh! How much money do companies lose because of the sometimes expensive mistakes made be less experienced, “cheaper” employees? Besides, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a few mature, experienced workers around who can mentor younger talent?

For that matter, what should companies expect if they underpay anyone, young or old? Do they think people will stick around for the pleasure of their manager’s company or to admire how effectively the CEO spends all the money he/she gets to keep by underpaying their employees??? Good luck with that.

If an experienced, mature worker accepts a lower salary than he/she should be earning (should…there’s that word again) there’s probably something wrong with him/her

Working Stiffed response: There is something wrong with unemployed mature workers; they are out of work for no good reason. I’d argue that there is really something wrong with short-nearsighted hiring managers and business owners who leave valuable talent at the interview table because of greed and ageism.

Job candidates over 40 who don’t get the job may sue for age discrimination

Working Stiffed response: And they should, if that is the only reason they are not being considered for the job, but the reality is they probably won’t sue you. In an environment where unions are routinely demonized and destroyed, few workers expect to find a sympathetic ear in the courts (and recent regulations have only reinforced employer-favored outcomes).

Besides, such an action would dash any hope of finding work, and finding a job when you’re over 40 is hard enough without having a failed age discrimination lawsuit to contend with during interviews.

Companies want someone who will stay for a while, and someone over 40 might retire sooner than they want

Working Stiffed response: As best as I can tell, most companies don’t want people to stick around, unless they’re young, cheap and don’t screw up too much. If a business is sincerely looking for long-term employees, they should prefer generation-Xers and baby boomers; they are more inclined to stick around and work hard, if they can land a decent job where they are appreciated.

Most millennials will tell you that they are not obsessed with money and they also don’t want to spend up to 80 hours a week trapped in an office. Thanks to all the zombie, vampire and doomsday scenario entertainment they grew up with, many are focused on having as many invigorating life experiences as they can before the zombie apocalypse, so good luck with your youth-focused succession planning, Mr. or Ms. Hiring Manager.

Besides, who can afford to retire these days? I swear I saw a former VP I worked with bagging groceries at Publix the other day.

Workers over 40 are too set in their ways

Working Stiffed response: Not necessarily; we’re just used to doing things the right way. What some people call “set in their ways” others call avoiding mistakes learned through trial and error. But don’t worry; we have the maturity to sit on the sidelines and let the young guns try out “awesome” out-of-the-box ideas, even if we know these sparks of innovation will turn into a waste of time and money.

The value of workers over 40

I’m sure the writer of the Business Article meant well; after all he was trying to sell the virtues of hiring mature employees. Unfortunately, the emphasis of the article was to inform companies that they have an opportunity to benefit from hiring experienced older workers at any crap salary they choose by exploiting the fact that many are now broke and desperate after being forced out of the workforce. It’s hard to appreciate such support when your alleged sole virtue is that you’re a bargain who should be fished out of the clearance bin.

Instead of focusing on the reasons to avoid hiring experienced workers, let’s look at the benefits of hiring qualified people over 40 (and, no, saving money by underpaying them isn’t a sound strategy):

If you pay us what we’re worth, we will likely MORE than earn our salary

We’ve already learned from our mistakes, so we won’t make them on your dime. Plus, we can hit the ground running and we’re more likely to have the emotional maturity needed to build relationships with stakeholders and to work well with others (that go-getter ego a lot of young managers have often works against getting the job done efficiently or effectively).

If you hire us at a salary worthy of our experience, you’re also likely to get a hard worker who is less likely to jump to another opportunity

Young people know that the only way they are going boost their pay is by jumping to other companies. And if they’re valued at one company, the odds are they’ll be appealing to another company…maybe even a competitor.

A mature employee is more likely to keep their wisdom and hard work ethic around longer, especially if they are paid what they are worth and are appreciated, because they know their job jumping days are behind them.

You need experienced workers to mentor your young talent

When I entered the white collar workforce after graduating from college, I had the benefit of working in a fully staffed department (back before “economies of scale” shrunk every operation to the bone). I learned a lot from my older, experienced coworkers. I don’t think I would have become as skilled in my field without their guidance.

If you have several employees, it’s a good idea to have at least one seasoned veteran to show them the ropes. And if you have limited resources for staffing, you probably don’t have the budget for costly trial and error, so if it comes down to hiring young and cheap or shelling out a little more for an experienced over 40 worker, you’re better off erring on the side of experience.

You get what you pay for

The last year I was employed as a full-time marketing manager, I generated more than 30 times my salary in revenue for my company. When I lost my position after my company was acquired by a competitor, my job was eliminated in favor of the acquiring company’s young, inexperienced manager.

Because she had little hands-on experience, in the year following my departure, she spent more than four times her salary on outside firms and consultants (which I never needed to do); and not only could she not replicate the success I achieved during my tenure with the company, but she allowed the leads and momentum I was building to evaporate.

In the four years since my departure, several former colleagues told me that the company’s marketing efforts are failing miserably, even as they keep adding more young marketing executives.

So, to all the hiring managers and business owners out there, I say keep hiring (and underpaying) inexperienced talent at your own risk. Sure, youthful innovation has it’s place, but so does experience. And the money you save in salary now may end up costing you your job or hurting your business tomorrow.

 

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