HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

STORY OF AN INSPECTION COMPANY

Some names have been changed in this account.

"Abandon hope all you who enter here." Dante

1. SOME BACKGROUND

Anonymous Inspections is an insurance property inspections company located in Fresno, California. Anonymous is right across the street from a church. A major shopping mall is up the street. The area is the frequent target of graffiti vandals and homeless people sleep outside the buildings at night.

I spent almost seven years making my way into the Anonymous parking lot and parking under the big trees at the back of the parking lot. I especially liked the trees in the summer because I took my breaks and lunch in my car. The trees made it a little cooler. It was a brief haven from the office.

The building itself is a rather dingy affair with stained carpets and leaky ceilings. The manager's office is surrounded by glass and reminds me of an aquarium without the water. There is another office located behind the manager's office that contains the computer server in a small room and a larger room where the IT staff sits.

The break room at the front of the building contains cheap plastic chairs, a refrigerator (with frequent complaints about the dirty refrigerator), tables, a microwave oven, and a time clock. There is a sign over the sink ordering people to wash their dishes (which gets ignored much of the time). On the other side is the "training room" and in front of the training room is another office where the payroll clerk works.

The biggest room holds the reviewing staff . The area is divided into cubicles where reviewers sit hunched over their keyboards peering at computer monitors displaying photos of lifting roofs, peeling paint, cracked sidewalks, and other conditions that insurance companies consider problems.

I spent most of my time in Anonymous in a cubicle trying to desperately keep up my "numbers" and avoid any major mistakes on inspection reports.

2. THE OWNER

On its website Anonymous proudly calls itself a family owned business. You have this image of a Mom and Pop place that is something like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegone. The reality is closer to the Corleone family in The Godfather.

Anonymous's principal owner is the Matriarch (a. k. a. The Mother). I saw The Matriarch just a handful of times in my seven years. She would come around at Christmas and, to my surprise, even gave us small Christmas bonuses a few times. She would bring her dogs into the office, pushing them in baby strollers.

She drove a Jaguar and we got to see pictures of her big houses at Bass Lake and on the coast.

Her own grandson once allegedly told her of the misery felt by her employees. He said Anonymous's employees were trapped and underpaid. She reportedly responded that Anonymous's employees were overpaid at $9.00 or $10.00 an hour.

For the most part, The Matriarch was content to collect big checks and leave the actual management of the company to family members.

3. HOLY MANAGEMENT CHANGE, BATMAN!

The Matriarch's two sons managed the company until just after Thanksgiving, 2007. They abruptly resigned and we heard innuendos of unethical conduct.

The Matriarch brought in the management team of The Christian and The Optimist, who had moved down from northern California. The Christian is The Matriarch's daughter. We were told that The Optimist had a background in banking and that The Christian had previously run an inspection company.

The first few weeks we got a public relations campaign. Even The Matriarch made appearances in the office. The Christian would come around and greet us in the morning. We were offered gift cards as incentives for more productivity. I even won a few.

As the year wore on, though, things changed. There were no more visits to ask us how we were. There were no more gift cards. We were mandated a stricter dress code, even though we rarely had public contact. Even when the air conditioning made it as icy as the tundra, we couldn't wear jackets that weren't part of the dress code.

We were instructed to send a daily email that detailed our day. We were supposed to find something positive to talk about.

We got word from the IT guy that he monitored the websites we visited. He took great offense that some people had visited sites like My Space or Face Book. We also learned that management read our emails.

The Christian and The Optimist team decided they wanted to move into commercial inspections and I was a candidate to "review" those reports. I had some slight interest at first. But when they started talking about out-of-town trips I wasn't as enthused. I have a hard time physically riding in a car for several hours. The Optimist, in particular, seemed perturbed that I couldn't make long road trips.

A friend was interested in learning commercial reports because she thought the knowledge would give her a leg up on becoming an insurance underwriter. But she suddenly had reports dumped on her without any real training. The Christian reportedly didn't like my friend's criticisms of the often shabby work by field inspectors.

4. MICROMANAGEMENT

The more I was exposed to reviewing the more I became convinced that the greatest qualification is the self discipline not to take an automatic weapon to work.

A perfect report has the photos the insurance company wants arranged in the correct order (front, rear, left side, right side, all around the town), a diagram that looks like the home, square footage that coincides with the tax report information, and notes from the inspector about any problems or questions the insurance company might have. Perfect reports happen about as often as blizzards in Fresno in July.

Inspectors have an uncanny ability to ignore written instructions. For example, suppose there is a written instruction that photos of all outbuildings are required. You can bet that the inspector will say there are outbuildings, but not send any photos. Sometimes getting what you need from an inspector is a little like greyhounds at a dog track chasing a mechanical rabbit round and round and round.

Under the The Christian-Optimist regime there were rules. And more rules. We were told we had to contact the inspectors by email and by phone and by cell phone. They apparently didn't think about smoke signals, jungle drums, or homing pigeons. We had to document our contacts in the "Activity Log." We had to document our contacts on a separate list that we sent them every day. After a while, it felt like I was documenting my documenting.

We were given big binders that contained the guidelines for every account. We were told that we had to keep the binders open at all times. I don't know; maybe we were supposed to learn the guidelines by osmosis.

The word "diagram" has taken on a negative connotation for me now. It's the single biggest headache in the reviewing process.

The Christian-Optimist regime decided it would be a nifty idea to include camera icons on the diagram. The idea is show the angle from where a photo is taken. I should explain that diagrams are already an enormous headache. Inspectors leave off porches, decks, second levels, outbuildings, balconies, bay windows, etc. on diagrams. The objective, from the reviewing standpoint, is to have the diagram look like the house in the photos and to match the desired square footage. Camera icons were just one more monkey wrench in the process.

Camera icons took on a surrealistic aspect when were told we had to include camera icons for condition photos. Say, for example, an inspector takes a photo of peeling paint on the siding. Unless you're psychic, you don't have clue where that damage is unless the inspector tells you. What do you think the odds are that the inspector will tell you?

5. NUMBERS

In this context we're not talking about Arabic numerals or Roman numerals or a television show on CBS on Friday night. Management was very big on "numbers," which equates to the number of reports you complete every day. You track every second of your day so that you can arrive at an hourly average. When you got really bad reports (which is frequent), or you had really complicated reports, your "numbers" would go in the tank.

This was important because "numbers" were the basis for your raise, such as it was. So it was the classic case of a double bind. You had to have error free reports and you had to produce "numbers." Trying to do both was a little like doing jumping jacks on a high wire. I sometimes thought that we should get a handicap like golfers get. If you got reports from some inspectors, you would automatically qualify for a handicap.

Photos, or lack of photos, were a big obstacle in achieving "numbers." If you got reports without photos, or if you got photos that were almost unusable because they were too dark or too light or taken at a weird angle, that greatly affected your "numbers." We would either spend time trying to get photos (documenting in the Activity Log as explained above), fix photos, or get someone else to fix the photos (documenting in the Activity Log as explained above).

"Numbers" became especially important around billing time. We would get emails telling us that we had posted "X" number of reports up to that point. It was supposed to motivate us.

6. HOW TO CO-OPT

The Christian and The Optimist suggested once that I could be a supervisor. I said I wasn't interested. I've been a supervisor. I consider it a no-win position. You can't please management and you can't please the people you supervise. You frequently get put on salary, which means you don't even get paid overtime. And overtime was very important in the The Christian-Optimist regime.

I wasn't a big fan of overtime at Anonymous. It's reminds me of a scene from the movie The Little Shoppe of Horrors. A guy is having his tooth drilled by a dentist. He doesn't use Novocain. He enjoys pain and tells the dentist "My God! Don't stop now!" Unlike that man, I don't enjoy pain. Reviewing for 40 hours was enough pain (see above regarding Activity Log, inspectors, diagrams).

Team Christian-Optimist tried another innovation. They designated people as "account managers." An account manager was in charge of a specific account or accounts and would usually have two or three members of a "team" ( we didn't get pennants or cheerleaders, unfortunately) assigned to work on that account. As things evolved, the chief function of the account managers was to harass members of their "team."

One of the classic strategies of warfare is to divide and conquer. In the business world that concept frequently means management co-opting employees. You get them to identify with management rather than with their coworkers.

I would have a typical report with problems, go through the process of contacting the inspector, and then document it (see documenting in the Activity Log above). In a flash I would get emails from the account manager wanting me to follow up. Or I would get an email claiming that a question I had wasn't really a problem at all (I was just too stupid, I guess).

After a series of condescending emails from one specific account manager, I'd had enough. I emailed her that I was tired of the nasty emails.

The Christian thought that was "disrespectful" and--poof!-- I was suddenly out of a job.

7. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

The Christian is religious, or claims to be religious. You half expected there to be a bright heavenly glow from the aquarium-like office, or perhaps a chorus of angels. An altar for blood sacrifice would be apropos.

I'm tolerant of religious belief, although admittedly skeptical. I've done the religion thing and the more I examined things the less I believed. But I don't think religion mixes with business any better than it mixes with politics.

It's especially disturbing when religion is used as a hammer. Its punitive and vindictive side comes out instead of the compassionate side exemplified by The Golden Rule. I have the feeling that The Christian knows more about the punitive side of religious belief than about the compassionate side.

It was a little like the climatic scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Nazis believe they have found the ultimate weapon in the Ark. But when they open it all kinds of monstrous creatures rush out. People are being killed and faces are melting. You had to walk softly when you walked by The Christian's office.

8. QUIET DESPERATION

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation." Thoreau could have been a reviewer at Anonymous Inspections.

When you talk about how much you hate a job some enterprising sort will ask, "Then why don't you just leave?" It should be so simple.

In our system jobs are a little like musical chairs. When the music stops people scramble for the chairs and someone is always left out. You need some things, like money for rent, or health insurance, so you grit your teeth and try to slog through another day or week.

I've spent a few decades now going to jobs I hate because it's the lesser of two evils. It's go to a job I hate or starve.

Many of us spend our lives in quiet desperation, not getting the opportunity to fulfill our dreams or potential. We spend our lives on the treadmill of working paycheck to paycheck for too little money and no appreciation, hoping for that little annual raise, and that someway somehow there is a way out. But it's a system that rewards the few at the expense of the many with reminders of how “lucky” we are to have jobs. Some luck.

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


REAGAN: SOCIALIST FOR THE RICH


From its inception the United States has had inequality. The well-to-do find rationalizations for why they deserve everything and no one else deserves anything. I've been reading a little of Arthur Schlesinger's book The Age of Jackson. Back in the 1830's the debate raged about inequality. Amos Kendall, a supporter of President Jackson, observed: "In all civilized as well as barbarous countries a few rich and intelligent men have built up nobility systems; by which, under some name, and by some contrivance, the few are enabled to live upon the labor of the many." In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected. He was a great believer in "nobility systems" and orchestrated a massive transfer of wealth from the middle and working class to the very rich. This commentary by Ravi Batra is at www.truthout.org:

Let's go back to the early 1980's. In 1981, Reagan signed a law that sharply reduced the income tax for the wealthiest Americans and corporations. The president asserted his program would create jobs, purge inflation and, get this, trim the budget deficit. However, following the tax cut, the deficit soared from 2.5 percent of GDP to over 6 percent, alarming financial markets, sending interest rates sky high, and culminating in the worst recession since the 1930's.

Soon the president realized he needed new revenues to trim the deficit, bring down interest rates and improve his chances for reelection. He would not rescind the income tax cut, but other taxes were acceptable. In 1982, taxes were raised on gasoline and cigarettes, but the deficit hardly budged. In 1983, the president signed the biggest tax rise on payrolls, promising to create a surplus in the Social Security system, while knowing all along that the new revenue would be used to finance the deficit.

The retirement system was looted from the first day the Social Security surplus came into being, because the legislation itself gave the president a free hand to spend the surplus in any way he liked. Thus began a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class, especially the self-employed small businessman, to the wealthy. The self-employment tax jumped as much as 66 percent.

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE

THE RICH AREN'T SO DIFFERENT AFTER ALL

In right wing land we're told that the rich are special. They're the "achievers," the risk takers, the innovators, the virtuous, and deserving of so much more than the rest of us. I've never bought that idea. I worked for a company for seven years where the owner didn't work, but collected handsome checks from the blood,sweat, and tears of her employees. A good deal of wealth in this country is inherited. A lot of it comes from financial manipulation such as we've seen with AIG. This commentary by Michael Hiltzik is at www.latimes.com:

That the point is even open for discussion suggests that a sea change is taking place on the American political scene. For decades, the wealthy have been held up as people to be admired, victors in the Darwinian economic struggle by virtue of their personal ingenuity and hard work.

Americans consistently supported fiscal policies that undermined middle- and working-class interests partially because they saw themselves as rich-people-in-waiting: Given time, toil and the magic of compound interest, anyone could retire a millionaire.

That mind-set has all but been eradicated by the damage sustained by the average worker's nest egg, combined with the spectacle of bankers and financial engineers maintaining their lifestyles with multimillion-dollar bonuses while the submerged 99% struggle for oxygen.

(The price of admission to the top 1% income-earning club last year was roughly $400,000.) That may account for the near-total absence of public outcry over President Obama's proposal to raise tax rates on the wealthiest Americans -- except of course from the wealthiest Americans.

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


BYE BYE RIGHT WING HATE RADIO

A lady wrote a letter to The Fresno Bee criticizing right wing gasbags Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The Bee has a comments section for people to respond to letters and, of course, the Ditto Head community was represented. One response said something about "the left," assuming that the writer was on the left. Criticizing the tactics and misinformation of Limbaugh and Hannity automatically puts you on the left? Who knew? Rush Limbaugh could claim that he parted the Red Sea and the Ditto Heads would rush to his defense because they're morons. The good news is that right wing hate radio is declining in California. They had they heyday and we see the catastrophe that has resulted. This article by Michael Finnegan is at www.latimes.com:

Tune in to conservative talk radio in California, and the insults quickly fly. Capturing the angry mood of listeners the other day, a popular host in Los Angeles called Republican lawmakers who voted to raise state taxes "a bunch of weak slobs."

With their trademark ferocity, radio stars who helped engineer Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's rise in the 2003 recall have turned on him over the new tax increases. On stations up and down the state, they are chattering away in hopes of igniting a taxpayers' revolt to kill his budget measures on the May 19 ballot.

But for all the anti-tax swagger and the occasional stunts by personalities like KFI's John and Ken, the reality is that conservative talk radio in California is on the wane. The economy's downturn has depressed ad revenue at stations across the state, thinning the ranks of conservative broadcasters.

For that and other reasons, stations have dropped the shows of at least half a dozen radio personalities and scaled back others, in some cases replacing them with cheaper nationally syndicated programs.

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


BUSINESS AND EMPLOYEES: A ONE-SIDED RELATIONSHIP

I lost a job I'd had for almost seven years on February 11. I had an email exchange with an abusive supervisor and the office manager considered my response to be "disrespectful." I suspect it was all a pretext because the company is having major financial problems, I'm over 40, and voila! You cut people who are past 40 because their health insurance costs more. You bring in some part-timer with no benefits. So I identify with this article by Dave Lindorff at www.smirkingchimp.com:

Welcome to the American business world.

It is, for the most part, an ugly, heartless place where loyalty is rewarded with abuse and relationships are intensely hierarchical, one-sided and ultimately totally artificial. It is a place where managers do not have to follow the basic rules of human decency by which they for the most part live in their private lives.

Across the country, every day, some 20,000 or more American workers are getting sacked these days by managers who are focused on bottom lines and satisfying greedy investors. A shockingly high percentage of these victims of recession and corporate greed get little or no notice. One reason for this shabby and abusive treatment is that companies don't want word leaking out about their difficulties and their cutbacks. Bad news about layoffs can hurt stock prices, can alarm customers and can worry creditors.

Many employers even attempt to block fired employees from collecting unemployment compensation (an employer's unemployment insurance rate is determined by experience--the greater the number of workers you fire who go on unemployment, the higher your premium). They do this by claiming the worker was fired "for cause." This forces the sacked worker to appeal and go through a hearing process, all of which can take weeks, with the outcome uncertain.

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


GETTING OLDER IS A SIN IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY


I'm going through my third layoff in this decade. I suspect a large part of it is that I'm over 40. Once you hit 40 in this society you have a target on your back. It's hard to get hired and if the economy turns sour you're immediately a target for a layoff. Businesses can always rationalize job cuts so that don't openly admit they're discriminating by age, but the large number of Baby Boomers getting laid off isn't just coincidental. This is yet another argument for a national health care system. Then businesses won't have the excuse that health care costs for older workers gives them good reason to lay off older workers. This commentary by Susie Madrak is at crooksandliars.com:

If this is true, this is exactly why it would be such a good idea to lower the Medicare age to 55 - because otherwise, industry paints a target on every Boomer back:

Every day there's another layoff announcement, so Sean O'Grady finds himself confused about why his Philadelphia-based recruiting company, CareerTV USA Inc., is doing so well.

"We had to shake our heads at that," he said, "because we're doing our best sales ever, and we had our best quarter at the end of 2008."

So O'Grady started asking his clients to explain why they are bothering to recruit in these times, even when, in some cases, they are cutting back on hiring.

What he learned and what he is seeing "is the layoff of the baby-boom generation. Companies are filling those holes with bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college graduates.

"They are essentially trying to hire people they can pay less and get a lot of energy and enthusiasm," said O'Grady, 26, a senior producer at CareerTV.

[...] One was Andrew Vavra, 55, of Schwenksville, an unemployed marketing project manager. He had been to a another job fair recently "and no one under 40 was there," he said. "It made me angry.

GOP AGENDA: SHAFT WORKING PEOPLE

Suddenly, to hear them tell it, Republicans are fiscal conservatives. They don't want to burden future generations with debt. They haven't had any problem since the days of Ronald Reagan in doing just that when they could pursue their wars and give tax cuts to their fat cat friends. But if a dime goes to working people it's tragic and the end of western civilization. Working people are the majority in this country, and the government should be representing our interests. This commentary by Bill Gallagher is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The Republican Party of the 21th Century has no interest in doing anything to stop the wage inequality that chips away at the middle class. The economic "recovery" during George W. Bush's terms saw median incomes actually decline as wealth shifted to the top one percent.

Wage earning Americans are inordinately burdened with the responsibility of paying for Bush's debt while people living off investments and hedge fund managers saw their tax obligations significantly reduced. Does any sane person believe the Republicans want to upset that gravy train and change the tax codes?

If Republicans had their way, they would eliminate unions and restore despotism in the workplace, embracing the mentality that, "Hey buddy, you're lucky to have a job. If you complain you're outta here." Republicans want nothing whatsoever to do with safety and health in the workplace. The Democrats do.

We have the most expensive and inefficient health care system on earth and the Republicans are fighting to preserve the status quo. The drug companies and insurance companies profit mightily from the failed system and dump their campaign money into Republican coffers. The GOP wants to preserve Bush's privatization of many Medicare programs and Republican lawmakers still insist the government cannot negotiate prices with drug companies. How's that for a sound business practice?

The Republicans scoff at green energy and government incentives to develop and use renewable energy. They remain wed to the oil and coal companies and prefer continued dependence on imported oil and the absurd notion popularized by the intellectually challenged Sarah Palin that all we have to do to become energy independent is to "drill, drill, and drill."

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


THE LYING, LYING CORPORATE MEDIA

The corporate media are running around like Chicken Little and squawking, "Tax increase, tax increase." They're spinning President Obama's proposals as a massive tax increase in a time of recession. What they aren't mentioning is that the majority of us are getting tax cuts. The tax increases are only on people making $200,000 and above. And the tax increases aren't draconian. They're the same rates people paid during the 1990's. This article by Jamison Foser is at www.mediamatters.org:

Last week, President Obama unveiled a budget outline that extends the Bush tax cuts for all but the top two percent of taxpayers and makes permanent a tax credit of up to $800 for low- and middle-income workers that was included in the recent stimulus package, among other tax cuts.

On the other hand, individual taxpayers with taxable income above $200,000 ($250,000 for families) per year would pay more in taxes under Obama's plan, under which the tax rates paid on income in the top brackets would revert to their levels under President Clinton in the 1990s -- from 33 and 35 percent to 36 and 39.6 percent. Slate.com's Daniel Gross estimates that for someone with $350,000 in income, this will amount to about $1,500 a year in increased taxes.

So: Obama's plan cuts taxes for the vast majority of Americans, while raising them for the small number of people who make more than $200,000.

But the media, eager to hype their bogus "war on the wealthy" storyline, have portrayed it as a tax increase.

HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


THE ONLY THING CONSERVATIVES DO WELL: WHINE

A lot of places I go, for some inexplicable reason, have Fox News on the television. Fox News should more properly be called The Republican Propaganda Network. It's just one whining story after another about President Obama's efforts to save the economy. The "ideas" of the people at Fox News and the people they support have been given too much opportunity already. We see the horrendous results. People are losing jobs, homes, savings, and hope. But right-wingers whine and whine about what victims they are. This article by Thomas Frank is at www.commondreams.org:

Capitalist self-pity was much in vogue. Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, looking tanned and groomed and yet strangely mechanical, joked that he needed to get through his speech "before federal officials come here to arrest me for practicing capitalism."

Jim Gilmore, a former governor of Virginia, moaned that the "philosophy" one encountered in the land these days was that "people who succeed and have wealth are bad people, and they're entitled to be discriminated against in the tax code."

Perhaps this was because the current economic crisis was being "overblown," as claimed Lew Uhler, who heads the National Tax Limitation Committee. The administration was trying "to create as much trouble for all of us as possible, and we're here to create trouble back, back, back!"

A little while later, Mr. Uhler lapsed into the same confused zombie cry as the tea partiers across town: "We're not going to stand around and take it anymore! We're mad as hell and we're not taking it!"

They're not going to take it anymore? I guess it's supposed to be obvious that conservatives are history's real victims -- that their imagined suffering at the hands of that Big Deficit to Come trumps the global systemic economic crisis and all the upheaval it may unleash.