JobScam. An idea without a plan ...

... is nothing more than a dream.

That's what the weasel in a prime minister's suit is now trying to peddle to you. Having spent $2.5 million in advertising on a program that did not exist, this is how he explained it away. (From Aaron Wherry and you really need to read the whole piece).

“Mr. Speaker, I noted that the Canada Job Grant was in fact very well received by those in the marketplace,” Mr. Harper enthused, “by people who want to upgrade their skills, want to receive more training, want to gain jobs and, by pluralism, want to create jobs.”

Well, that just makes you all squishy thinking about all those happy people dreaming about the imaginary jobs they're going to get when the Harper government finally gets off their collective asses and actually negotiates a deal with the people who will be providing the access to training. Someday. Maybe. Would you like a sparkle pony with that elephant turd pie?

We may well have known a lot less about this fiasco if we'd relied solely on the information provided by Advertising Standards Canada. It took a leak for us to find out that ASC had forwarded fraud complaints on the expensive advertising and that the Harper government quickly removed them. The ASC, because the Harperites hauled their ads immediately after the complaints started piling in, won't identify the public abuser because they "withdrew" before the council could adjudicate. The only identity you'll see on the ASC website is Service Provider, buried amongst the restaurant, used-car and cheap air fare scams. 

The council publicly posts complaint reports, but there are two different ways of handling the disclosure, she said. Some transgressors are identified, others are not.
If an advertiser pulls or changes an ad after people complain to the council, they don't get publicly identified.
"If the ad was not withdrawn or amended until after the council decision, that's when the advertiser is identified," said Feasby.
And so it is that a posting on Advertising Standards Canada's website shows that a "service provider" with a national television campaign advertising "a new program of services" attracted 22 complaints last year.
"To the council, the commercial conveyed the general impression that the services were universally accessible," says the posting. "In fact, they would not be accessible for some time."

That's Janet Feasby. She won't tell anybody who the identity of the Service Provider is because the explicit rules say so. However ... back in August she wrote this about the Harper scam:

"In reality, the implementation of this program is not imminent, and the process of obtaining such agreement may well take a considerable length of time if, in fact, an accord with the provinces and territories (on the grant proposal) is even possible," said the letter leaked to Global.

And that one did identify the Harper government and it did make the point that the whole program, top to bottom, was blatantly fraudulent.

But yesterday, Harper told the country that everybody just loved it. He tells you all kinds of things. Most, if not all of them, are untrue. Yesterday's attempt to put lipstick on a pig shows a level of desperation in that he, and his cohort of thugs, have no amount of hesitation when it comes to insulting the intelligence of Canadians ... and spending your money to make themselves look good.

And when he tells you that they are the most fiscally competent herd in the field, keep in mind that they have yet to demonstrate anything resembling competence at anything. Clearly management and organization are absent with this crowd and without at least those two things, you don't have a government.

Harper couldn't organize a one man rush to a three hole outhouse ... but he can dream about it.

Comin’ at ya . . .

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW has an article by Aviva Hope Rutkin that you should read and ponder. “Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization”. 45% is the estimated job loss over the next 20 years.

The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. 

What's old is new again.

20 years? Hell, I might even still be alive. As this develops, Conservatives who go berserk at the idea of Food Stamps might want to get therapy. As well, “Liberals”, to use the US term, might want the same. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, this is scary: even the crappy jobs will be disappearing as technology develops.

Even if it's only the loss of 25%, not 45% of US jobs, there are going to be a lot of people who are under 40 when this happens who can't work if jobs don't exist, crappy or not, and if they don't starve to death, can expect to live another 30-40 years. Then there's the teenagers and twenty-somethings trying to enter the working world. And if all there is for them are crappy jobs, what will that do for future families?
Wherever he is, Karl Marx is probably laughing hysterically. How will Capitalism cope? As the robotics take over the work force, maybe we might just see a resurgence of “hand-made” items as the items of value.

Getting to the end of the Monopoly Game . . .

WASHINGTON MONTHLY has a disturbing article by Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman, "Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?". Scary stuff:

If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.
. . .

But while the mystery of what killed the great American jobs machine has yielded no shortage of debatable answers, one of the more compelling potential explanations has been conspicuously absent from the national conversation: monopolization. The word itself feels anachronistic, a relic from the age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. But the fact that the term has faded from our daily discourse doesn’t mean the thing itself has vanished—in fact, the opposite is true. In nearly every sector of our economy, far fewer firms control far greater shares of their markets than they did a generation ago. 

Indeed, in the years after officials in the Reagan administration radically altered how our government enforces our antimonopoly laws, the American economy underwent a truly revolutionary restructuring. Four great waves of mergers and acquisitions—in the mid-1980s, early ’90s, late ’90s, and between 2003 and 2007—transformed America’s industrial landscape at least as much as globalization. Over the same two decades, meanwhile, the spread of mega-retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot and agricultural behemoths like Smithfield and Tyson’s resulted in a more piecemeal approach to consolidation, through the destruction or displacement of countless independent family-owned businesses.

And when the Monopoly game is over, you just dump the pieces back in the box . . .