Death to the Credentialocracy

The summer after junior year, my college expelled me. Six years later I returned and graduated with honors. During the interregnum, I worked. But finding a decent job was tough.

No matter how easy or rote the gig, every prospective employer listed a bachelor’s degree as a prerequisite to apply. I drifted from temp work to short-term project, barely scraping by. Then I came across a listing by a bank searching for an entry-level administrator. Amazingly, they didn’t say anything about having to have a college degree.

I didn’t lie on my resume. “9/81-5/84 Columbia University” listed the dates I attended. I didn’t state that I’d graduated. Nor did I announce: “DROPPED OUT/LOSER.”

Interviews went well and I was offered the job. It was 1986, my income rose from $10,000 to $17,000, and I felt grand.

On my first day, though, after I’d quit my previous job, my new boss offhandedly asked: “You graduated, right?”

“Yes,” I said. I needed the money too much to be honest.

Four years went by. I was repeatedly promoted and given big raises. I worked on big deals. My boss loved me. We became friends. His kindness was too much. I couldn’t lie to him anymore. I confided the truth.

Something wild happened: he apologized to me.

“I should never have listed that college degree requirement,” he said. “You’re a great employee; if you hadn’t lied I would never have gotten to work with you. I’m sorry you’ve been scared all this time. Thank you for lying.”

He dropped the college credential stipulation from his future job listings.

In 1995 I published a widely-circulated and well-received essay for Might magazine titled “College Is For Suckers“ in which I argued that American colleges and universities were perpetuating a multibillion-dollar scam directed at tens of millions of naïve young people and parents.

It’s worse now.

Because you can’t get a professional job without a degree, post-secondary educational corporations—which is what they are—can charge as much as they want. Banks and the government enable the grift by giving 18-year-olds high-interest loans they can never escape, even if they declare bankruptcy. Easy-money loans have allowed colleges to hike tuition five times faster than the rate of inflation since 1970.

Colleges are selling a service we don’t need or necessarily want. Yet we’re coerced into buying at insanely inflated rates.

Many of us pay for that service and don’t even receive it; 42% of college students will never graduate—mostly low-income and minority people—yet they’ll still owe those loans.

At the root of the student loan-industrial complex is the credentialocracy, a corrupt system in which the college education that people receive serves no practical purpose beyond allowing them to apply for a job. What they study and hopefully learn may be interesting or personally enriching, but it does not provide them with any of the knowledge or training needed to do the job. A mere one out of four graduates works in a field related to their major. Even among that tiny portion, few actually learn stuff at school that they wind up using on the job.

The solution is obvious: employers should stop demanding that applicants obtain an education they don’t need. The Labor Department should issue regulations designed to discourage overcredentialization.

Instead, we’re making the problem worse. We’re saddling families with debt-trap Parent PLUS loans with bigger principals and interest rates higher than traditional government-backed student loans. Student-loan forgiveness schemes dun taxpayers, many of whom don’t go to college, while colleges and banks keep raking in cash and raising rates.

Students loans are a $1.7 trillion business.

Fortunately, the tight labor market has prompted some companies to eliminate silly degree requirements. “Part of it is employers realizing they may be able to do a better job finding the right talent by looking for the skills or competencies someone needs to do the job and not letting a degree get in the way of that,” Parisa Fatehi-Weeks, senior director of environmental, social and governance for the hiring website Indeed told CBS. If history repeats, however, degree inflation will roar back with the next recession.

Credentialocracy is a toxic mindset that prioritizes arbitrary classist certifications over talent and hard work and, as such, should be purged from our collective consciousness. When Hillary Clinton touted her presidential candidacy based on her resume, we ought to have asked: “Impressive list of titles, but what did she accomplish?” When retired generals appear on cable news to analyze the latest foreign crisis, we ought to ignore their honorifics and ask: “Was he one of the neocons who thought Iraq had WMDs?”

Most of the best journalists have never been shortlisted for a Pulitzer. Most of the best musicians are never considered for a Grammy. Awards are BS; diplomas are meaningless. Judge the work, not the plaudits.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Look for the Union Libel

In a history-making act of performativeness, President Joe Biden appeared at a UAW picket line. But he didn’t picket or offer meaningful government support.

Trump, the UAW and the Next Realignment

Bipartisanship is dead. But job-killing trade agreements like NAFTA were promoted by politicians of both major parties alike—until Donald Trump. “Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization, moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas. Globalization has made the financial elite, who donate to politicians, very, very wealthy. I used to be one of them,” he told an audience in Pennsylvania in 2016. “Many of these areas have never recovered and never will unless I become president. Then, they’re going to recover fast.”

They didn’t. The Rust Belt continues to disintegrate.

Trump didn’t deliver. But his message proved to be an effective vote generator. It turned Ohio, the ultimate bellwether swing state, red. Formerly Democratic Pennsylvania now swings. So it’s no surprise that Trump is repeating his message to workers: deindustrialization sucks, no one sees your pain but me, and I’ll make it go away.

This year, Dr. Trump is going even further than any previous Republican president has gone before, reaching out to big labor, long a bête noire for Republicans. September 27th  finds the once-and-possibly-future president skipping the second GOP presidential debate and speaking instead to striking autoworkers.

Symbolically, Trump’s outreach represents a radical contrast for a party with a long and consistent history of antagonism to workers’ right to bargain collectively. Congressional Republicans rammed through the Taft-Hartley Act, Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, Republican-controlled legislators created union-gutting “right to work” states and, as a result, union campaign contributions overwhelmingly flowed to Democratic candidates. This is the first time in memory—possibly ever—that a major Republican presidential contender has thought of campaigning to union members, during a walkout no less.

Meanwhile “Union Joe” Biden, who likes to emphasize his working-class Scranton background and has collected numerous union endorsements, has been publicly silent about the UAW strike—a stance made starker when he jammed a contract down the throats of freight train workers when they threatened to walk off the job. The President hasn’t expressed any desire to meet with striking workers, whether at one of the big three automakers, the SAG-AFTRA writers in Hollywood, or Amazon warehouses. Biden’s support for unions has been performative and rhetorical.

What about Trump’s?

At this date, Trump is the better talker. Nothing new here, when compared to Biden. The question is, might the Republican Party assume policy positions that credibly allow it to argue that it has become an ally of workers, after decades of being their enemy in service of their corporate masters?

If anyone can and will spearhead such a pivot, it will be Trump, the man who pulled off the neat trick of running against the Iraq War in the den of bloodthirsty militarism that is a Republican primary, and winning, and going on to become the first president in two decades to seriously negotiate with the Taliban, signing a deal to withdraw from Afghanistan, yet remaining a hero of the right.

Should Trump construct a pro-labor Republicanism, we may be at the dawn of the biggest political realignment election since 1932. Roosevelt’s victory at the depth of the Great Depression and the subsequent enactment of his New Deal reversed the basic duopolistic structure in place since 1860. For three-quarters of a century the Party of Lincoln had represented progressivism and the struggle for equal rights while Democrats had embraced reactionary and racist policies with the occasional interruption of white-aligned populists like William Jennings Bryan; in rough terms, the parties switched places as Democrats embraced liberalism as we know it and Republicans took on conservatism.

We are currently experiencing a realignment-in-waiting, a 1932-scale ideological reversal that is taking hold in some arenas, tentative in others and will live or die depending on what party leaders do about two or three key issue categories.

On foreign policy, realignment is nearly complete. America’s current project in interventionism, the proxy war in Ukraine, enjoys full-throated support from Biden and Congressional Democrats while the antiwar voices are found not in the supposedly democratic-socialist “Squad” but the far-right Freedom Caucus. Culturally, the Democratic Party has become the home of well-educated coastal elites while the GOP increasingly draws in voters with high school educations and lower incomes in flyover country.

Realignment remains stillborn without an analogous reversal in domestic affairs, however. This is where Republicans have yet to demonstrate an appetite to reverse course.

A 180° switcheroo would see a genuine attempt by Republicans to address long-standing economic problems that traditionally have been Democratic Party projects if and when they have been discussed at all: soaring healthcare costs, high college tuition, poverty, homelessness, unaffordable housing, low real wages. In Alcoholics Anonymous the first step is admitting you have a problem; in politics the first step is talking about a problem in a way that shows that you acknowledge its existence. Some Republicans are finally starting to address some of these issues. But that’s a far cry from proposing meaningful solutions, much less legislation.

Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party put him on a collision course with the neoconservatives who started two forever wars. He prevailed in that fight. Should Trump choose to chart a path for Republicans that includes an appeal to ordinary workers, he will have to defeat the traditional Republicans who created the status quo like rival presidential candidate Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who suggests that the appropriate response to striking auto workers is to replicate the way Reagan handled PATCO: “He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me to the extent that we can use that once again.” Similarly, Governor Brian Kemp dismisses the UAW as a blue-state nuisance: “We just haven’t been dealing with it in Georgia, because we’re a right-to-work state.”

Trump’s outreach to labor could, and most likely will prove to be, nothing more than an empty gesture designed to extract votes ahead of an election, no follow up forthcoming, no actual leaning on management to cough up higher wages and better conditions for workers. Or it might be the beginning of something big, like his America First foreign policy, which overturns the balance of power inside his party and changes the way we think about what both major parties stand for.

 (Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

First They Came for Bigger Cubicles

Unemployment fell to the 3.4%, the lowest on record since the early days of the Richard Nixon administration. Jobs have never been easier to find and workers are able to get raises. The American economy, however, relies on cheap compliant labor, so economists are worried.

Two Bad Options, One Obvious Choice

Historically, unemployment tends to go up under Republicans and down under Democrats. Meanwhile, Democrats like Jimmy Carter and of course the current president have suffered from inflation. But what would you rather have? A paycheck shrinking from inflation? Or no paycheck at all?

DMZ America Podcast 71: A Look Behind the Looming Freight Railroad Strike

Freight-train conductor Toby Kemp joins political cartoonists Ted Rall (Left) and Scott Stantis (Right) for a behind-the-scenes look at life for railroad workers in the run-up to a likely national rail transport workers strike next month. Between 30% and 40% of all freight moves via rail, so a strike would cause major supply-chain disruptions as the country faces down higher interest rates and an OPEC-led oil shock. Rall and Stantis discuss the political and economic implications while Kemp provides a fascinating look at an important sector of the workforce that often gets ignored.

 

 

Labor-Management Non-Relations

The clash between labor and bosses used to be so violent that it sometimes resulted in deaths. Now no one wants to talk to one another. Remote workers slack off as quiet quitters, employers scheme as quiet firers and some disgruntled employees slink off to unionize while no one is watching.

Be Careful of the Inflation You Don’t Wish for

Conventional economic wisdom harbors a great fear of inflation. But deflation is even worse. It is entirely possible that the economy will seize up again as people decide to stay home and away from stores during the rise of the omicron variant.

Non-Competes

One out of six American workers, including manual and low-level laborers, are forced to sign non-compete agreements. It’s abusive, it’s strange, and studies say wages are 10% lower on average as a result.

TPP

Economists say that free trade agreements like TPP, which are unpopular with voters and have driven the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders,are good for the American economy overall, as long as dispossessed employees are provided with assistance. But they never are.

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