Booman wrote recently in his post Shooting Yourself in the Foot:
For decades conservatives have worked to see that blacks and latinos are undercounted in the Census. Now they are voluntarily disenfranchising themselves by refusing to send in the forms. Should we be happy about that? After all, it could cost them seats in Congress and votes in the Electoral College, and it will mean more federal dollars are available for blue and purple areas of the country. But, the thing is, the Census is supposed to accurately count the population of the country, and political power is supposed to be divvied up on the basis of a real assessment of the country’s demography. So, no, I am not happy that the most conservative areas are the least responsive to the Census, even though it serves my narrow political interests. You can’t cure stupid, and I will weep no tears for these folks, but I am not happy to see a new strain of irrational paranoia taking root in the reddest areas of this country.
It’s dangerous.
Get real.
The “census” is as broken as is the rest of this system. Trust a broken system? Why? Minorities and the poor in general have always known the truth of the matter, and I know for a stone fact that the majority of people that I have met in my 40+ years of urban semi-ghetto living would no more fill out a census form or open a door to a stranger than they would tell a policeman that yes, they did smoke some pot once in a while.
“Irrational paranoia?”
How about William Burroughs’ definition of a paranoid?
“One who is in possession of all the facts.”
Yup.
Read on for more.
We have a corporate-run government that is hostile to the needs of the people. Simple as that. The machine comes first, people second. Not only is it hostile to the people’s needs, it is incompetent as well.
The census is part of this non-functonng government. And it is also broken.
Read it and weep.
If you can count to ten or watch television, you probably know that it’s a Census year. And if you can count to ten, you should go work for the Census – they could use you.
I’m a little worried here. The Census Bureau is charged with counting 300 million-plus Americans, and from where I sit, I think they’re gonna have trouble counting their own fingers and toes.
In early 2009 I applied for a job with the Census. At the time I was living in Rockland, Maine. I completed and submitted my Census employment application, and I scored what I thought was a reasonably decent 98 on the pre-employment test. A few weeks after all that I moved from Rockland to Bangor, and I called the Census and informed the Bureau of my new address and phone number. No problem, I was told, it will be taken care of. Like a fool I believed this.
Months went by and I didn’t hear from the Census, so I decided to give them a call to make sure my address change had been duly and properly recorded. It hadn’t. So I tried again, and made a note in my calendar to call back a week later to make sure I had succeeded with this second attempt to change my address of record. And so it went, week after week. I ended up calling a total of ten times. Seriously.
I spoke with Kim in the Bangor office – she was very nice. I spoke with Donavon in the Augusta, Maine office – he too was very nice. I spoke with Don in the Bangor office – great guy, very helpful. Or seemingly so. I spoke with a guy in the Augusta office who said he had my file in his hand right then, as we were speaking. He said he would send it on that very day. He didn’t. Nor did he the next day. Nor the day after that.
Bangor told me to call Augusta. They gave me a phone number for Augusta. How helpful! The phone number was no longer in service. Seriously. The next time I spoke to the Bangor office I told them the Augusta number they were giving out didn’t work.
I was then told that in order for them to send my file from Augusta to Bangor they had to first send it to Boston. But of course! I always go from Augusta to Bangor via Boston.
Finally they called me for a job interview. After having possession of my application for more than a year, they called to interview me at 5:10 p.m. on a Friday.
For months I had been trying to recruit two people for a pinochle trio in my new home of Bangor, and I had finally succeeded. We were ten minutes into the first meeting of the brand spanking new Bangor Pinochle Club at Paddy Murphy’s wonderful Irish pub and eatery in beautiful downtown Bangor, and I was three quarters of the way through a pint of Geary’s Hampshire Special Ale, the best beer brewed in the great state of Maine, when my cursed cell phone rang. Normally I wouldn’t even have that infernal contraption turned on after 5 p.m., but I had forgotten to turn it off.
The Census wanted to do a job interview right then and there, by phone. You mustn’t delay, the woman warned, or she would simply go to the next person on the list. Now there’s some enlightened personnel management. Keep ’em hungry and pliant! But I managed to convince my would-be interrogator to call me back at my home, on my landline, at 7:30 p.m.
So the pinochle club’s first meeting was a little rushed – I lost, Paula won – and I scurried home to receive my phone call. But the Bureau didn’t call.
The next morning I went for a 14-mile walk along the bony, bonny banks of the Kenduskeag Stream, and I forgot to bring my cell phone. Naturally the Census called while I was out walking, on a Saturday. A return number was left on my voicemail. The number looked familiar. I called it. It was out of service.
Later in the day the Bureau called again, this time to interview me for the lesser job of enumerator – the crewleader positions had all been filled by this time. But it was not the Bangor office calling. It was Augusta, and they wanted me to work out of Rockland – they were unaware of my move to Bangor. The caller said he would give his supervisor my new contact information, but he sounded decidedly uninterested in the project, and mostly he wanted to get me off the line so he could call the next schmuck. “I don’t know if I’m in a good position to get this done,” the guy said. “I don’t know whether God himself is in a good position to get this done,” I responded, but I don’t think he got my humor.
The next day I got another voicemail from the Census. This was from Don, a supervisor in the Bangor office with whom I had spoken previously. In his message Don said that Augusta had fedexed my file to Boston six days before, but that I still wasn’t in Bangor’s system. Good thing they fedexed it.
In other words, on March 16 Augusta finally told Boston I had moved out of its area. Then three days later Augusta called me to interview me for a job, in its area. And the day after that Augusta again called me to interview me for a job, in its area.
And these people are going to count 300 million Americans with anything faintly resembling accuracy?
This whole country works on the same level.
Up and down.
I have a friend who recently started working as a researcher for an Ivy League school. It took them 8 weeks to get his fucking address right in order to send him his paychecks!!! This is s’pose t’be the smart folks, here.
I have another friend who needed to get certification that he wasn’t a chid molester so that he could teach in part of the NYS school system. (BOCES, for those in the know. Boards of Cooperative Educational Services.) It was simply a matter of getting his fingerprints taken at a NYC police station and then getting the bureaucracy to certify that he had never been arrested for that sort of act. Now…forget about the whole “Innocent until proven guilty” idea. He had to be proven innocent!!! That’s bad enough. Worse? He had no recourse except not taking the job. More worse? The NYPD couldn’t get their act together enough to give him:
1- An accurate time to come in.
2- Where he could or could not get the fingerprint service based on where he lives and where he works.
or
3- What he should bring when he went to any given police station. (They all had different rules.)
Worst of all? IT TOOK BOCES THREE MONTHS TO GET IT DONE AFTER HE MANAGED TO GET HIS FINGERPRINTS TAKEN!!!
The fall of the banking and financial sectors?
The fall of American industry?
The ongoing, 50+ year long failure of he American military and intelligence sectors?
Same same.
Broken.
Incompetent on every level.
Recently here Steven D asked the magic question: Have the Coming Civil Wars Begun? It was about the recent Hutaree bust.
It seems as if the mainstream liberal left thinks that it is simply a bunch of stupid, ugly, redneck losers who are the only ones that despise this system as it now stands.
Leftiness shmoon beware.
Anyone with half a brain remaining in their head after undergoing the massive societal hypnomedia conditioning which is…and has been for 50+ years… part and parcel of growing up in this country knows that there is not a shred of evidence pointing to a good reason why any part of this system should be “trusted.” (Read my recent posts “The Teabaggers and The Truth Of The Matter”, “A Song For My Father. And For Joe Stack As Well”, “The Joe Stack Story and the Media-The Dog That Did Not Bark”, and “Joe Stack, Righteous Anger and the PermaGov” for more on this matter if you so desire.)
Answer the census so that we will be accurately represented?
By whom!!!???
Corporate-owned hustlers?
C’mon.
Ludicrous on the face of it.
Be overjoyed that we now have “universal healthcare?”
Of which universe are we speaking?
Healthcare?
Oh.
You mean Thalidomide for the masses?
No thanks.
Nice.
Nevermind.
I’ll pass, myself.
In what universe are you living?
The “Civil War” is just heating up, folks.
Just heating up.
Watch.
Later…
AG