I saw you on the DailyShow last night and the stuff you said about the state of New Jersey being desperately short of biomedical researchers made me sick to my stomach.
You have to know this is not true. How could you NOT know this is not true? It’s so easy to prove with cold hard numbers and statistics. The big pharmas are pulling out of New Jersey to go to Massachusetts because Massachusetts offered them almost half a Billion dollars in taxpayer money to relocate there. They are leaving thousands and thousands of us behind. That’s thousands and thousands of well-educated, technically proficient, TAXPAYERS. That’s where the unemployment money is going, Cory. Those companies take the money that Massachusetts is offering, dump thousands and thousands of us on the state of New Jersey’s unemployment roles and then relocate only a tiny fraction of their workforce to Massachusetts. What do they do with the rest of the tax incentives? Beats me but I’m sure the shareholders are happy.
The idea that you would actually believe a pharma lobbyist who tells you he can’t find good help anymore in NJ and now has to outsource and that you would voluntarily spread this misinformation without actually checking to see if what they’re telling you is true or not defies explanation. It makes no sense, Cory. It is UN-believable. You either know that you are willfully lying, compromised by people who you view as your true “peers” or you’re dumber than a box of rocks.
I suggest you spend some time with those of us who used to work for pharma and are now unemployed in New Jersey. Funny how no politician actually does that. They’re more than happy to listen to whatever bullshit the financiers and industry propaganda artists tell them but they won’t go down to the NJ Department of Labor and actually check the database for the unemployed from Roche, Sanofi, Pfizer, Merck and all of the other companies that shed employees on a routine basis. Go check out the shuttered lab facilities in South Brunswick and Bridgewater. Our unemployment rate is more than 10% in this state and a big slice of it comes from the biomedical researchers who are not employed anymore.
But don’t tell lies on national TV. It will come back to bite you during your next campaign. Someone who is that out of touch shouldn’t be representing our state.
By the way, the idea that “the more you learn, the more you earn” is the old paradigm. It doesn’t work any more. Wake up already or you’re going to condemn a whole generation of New Jersey school children to a lifetime of indentured servitude to pay off their student loans for the low paying jobs they got in a laboratory. Come talk to us, Cory. The sooner you get a clue, the better off the school kids in Newark will be. What we need is a tough negotiator, not more low paid scientists who can’t make ends meet in New Jersey anymore.
Filed under: General | Tagged: biomedical researchers, Cory Booker, jon stewart, New Jersey, pharma, unemployment |
The Confluence 
Another ” blame the victim ” tactic. This is insight into how elites in the Democratic Party think. The truth is, Democrats are as captured by oligarchic fairy tales as Republicans. Booker’s appearance on Daily Show is a window into how prominent Democratic pols have completely disengaged from the public.
This is why I can’t align myself with this party anymore. It stopped representing my interests years ago.
The one that gets me upset is the ‘meme’ that we don’t have people here, trained or trainable… arrrgh.
What’s upsetting to me is that some liberals are still living in the 20th century. This is a new gilded age and they haven’t adjusted to the fact that the REAL problem for all of us is that there are a bunch of dragons sitting on everyone’s gold and it doesn’t matter anymore how educated and talented you are.
The weird thing is that I believe Booker when he talks about improving the lives of New Jersey’s students, especially in the inner cities.
But I fail to see how turning NJ into the scientific equivalent of a Vietnamese Nike factory is going to improve anyone’s lives except the bank accounts of the majority shareholders who think highly educated, low paid workers is a swell business model. It won’t help anyone, least of all those kids’ lives he wants to improve.
BTW, the number of people in ANY population that can do the kind of high level scientific research we used to do is really small. It’s great that he’s trying to encourage kids from all socioeconomic backgrounds to do it. But it is not an easy job and there are many failures, as is true for any branch of science that is still not very well known. The big mistake is that the financiers think that this kind of work can be parsed or that nerdly types don’t have the same kind of financial stability requirements as the rest of the population. In fact, financial instability tends to inhibit creativity, which is necessary for innovation. If you are always focused on your bills, you can’t untether your mind to go in different directions and concentration goes to shit.
So, why isn’t Booker taking these companies on and saying, “I have this group of talented people and they are precious to me. You need to pay them well enough that they can perform optimally.”
No, instead, he’s just going to train up a bunch of trained labrats who get paid shit wages to separate mixtures all day.
This probably won’t go over well here, but I looked at the financials of a couple of the pharmas as well as a data base type entry for R & D of large pharmas throughout the world ($3 billion in sales or more). The companies spend about as much on the suits as they do for inventing and making the product. General, selling, and administrative was an bput 40% vs, 15% for R & D and 25% for “cost of goods.’ The remainder, a good 15 to 20% is profit. (Research pharmas spent 10 to 25% on R & D, a generic spent under 5%. The difference is incredibly easy to spot. Only Amgen spent more and they were out of the norm in an R & D paradise.)
Way back in the original Gilded Age, William Jennings Byan pointed out that if you eliminated all the farms (and factories and labs to update the picture), the cities would eventually be full of weeds. The suits need product to survive.
Forty years ago, a professor of mine actually taught that since the US had the most efficient product distribution network in the world and Japan had the most efficient production network, “that turned the US economy into a giant sucking machine for Japanese imports.” Change Japan to China/India/Korea and it still fits.
Cory Booker is no dummy. He’s a Rhodes Scholar and very well connected. What that says about Booker and the Wall Strret group of suits is not encouraging.
We are the state that invented the corporate lab (Edison at Menlo Park). For a 100 plus years between Edison, Bell Labs, and big pharma, it has been a good match. Well, that seems to be fading. And frankly, what pays off is really not education so much as other skill sets such as greed, office politics, smoothness, and the right tone.
If I have understood what Riverdaughter has been writing on the subject, I bet this comment will go over perfectly well. It seems to run parallel to her observations that the suits have been starving the labcoats of money to enrich the suits and the suits’s owners and patrons. (If I am wrong I expect I will be corrected).
“I believe Booker when he talks about improving the lives of New Jersey’s students, especially in the inner cities.”
I’m only slightly disappointed by your appraisal of booker’s motivation. Just for the record, there are those on the Left who disagree:
From: “Cory Booker: A Clear and Present Threat to Public Education | Black Agenda Report”
“…Just as I warned, back in 2002, Booker remains determined to make Newark the national showcase city for corporate education – only now, he’s got the cash. And he is now part of a full-blown network of capitalists whose mission is to turn American education into a market, for power and profit. The billionaires are circling public education like birds of prey, seeking to transform charter schools into an interlocking, national, for-profit business, worth trillions of dollars. That’s what the hedge funds are after, and that is the mission of Booker money-bag John Doerr and his California-based New Schools Venture Fund, whose goal is to “build an entirely new sector of public education” through private investment. They want nothing less than to create a nationwide corporate-managed schools network paid for by public funds but run by private managers…”
http://blackagendareport.com/content/cory-booker-clear-and-present-threat-public-education
“Now that Barack Obama is a lame duck who can’t run for the top office anymore, it’s as good a time as any to speculate on who will take his place as the Black politician that rich white folks feel they can truly trust. One name stands out: Cory Booker, the 43 year-old Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, whose rightwing background and connections are far deeper and more intensely ideological than Obama’s. Indeed, if there had been no Barack Obama, Cory Booker would have been Wall Street’s choice as the First Black President. “He’ll be our second,” said a New York hedge fund partner, quoted in a recent Bloomberg News article.”
– Glen Ford
Mr. Booker does as he’s told. It serves some BS purpose to pretend NJ is not bristling with outta work prams .
They’re more than happy to listen to whatever bullshit the financiers and industry propaganda artists tell them but they won’t go down to the NJ Department of Labor and actually check the database for the unemployed….
Exactly. Reality ain’t paying his bills, on the contrary
but you know all this.
“the more you learn, the more you earn
It’s still true, hecks its a leading industry…the more earning as one is learning is for the student debt holder however
AP : Russia says Assad losing control, rebels could win
Looks like we are finally paying Russia its price to get on board.
They were smart to hold out. But if I was them, I’d wait til the price is delivered…because we don’t keep promies.
The idea we give a damn about any one’s human rights in this ( or at all )is laughable. We are gleefully supporting ruthless sectarian violence to gain our ends We want Syria to be a big landing strip for our bombers in our war with Iran and so crafted “contra rebels” to destroy it. Other repressive regimes take note : This is the thanks you get for dutifully doing our toture dirty work…
Why would this be a case of us paying Russia its price? Why would this not be a case of Russia deciding to avoid the embarrassment of supporting its client past the bitter end to no benefit to Russia? If Russia is saying that, I suspect that Russia is working to try and shape
a semi-Baathist post-Assad ruling group and future for Syria . . . one which will allow Russia to preserve and rescue some of its interests there.
If Russia supports Assad all the way down, then a post-Assad Salafislamist successor state will show its bitterness towards Russia in every possible way. Beginning with no more naval basing privileges at Tartus.
one which will Russia to preserve and rescue some of its interests there.
are we going to let them keep thier naval base? Maybe that was the price .
As a bi-weekly-wage hospital pharmacy technician I am obviously no foreign policy expert. But I have to wonder whether we (America) is/are really strong enough any more to be the only people who get to set the agendas and initiate the uprisings and set the prices and collect the payments.
According to my memory, fed the info I get from the MSM to be sure, the events in Syria began as demonstrations by semi-westernised young semi-secular Syrians thinking they could overawe Assad into resigning the way Mubarak resigned . . . just by the moral force of their demonstrating. The Syrian government decided to repress them instead by lethal and non-lethal means to scare them back into their homes and into good behavior.
It didn’t work. When they kept demonstrating, the Assad government decided to kill enough of them to drive the rest into arming themselves and getting counter-violent. In other words, the Assadistas felt they could win a civil war so they set out to create one.
Colonel Pat Lang’s Sic Semper Tyrannis has been a very interesting blog to follow over the whole evolution of Syrian events. He and some guest bloggers were at first very sympathetic to the Syrian rebels but when some of them appeared to be Islamists ( Salafi or otherwise) and when they began getting more and more help from the Gulf States and Kingdoms, Lang and his guest commenters became very strongly and severely anti-rebel and pro-Assad very quickly. You might find SST’s interpretation of who and why in the US government keeps supporting the rebels to be very interesting. Just lately US/Brittain/France
have been trying to craft an “opposition government in exile” composed of sorta kinda “westernistic” Syrians . . . but actual gun-shooting rebel Syrians on the ground appear to be evermore Islamist. That group which the Obama Administration just recently declared “terrorist” is the group scoring the biggest military successes against the Assad forces. So whatever the Obama Administration and Western Allies thought they were going to achieve
there is not what they will get.
Russia has not been Assad’s only supporter. China and Iran also support the Assad government. I can’t imagine Russia breaking with China/Iran in return for favors or arrangements from America. I can only imagine Russia distancing itself from Assad because Russia suspects Assad may lose control and power even with continued Russian support. If so, Russia would want to avoid looking the worst possible by backing Assad all the way down. Russia might be in quiet contact with all kinds of non-Assad forces within Syria. Perhaps Russia (and China and/or Iran) might be working on cobbling together
a post-Assad “Greater Baath” Emergency Government of National Unity and Salvation or some such thing. They might be working on giving Assad a “Ceaucescu exit” in order to retain some influence on what they can engineer to come after.
I haven’t read SST for about a week now, so I don’t know the very latest in SST thinking, but I just know it will be worthwhile one way or another and I recommend it in the highfully mostest terms possible.
(By contrast, Juan Cole at Informed Comment has been embarrassing himself by continuing to believe that the ever-more-Islamist rebel forces in Syria are a group of French Enlightenment Jeffersonian Democrats. I think he really believes that. I don’t think he is somehow “shilling” for some part of the US government).
opps, I meant outta work ” parms” …..though the prams .
might be hurting too
I just posted this on Cory’s FB page….hope that is OK….
“The big pharmas are pulling out of New Jersey to go to Massachusetts because Massachusetts offered them almost half a Billion dollars in taxpayer money to relocate there. They are leaving thousands and thousands of us behind. That’s thousands and thousands of well-educated, technically proficient, TAXPAYERS. That’s where the unemployment money is going, Cory. Those companies take the money that Massachusetts is offering, dump thousands and thousands of us on the state of New Jersey’s unemployment roles and then relocate only a tiny fraction of their workforce to Massachusetts. What do they do with the rest of the tax incentives? Beats me but I’m sure the shareholders are happy.
The idea that you would actually believe a pharma lobbyist who tells you he can’t find good help anymore in NJ and now has to outsource and that you would voluntarily spread this misinformation without actually checking to see if what they’re telling you is true or not defies explanation. It makes no sense, Cory. It is UN-believable. You either know that you are willfully lying, compromised by people who you view as your true “peers” or you’re dumber than a box of rocks.”
Hmmmm – it didn’t stay up very long!
Well, that’s interesting. They can try to shut us up but that doesn’t mean we’re going away.
Maybe if you had used “bag of hammers,” his scrubbers would have left it alone.
Maybe if lots of people leave lots of short easy-to-type comments like this on his facebook page, he or his handlers will be forced to close that page. That could be publicised to much embarrassment on the Mayor’s part.
If I were to offer the epithet ” upwardly mobile black boozhie Obamapig” to describe Mayor Booker . . . would members of the R@yce Card Community be offended?
Would it hit a nurrrvvvv?
I don’t know if they would be offended but I might be.
Let’s not go there.
As a (privately uttered) epithet, it has merit. See below, The Black Agenda Report link.
Well, I will drop all the potentially divisive-offensive parts then . . . but the word “Obamapig” in isolation is just too good to let go. I give that word to the whole world in case anyone wants to use it.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/cory-booker-second-coming-obama-only-worse
Anyone who thinks Cory Booker is anything but another well connected corporatist hasn’t been paying attention. Booker it was who wanted to privatize the city’s water system. Stymied in that but never fear, he’ll press on. Another of the black misleadership. Done right well for themselves, they have.
And why are whites so blind to black misleadership’s evils? Obama lives on that blindness. Bad is bad, you know.
Privatize a water system? Will this shit never stop?
Short form, NO.
I think in some countries they made it illegal to put out a rain bucket lol/sob
Yes, I’ve read that. Not, tho, another country: http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2012/08/16/man-jailed-for-collecting-rainwater-in-illegal-reservoirs-on-his-property/
http://www.naturalnews.com/029286_rainwater_collection_water.html
http://offgridsurvival.com/rainwaterillegal/
Right here in River City, you’ll pardon the expression. It’s interesting that people attribute extreme law to other countries. Why, we have Sharia Law in the United States, under the auspices of the right wing theocrats. They’ve renamed it, of course.
It is illegal in many Western States and is being challenged in some. It may have been successfully challenged in Colorado. Or it may still be illegal to put out a rainwater capture bucket in Colorado. Perhaps Propertius can tell us the answer.
Suspicious-minded thinkers think the “privatist forces” have long dreamed of
privatising Detroit’s grand municipal water system.
Water owning and delivering companies already have a presence: http://www.amwater.com/
Water is actually more critical to survival than energy and water rights and water control have been the impetus for many battles over millennia. Hell, whole oceans have been ferociously fought over. But not for drinkable water, of course.
Water rights is a legal specialty in the West. I don’t know of any water law firms elsewhere. But if the use and misuse of water continues, the calamity will tower over any other concerns at the time.
I was attending the Acres USA conference lately (as a mere amateur in my case) and talked some to a successful organic vegetable grower in Colorado who was relocating to Kentucky because he sees a “train-wreck disaster etc.” looming in Colorado due to water overcommitment, economic overdevelopment, etc. He decided he didn’t want to be there anymore to see it from up close.
Don’t blame him. Who wants to be up close and personal with his own disaster? Water rights are bitter, bitter fights in the arid and semi-arid West. And god bless their public fountains, Mike Kirwan’s ditch, green lawns, abundance of non native plant species, their profligate and persistent displays of conspicuous water consumption. Los Angles and surroundings likewise.
The East, of course, only has to worry about degraded water quality. Poisonous water quality, actually.
I was not blaming him to begin with. I was presenting what he told me as an interesting piece of intelligence.
As in . . . don’t move to Colorado.
I don’t blame him. I should have written “I don’t blame him.”
Some may be blind. Others may be sensitive to being extorted into compliance by deceitful anti-white racist accusations of racism.
Here is an example of that tragic very blindness of which you speak.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield
So true. Gad! Can’t tell a book by its cover or a person by the color of h/is skin.
And anyway, Obama isn’t black: everything important about him is white. In 2008, Jack White of The Root wrote a scathing critique of Obama, his personal history, his books, his affiliation with Michelle Obama’s church. White explicitly rejected Obama’s autobiography as presidential campaigning. I haven’t been able to find that article but it was a scorcher. And White’s cousin, looking for a new church, tried Wright’s. I think she lasted three weeks and her comment was, “I don’t go to church for that sort of thing.” Wright is a firebrand and while I agree with his criticisms, it’s preposterous, outrageous, really, to assert that Obama sat in Wright’s church for 20 years and didn’t hear what Jack White’s cousin heard in three weeks. Own it, man, own it.
Obama defines expediency. Among other things.
Al Giordano had done years of good solid radical-lefty work. So his truly-held opinions in this matter are indeed tragic. Of course he lives in Mexico and probably won’t ever come back to America anyway . . . so the poverty his beloved Obama is working to engineer for Americans isn’t his problem, I guess. But I suspect he doesn’t even secretly believe that Obama is in fact pursuing poverty for us here. He actually believes Obama to be a Liberation Leftist community organizing warrior.
If I had the time to read all of his work over the last few years, I would read it in the spirit of Forensic Autopsy on the death of common sense and basic intelligence among big parts of “the left” during and after the Obama campaign of 2008. It would be worth understanding what led to that death to begin with.
Chris Rock appeared to “get that” in a humorous way. He decided to make a “special announcement to White People” on how Obama is jussst white enough to vote for.
Of course Chris Rock was just being funny. But at some level it is truefunny. And yet Mr. Rock is motivated by the same race-tribal pride to vote for Obama that motivated the rest of Obama’s 93% of the Black vote. In Rock’s case it hardly matters. Rock is rich. Rock loses nothing by losing his Social Security and Medicare if Obama gets his way. But a lot of Chris Rock’s black and white lower class fans risk losing every survival benefit they have by voting for Obama. Oops . . . they already did. Anyway, here’s the link.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/chris-rocks-message-to-white-voters-vote-for-the-white-guy-obama/
Of course, the comments read like a Fox News Dummathon, but that’s not Chris Rock’s fault.
A great deal less tragic than irresponsible and foolish.
But in good news, apparently according to Durbin, the Medicare age increase is off the table in the fiscal cliff talks. I suspect Obama couldn’t get the votes for it. Sorry, Barack.
Durbin supports the Catfood Compromise in basic concept. If he is forced to say the raising the Medicare age is off the table, it may be that he has been forced to by constituent pressure and credible threats.
If so, that would show that constituent pressure and credible threats are useful and should continue and be increased and sharpened.
If so, that would show that constituent pressure and credible threats are useful and should continue and be increased and sharpened.
amen to that
Credible threats are pressure and always effective. These balls of self-interest roll where they’re pushed.
Calif. judge says victims’ body can prevent rape
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — A Southern California judge is being publicly admonished for saying a rape victim “didn’t put up a fight” during her assault and that if someone doesn’t want sexual intercourse, the body “will not permit that to happen.”
hey I think this judge should personally test his idea with a general population stint in the Big House….
” publicly admonished?” . Is that like going to bed without dinner?
May he have every opportunity to test that belief.
If we start using new and better words and terms, we might be able to force the argument our way.
Fiscal cliff? The “fiscal cliff” is a lie. There is no fiscal cliff. What there is . . . is a “fiscal reset”. Let’s hit the “fiscal reset button” and go back to Clinton rates. Lets hit the “Clinton fiscal reset” button.
I give those words and phrases away for free, in case anyone thinks they are useful. Let’s take inspiration from victory-winning politico-linguistic warrior Frank Luntz. Not from that droning intellectual snoremonger George Lakoff. Where are George Lakoff’s victories? Where is George Lakoff’s pile of severed heads? Now Luntz, on the other hand . . . well, if you use the word “climate change” when you mean global warming, Luntz has planted his flag on your brain right there.
Unless the new Right To Freeload law can be repealed or replaced . . . and the Repuglans who passed and signed it beaten into a state of permanent defeat . . . Michigan will slowly get poorer and poorer. But not all at once.
And in the meantime, Michigan might offer any number of Margaritaville opportunities for disemployed scientists who have had enough and are ready to get out of the bussiness.
And who knows . . . your grandchildren might get to dodge wolves and mountain lions on their way too and from school. Teach kids about Respect for Nature.