I worked my entire career (with the exception of one year) in local government. Back in the 1990's, governments got on the competitiveness bandwagon too. We were given materials that talked about the new paradigm for work and how we needed to be competitive. We had extensive training indoctrination into this paradigm of competitiveness and our evaluations were geared toward competing with one another with any raises tied to those evaluations. I distinctly remember the day as the new competitive philosophy was being introduced, that our department head told all of us that no one was indispensable and that everyone was expendable.

The result was a massive change in the working environment from one of cooperation to one of competition. The quality of our work went down and moral plummented. At the same time, the worst supervisor I ever had was hired. He prohibited us professionals from working cooperatively or helping one another on projects. Inter-division cooperation became non-existent. I specifically remember being assigned to work with a planner in another division on a project. I completed my draft first and gave it to her to review before we submitted our final work. I asked that she share her work with me too so that we could be sure that both parts of the project were cohesive. I had two decades of experience and seniority over her. Instead, she submitted both her work and mine without sharing the final product with me first. When I asked her why, her response was that I was not her supervisor and she did not have to share her work with me.

In using the competitive evaluation scoring system for giving raises, my new evil supervisor decided what the final scores would be first before actually evaluating us. He wanted to downgrade the longest term planners in the division in hopes that we would leave to go elsewhere. Two of the five planners in our division did just that. I had the most seniority, so he wanted to give me the lowest score even though I was the highest rated planner for several years under the previous division chief. The problem was that his individual scores did not add up to the total. My biggest downgrade was for having worked there too long. (yes, true)

Having worked under a system in which employees were valued and treated professionally and fairly versus the one (under which I ended up retiring from) in which we were treated as interchangeable and competitive cogs, there was no doubt in my mind that competitiveness leads to overall poorer performance, employee burnout, and lack of cooperation in the work environment.

For those who despair the loss of critical thinking, BlackCatte recently posted an excellent piece on just this topic at OffGuardian: "The idiotic media version of ISIS: are we losing our critical thinking?"

It's a long-form essay, well-written, entertaining, and ultimately challenging. I highly recommend it.

http://off-guardian.org/2015/11/07/the-idiotic-media-version-of-isis-are...

It is not so much America's international murder sprees, as heinous as they are, that has caused the growing global disrespect toward the US — it is the way the US denies its people the most critical of Human Rights. Specifically, health care.

"There, but for the grace of God go I," international onlookers think to themselves. It is this, above all, that stands as a barrier to the sweeping US trade agreements — the TPP and the TTIP — because the trade agreements are deliberately designed to harm national health care systems by making medications increasingly unaffordable in all participating nations, including the US. Some nations have opted out of this depravity via side agreements, but most have not.

But back to the current disgrace in the US — on display to the world — Amy Goodman investigates:

How GOP & Insurers Undercut Obamacare's Nonprofit Option

It’s the kind of scenario that advocates of a single-payer system warned about from the outset: With Obamacare relying on for-profit insurance companies to provide coverage, the market will find a way to squeeze out those who need it most.

The insurance co-ops were founded to offer a cheaper alternative after Democrats stopped demanding a public option. But since going live three years ago, the co-ops have faced major cutbacks from the Republican-controlled Congress. The GOP has slashed funding by more than half and stopped the Obama administration from helping offset the unexpected high costs of covering sicker beneficiaries.

Goodman interviews three well known health care experts, including Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a New York, primary care physician, professor at the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, where she’s been a vocal advocate for single payer. Here's an excerpt:

AMY GOODMAN: Steffie Woolhandler, let’s begin with you. In New York, there are well over 200,000 people who are—have insurance under what’s called Health Republic, one of these healthcare co-ops. Suddenly, last Friday, to the shock of many—even people working within the system—they were told that this healthcare co-op will close by the end of the month. That’s November. That’s before you can even get coverage in this open enrollment period. The next time is January 1st. So they have to sign up twice—right now, to fill the gap to the end of December, and then, because of IT issues—they can’t just sign up now and get that insurance from now on in another company—they have to sign up now ’til the end of December, and sign up within the open enrollment period, like a day later, for getting insurance in January. Over 200,000 people are out of insurance.

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Just in New York alone.

DR. STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER: Just in New York. And 10 of the 23 co-ops have closed, and several more are expected to close soon. These nonprofit co-ops, many of us felt they were never going to be viable. These tiny insurance co-ops was like the peewee football going against the NFL. They just didn’t have the size to make it in the marketplace.

But also, they weren’t cheaters. And the way the health insurance market works is good guys finish last, and cheaters win. The way you make a killing in the health insurance market is by signing up lots of healthy people, collecting as high premiums as possible and giving them as little care as possible—and, if they get sick, figuring out ways to force them out of the insurance. That’s the way the U.S. insurance market works. And these small nonprofit co-ops were not very good at playing the game. Many of them didn’t want to play that game.

So, we’re not surprised they went under. You know, the only way to insure a population, that has worked, is through some form of nonprofit national health insurance. That’s what every other developed nation uses. And then you have everybody in what we call the same risk pool—everyone in, nobody out.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/11/3/the_co_ops_collapse_how_gop

It's a telling interview, and leaves little wonder about the growing contempt that the world has for the psychopathic policies of United States that denies basic Human Rights to its citizens for the sake of profits for the corporations that own the nation.

No developed or emerging nation has stooped this low in either the Western or Eastern Hemispheres.

I have my son at the phone and he is basically telling me that he believes in nothing anymore with regards to caring of employers for the fate of their employees and general empathy of people, driven away from it by greed. We then talk about the differences between US and Germany/Europe and with all the tourists hanging around in places like Hawaii from Europe, hanging there without working, but somehow still surviving, telling him they have difficulties to find the jobs over there. So it looks to him as if the situations here and over there are comparable. I don't believe it but, he doesn't believe me.

So, we are caught up in life constantly comparing things and I am tired of it. I think I hang on to the old memories of work and educational situations in Europe of the sixties and seventies and have lost the capability to have my own reality-based opinion of what goes on in Europe, and I also have lost (or never gained) the capability to have a fair reality-based opinion about what was going on in the US in the eighties until now and how it changed over time. (learning it only through reading online), because I never recovered from culture shocks I went through in my life, which were not only US - Europe differences, but more than that.

Half of what NCTim describes in his comment I can't even understand, because of the professional, technical lingo, but it sounds absolutely awful and I can't believe that what the employers do is legal.

Reading gulfgal's comment, I just remember when I - (never worked in any US governmental positition - not accessible to me as green card holder - and never in an US-based corporation (wouldn't qualify for anything with my foreign out of date education and in my age - worked only shortly in an academic settings) - when I for the first time thought that people in the US compete for EVERYTHING and kill themselves for the sake of being competitive. They even compete for the most painful victim status.

I don't know how I survived after I walked out of my former marriage, but I ended up only working for German media or German think tank related lower level assistant kind of jobs, the only ones I seem to be able to get. The jobs I had felt safe. They had no upward routes. I didn't care, I was glad to earn by daily bread so to speak and I was not scared to lose them.

This depressive attitude my son represents, which to a lesser degree, he sees in his friends and Veteran buddies from the military, is prevalent everywhere around. Nobody believes anymore to hold jobs long term giving them security to build their lives, everybody seems to be very pissed off with their student loans they had to take, often they are pissed off with WHAT they actual got taught in college. People loosing their homes left and right, people look out for "warm climate" because they don't want to get into shelter situations during winter times and rather try to survive in areas, where they wouldn't freeze. I think that's pretty crazy, because men have always adapted to any climate.

I mean, I don't know, if the depressions of my son fog my views - (and I have a hard time to get away from them and distance myself to not get hung up in them), but almost everything upsets me about the situations he describes to me and the ones I read about online or see around here in the wider DC and MD area. So, what I learn from here and from other online sites, is enhancing the depressive views and in that sense is not helpful.

The worst is that I also have had myself and still have a lot of doubts about the value of the education you can obtain in colleges (especially for the price you have to pay for it) that all you want to do is to educate yourself by yourself, which I think shouldn't be an acceptable outcome of the situational downward spiral the US middle class is in.

WTF, thanks, NCTim for your excellent OT and the tunes (love me my BBKing). Let's start playing another game, not "their's". It's time to go on, but resent.

Counterpunch

The insurgents are losing . . . and they’re desperate.
— General John F Campbell, senior foreign commander in Afghanistan, speech in Kabul on December 28, 2014

The security situation in Afghanistan is extremely unstable, and the threat to all U.S. citizens in Afghanistan remains critical. . . Militant attacks throughout the country continue, with many of these attacks specifically targeting U.S. and other foreign citizens and entities . . . Extremists associated with various Taliban networks and members of other armed opposition groups are active in every province of the country.
— Current US State Department travel advisory for Afghanistan

In Afghanistan on December 28 last year there was a large military ceremony in Kabul. It marked replacement of the US-NATO led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) combat mission by a NATO “training and support” organization called Resolute Support. It was the most significant military-political event in the country since President George W Bush ordered his military forces to attack Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.

The senior figure at the ceremony was US Army General John F Campbell, commander of all foreign forces in Afghanistan, who declared to those present that “we have lifted the Afghan people out of the darkness of despair and given them hope for the future. You’ve made Afghanistan stronger and our countries safer.”

He ignored the staggering irony of the fact that for his own safety he could not give his speech in an open forum. There was no possibility that this US General could appear in a location accessible to the public anywhere in Afghanistan. As recorded by Fox News “the ceremony had to be organized in secret due to the threat of a Taliban attack, the number and intensity of which have increased in recent months,” which is hardly an indication of a “stronger” Afghanistan.
...
The US State Department’s ‘Travel Warning’ notes that “the security situation in Afghanistan is extremely unstable, and the threat to all US citizens remains critical.” That’s clear enough — and it sums up the entire horrible charade in Afghanistan. The country is a deeply corrupt, politically incoherent, economically insolvent, insurgent-ridden shambles that leads the world in production of heroin. As Al Jazeera notes, “Not only is Afghanistan the global leader in opium production, but Afghans are now the leading consumers of their own drugs. The number of Afghan drug addicts now stands at nearly three million, up from less than 500,000 just two years ago.” According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2014 Afghan Opium Survey, in 2001 there was opium poppy cultivation over 8,000 hectares (20,000 acres) and by 2014 it had exploded to 224,000 hectares.

Let me share that the main reason we have been 'scarce around these parts' is that for the last 3 months we have been in three different times zones all of which are 5 to 7 hours different than US?

'We have not been visiting often, but when we do' --the navigation is, for us, very slow to the point of maybe unconsciously avoiding visiting?

But hey, since this is an open thread, wonder if I could ask some user questions c99% that have been percolating in mah brain for a while? We like the content, we both really like finding that the 'usual suspects' hang out here.

Here goes:

1. Slowwwwwwwwwwww.
This is true on both my Android Galaxy 4 with Firefox, and Dell laptop with Windows 8 and Firefox.
Both here in Italy on a 4G connection and back in NM/TX in July on 4GLTE before we left, everything seems to operate in molasses.

Could this be Firefox and all the antispyware/anti-virus/malware add on I have?

Really, seems, at times, whether its to post a comment or follow links like I am operating via dial up. Very frustrating, because though I will probably never totally quit DK-- after all Meteor Blades still posts there -- I followed you fine people on over here for the community of cool kids and misfits (me) and for the news of EB.

2. Whodat rec my comments, man?
Hate to admit it, but I REALLY like to know who is reccing my comments and the comments of others. Does that make me paranoid or neurotic, just really interested in what you all think?

Appreciate any feedback or info.

Keep up the great work, all.