Artisans

How do we generate the jobs needed to sustain our middle class and pay for new infrastructure? It would require a different kind of politics — one that doesn’t conform to either party’s platform. We will have to raise some taxes to generate revenue, like on energy or maybe a value-added tax, and lower others, on payrolls to stimulate work, and on multinational corporations to get them to bring the trillion dollars they have offshore back to the U.S. for investment. We will have to adjust some services, like Social Security, while we invest in new infrastructure, like high-speed rail and Internet bandwidth; the U.S. ranks 22nd in the world in average connection speed. And, most of all, we will have to have an honest discussion about how we got in this rut.

How we got into this rut is no secret. We compensated for years of stagnating middle-class wages the easy way. Just as baseball players in the ’90s injected themselves with steroids to artificially build muscle to hit more home runs — instead of doing real bodybuilding — our two parties injected steroids, cheap credit, into Wall Street so it could go gambling and into Main Street so it could go home-buying. They both started hitting home runs, artificially — until the steroids ran dry. Now we have to rebuild America’s muscles the old-fashioned way.

How? In the short run, we’ll probably need more stimulus to get the economy moving again so people have the confidence to buy and invest. Ultimately, though, good jobs at scale come only when we create more products and services that make people’s lives more healthy, more productive, more secure, more comfortable or more entertained — and then sell them to more people around the world. And in a global economy, we have to create those products and services with a work force that is so well trained and productive that it can leverage modern technology so that one American can do the work of 20 Chinese and, therefore, get paid the same as 20 Chinese. There is no other way.

Sure, more countries can now compete with us. But that’s good. It means they’re also spawning new jobs, customers, ideas and industries where well-trained Americans can also compete. Fifteen years ago, there were no industries around Google “search” or “iPhone applications.” Today, both are a source of good jobs. More will be invented next year. There is no fixed number of jobs. We just have to make sure there is no fixed number of Americans to fill them — aided by good U.S. infrastructure and smart government incentives to attract these new industries to our shores.

But not everyone can write iPhone apps. What about your nurse, barber or waiter? Here I think Lawrence Katz, the Harvard University labor economist, has it right. Everyone today, he says, needs to think of himself as an “artisan” — the term used before mass manufacturing to apply to people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch in which they took personal pride. Everyone today has to be an artisan and bring something extra to their jobs.

For instance, says Katz, the baby boomers are aging, which will spawn many health care jobs. Those jobs can be done in a low-skilled way by cheap foreign workers and less-educated Americans or they can be done by skilled labor that is trained to give the elderly a better physical and psychological quality of life. The first will earn McWages. The second will be in high demand. The same is true for the salesperson who combines passion with a deep knowledge of fashion trends, the photo-store clerk who can teach you new tricks with your digital camera while the machine prints your film, and the pharmacist who doesn’t just sell pills but learns to relate to customer health needs in more compassionate and informative ways. They will all do fine.

But just doing your job in an average way — in this integrated and automated global economy — will lead to below-average wages. Sadly, average is over. We’re in the age of “extra,” and everyone has to figure out what extra they can add to their work to justify being paid more than a computer, a Chinese worker or a day laborer. “People will always need haircuts and health care,” says Katz, “and you can do that with low-wage labor or with people who acquire a lot of skills and pride and bring their imagination to do creative and customized things.” Their work will be more meaningful and their customers more satisfied.

Government’s job is to help inspire, educate, enable and protect that work force. 

Friendly Fire

Sarah Palin is disgusting ... I have been trying to avoid political topics lately, but this was infuriating ... 

Sarah Palin spoke in San Jose yesterday, where she engaged in her usual faux-military cheerleading speechiness. Never mind that in Alaska Palin was known for being disdainful and disrespectful of many vets who served her, this is a narrative about the great Divider who waves the flag and loves blood, so naturally she has to mix God and war together. In the course of this, she felt compelled to bring up Pat Tillman since he was from San Jose.

“One of those heroes was from right here in San Jose, who gave up the money and the glamor and think what he sacrificed and his family sacrificed, giving up pro-football career to serve his country and he ultimately giving up his life for our freedom. Remember to thank god every day for Pat and for the thousands like him….”

The problem is, Pat Tillman did not believe in God and nor does his family. His brother, Richard, expressed his disgust for people talking about God at Pat’s funeral on Bill Maher’s show just weeks ago. And Pat Tillman did not want to be used as a political weapon and most certainly not as war propaganda. His death was covered up by our military and made to look like Tillman had died “fighting for our country,” when in fact he had been killed by friendly fire.

Here are some quotes from the interview via the Guardian UK:

“….Richard’s courageous response (captured on video) to religious comments made by Maria Shriver, wife of California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Arizona senator John McCain as part of the eulogy delivered at his brother’s funeral.

“He’s not with God, he’s fucking dead,” asserted Mr Tillman. “Thanks for your thoughts but he’s fucking dead.” Mr Tillman, who has a low tolerance for lies was clearly offended by the sentiments, stating that his deceased brother “was not religious.””

He was clearly OFFENDED by the sentiment. Get the idea, there, Sarah? Not everyone agrees with you, Sarah. There are people who believe different things than you do. It’s a big world out there. Richard continued:

“I found it offensive. It’s like, I don’t go to a church and say, ‘This is bullshit,’ so don’t come to my brother’s service and tell me he’s with God. He’s simply not with fucking God.”

And Palin shouldn’t go to San Jose and think that just because she’s in the city where Pat lived, she can or should co-opt his death for her pro-war propaganda. Is there nothing sacred in Palin’s mind or heart? Palin thinks her religion trumps everything and everyone else, so much so that she would rather use Pat Tillman’s memory for her own purpose than to be respectful of him and his family.

Furthermore, as she should know (I realize she doesn’t read, but The Tillman Story is in theaters around the country) the Tillmans have a rather large issue with the military for the way they were lied to about their son’s death. They were originally told he died “fighting for his country” but he didn’t. He died by friendly fire.

Why would Sarah Palin go on about how he gave his life for our “freedom”? No, he didn’t Sarah. His life was stolen from him and while we do not know the circumstances, we do know that ‘blue-on-blue’ fatalities account for a significant percentage of all battlefield deaths – a tragedy, a reason to AVOID war if at all possible, not glorify it. Pat himself had decided that he would not have a military burial as he didn’t want his death to be used as a publicity tool.

Naturally, Sarah Palin took that as a sign that she should co-opt his death for her own publicity. And so she gave her usual glorifying war speech and used Pat Tillman for the local touch.

Maher asks Richard about the evidence suggesting that Pat Tillman was “deliberately attacked by his fellow troops”. Richard said, “I wish he would’ve just lit these fucking idiots up with his own gun. ‘Cause he knew that they were shooting at him. I wish he didn’t have so much character, and he would’ve shot his own guys.”

That’s what Richard thinks about the glory of war.

Palin is on video talking about how these wars are holy wars. If that isn’t glorifying war, I don’t know what is. Palin is a puppet of the propaganda machine and hence, by her very existence, she is an insult to people of integrity and thought, but in this case, an even worse insult to people dealing with having been lied to about their son’s death for the administration’s propaganda purposes.

Most people who have had to face the unrelentingly grim, gritty reality of war understand that war is a terrible thing, not to be entered into lightly. Honoring our troops for their sacrifices need not glorify war. The two are not the same, but of course, thought doesn’t sell wars. If Palin were President, she would have us at war with Iran by now. She isn’t one who can weigh disparate ideas and sift through complexities. She thinks in bumper stickers.

Sarah Palin used Pat Tillman. One can’t help but wonder if Palin is so unaware of her own reputation amongst those paying attention as a fundamentalist Dominionist that she thought she was going to get away with using Pat Tillman to make herself sound like the faithful. She couldn’t have been more deeply disturbing if she had tried.

Sarah Palin doesn’t really care about the troops. She’s a good cheerleader for war, though. There is, of course, a huge difference between the two. Palin is a moral and ethical coward who is not above using someone else’s son and brother to prop herself up a notch in the eyes of her rabid followers. She calls this loving America, but she is wrong.

Palin doesn’t love her country or the troops or she wouldn’t spend so much time dividing us (right after the Tillman freedom lie, she launches a jealousy grenade at the First Lady, driving the wedge just a bit deeper because that’s what we need in this country right now) and recklessly painting all Muslims with the brush of terrorism while our troops are trying to engage in a counter-insurgency strategy in Muslim countries.

Using Pat Tillman like she did puts Palin within shouting distance of the horrid and selfish Westboro Baptist Church. Sarah is a war coffin chaser. Anything she can drape a flag on and pose next to is game. If she missed the actual event, she’ll just use it in a speech. She’s a shameless publicity seeker, a cheap stunt, and an unworthy opponent. She insulted the Tillman family and this country with her used care salesmen platitudes and utter insensitivity to the real Pat. It’s as if she doesn’t get that these are real people, not just props for her to abuse. But why would Pat Tillman be treated any differently than Palin treats her own son?

Palin is nothing but the GOP’s latest propaganda tool, spouting off bumper sticker slogans about freedom from her $92,000 jet. Palin doesn’t know the first thing about freedom, because she suffers from an intellectual inability to comprehend what freedom really is. Freedom is not war.

And freedom certainly isn’t a bumper sticker.

Blood on the Motorway


In the past four decades, 459 deaths and 41 attempted homicides are believed to be linked to serial killers who are using the nation's highways to find and dispose of their victims.

A passerby found the severed head on Feb. 10, wrapped in two plastic bags and stuffed inside a backpack in Barstow, Calif. Authorities still haven't identified the victim or her killer, but the circumstances point in a particular direction.

The teenage girl likely had been killed days earlier, Barstow police say. Her head lay a few hundred yards from a truck stop just off Interstate 15, not far from I-40. To authorities, the proximity to the truck stop and the interstates suggests that the slaying might have been the work of a distinctive type of criminal: a serial killer operating along the nation's highways.

During the past four decades, at least 459 people may have died at the hands of highway serial killers, FBI statistics show. Investigators do not know how many people may be responsible for the killings but at least one such case — of murder, attempted murder or unidentified human remains — has been reported in 48 states, along roads as far north as Alaska and as far south as Key West. They believe the killers find their victims and dispose of the bodies along highways, sometimes near quiet roadside rest areas or at bustling truck stops.

Often, the victims are prostitutes, abducted in one state and dumped in another. And the killers? Authorities say they have 200 suspects; almost all are long-haul truck drivers. To date, the FBI says it has helped local authorities arrest at least 10 suspects believed to be involved in more than 30 of the killings.

That still appears to leave hundreds of killings unsolved, and the cases continue to mount. Not every killing along the nation's roadways is related, but since the FBI went public with the Highway Serial Killings initiative last year, local authorities have been sending information about unsolved slayings that fit the profile to FBI analysts.

Their hope: that the analysts can offer leads or find connections to other killings that may have happened years ago or several states away. Some of the killings recently added to the Highway Serial Killings database date back several years. Others, such as the one in Barstow, are relatively new.

"We seem to have one a week that comes in," says Michael Harrigan, the special agent who oversaw the FBI's effort for the past three years. "It could be a killing that's 30 years old. It could be one that happened a week ago." Whether the oldest and coldest cases can be solved, Harrigan is uncertain. But he's hopeful.

Harrigan and other law enforcement authorities believe serial killers still operate along some of the most well-traveled roads in the nation.

"They're out there," he says.

Even so, the FBI won't divulge the names of the victims, the dates the victims were abducted or discovered, even the locations where the killers either found their victims or dumped the bodies — places motorists might wish to avoid.

Despite President Obama's pledge of a more transparent government, Harrigan says the bureau is bound by its promise to local law enforcement not to disclose any details of the slayings — even basic information that is public record. The FBI makes such a promise so that local agencies will share details of the crimes with the bureau, Harrigan says.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request filed this year, I sought those details. "Many families drive from state to state and need accurate information to determine where they should and should not stop," I wrote.

The FBI denied the request, even though the bureau had posted on its website a small image of a U.S. map last year that shows the general location of many of the highway slayings.

Harrigan says a typical motorist isn't in danger. At least 234 victims were prostitutes, he says, and stranded motorists represent "a very, very small" number of the homicide cases. But Harrigan will not say how many, and he acknowledges that investigators know "nothing" about 130 of the victims. Among the mysteries are more than 80 cases — including the February case in Barstow — in which authorities couldn't identify the remains or recovered only body parts.

"It's creepy," says Keith Libby, the police detective in Barstow, Calif., who is handling the severed-head case. Libby says the victim appears to have been white or Hispanic, and police have released an image of how they think the victim looked. Beyond that, Libby says, investigators are hoping for help — from the public and from the FBI.

"We have nothing," he says. "Nothing."

A dangerous subculture

Although the FBI launched the serial killer initiative in 2004, violence along the nation's highways is hardly new. Stopping crime at the thousands of rest areas, truck stops and travel plazas, however, remains difficult. In part, that's because the responsibility for policing rest areas varies from state to state. That often means no consistent records are kept about the rate of crimes, and no single agency takes ownership for fighting it.

But crimes also are difficult to stop because of the location of the rest areas — along major roadways. That makes getting away easy; just jump onto an interstate and speed off. At some locations, private security guards try to keep watch or police cruise through. Elsewhere, cameras monitor the area. Neither of those approaches offer any guarantees.

Sometimes, the crimes at these stops along the highways are orchestrated by sophisticated criminals. Some deal drugs. Others sell sex. And, like weary travelers, other dangerous criminals might use rest areas for the purpose for which they were intended: to rest. The Beltway Snipers, who terrorized the Washington, D.C., area for weeks in 2002, were caught after they pulled into a rest area to sleep. (Whether the snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, are suspects in any of the highway killing cases is unclear. Muhammad was executed last year; Malvo remains in prison.)

What makes crime at rest areas and truck stops unique and especially troubling is that it occurs in spots intended to be oases for travelers — places where motorists expect to be able to relax and unwind, grab a meal and use the toilet.

"It used to be the place to go. It used to be the safe haven," says Sgt. Pat Postiglione, a detective with the Metro Nashville (Tenn.) Police Department. "But now, I think the opposite is occurring."

That's not the case everywhere, says Lisa Mullings, president of NATSO, a trade group that represents the truck stop and travel plaza industry. Mullings says most of the areas remain "probably one of the safest places to stop. There's always people."

Indeed, some truck stops have become more like bustling neighborhoods — for better or worse.

"It's kind of like when you live in the big city," says Frank Silio, a long-haul trucker since 1990. "You want to make sure you look at the quality of the people there. Are they paying too much attention to you?"

At many truck stops, the area for cars is separate from the area for semi-trailer trucks. The worlds are just as distinct, especially after sundown. On the trucking side, prostitutes might wander from cab to cab, looking for business.

"It is dangerous," says Vednita Carter, the executive director of Breaking Free, a Minnesota-based group that helps women escape prostitution. "They're having sex with them in the trucks." The truckers "might drive off and say, 'Well we can't stay here,' and they'll never come back."

Truckers even have names for the truck-stop prostitutes: lot lizards or fender lizards. "Those are the terms we hear all the time. But you only hear it there," Postiglione says.

"It's almost like a subculture, to be honest with you," Postiglione says. "You've got the family going to Myrtle Beach on one side, and you have the shady-looking truckers on the other. ... You have a lot of good truckers out there," Postiglione quickly adds, but "you have other truckers who go to these truck stops and get drugs or prostitutes."

Postiglione has good reason to think as he does. On June 26, 2007, the body of Sara Nicole Hulbert was found at a Nashville truck stop off I-24. Hulbert, 25, had been shot. Her killer also had used black electrical tape to fasten a plastic bag over her head. Postiglione contacted the FBI to tell analysts about that case and another similar killing in Lebanon, Tenn. He had little to go on except some surveillance tape of trucks coming and going from the Nashville truck stop around the time of the killing.

On July 12, 2007, Postiglione was near the truck stop when he noticed a semi that "seemed familiar." He followed it to the truck stop where Hulbert's body had been found and questioned the driver. When he looked inside the cab, he noticed a garbage bag. Inside was bloody clothing. The blood, he recalls, was fresh. The clothes, however, didn't belong to Hulbert.

Authorities now believe they belonged to another woman, Carma Purpura, who had disappeared the night before at a truck stop in Indianapolis. "There were items of female clothing ... that came back with Ms. Purpura's DNA," says Denise Robinson, a prosecutor in Marion County, Ind.

The trucker, Bruce Mendenhall, 56, was convicted in May in the Hulbert killing. He's likely to stand trial for at least three similar killings, including the slayings in Lebanon and Indianapolis. Postiglione believes other unsolved cases also might lead to Mendenhall.

"He's 56 and just starts killing people at 56?" Postiglione says, incredulous. "I have to believe that he may have been killing over the years but changed his methods. There's probably another victim or two out there that we're not linking yet."

Timelines are key

That search for connections between crimes is where the FBI effort has proved useful. Analysts continue to develop timelines for each of the 200 suspects, trying to determine whether their whereabouts match any of the unsolved killings.

Technology has made that effort easier — at least in terms of the most recent killings and any possible connections to truckers. Many truck companies, for instance, track their drivers using GPS. And when a trucker uses a toll road, systems such as E-ZPass log it. Credit card records and surveillance tapes also help pinpoint who used the truck stop around the time when a prostitute there vanished.

The timelines are "tedious," FBI agent Harrigan says. "We want to look back and try to figure out, were there any other killings where they were?"

Harrigan says analysts might hear about five cases a week. They seem to fit the profile, but further investigation shows a serial killer isn't to blame. No matter, Harrigan says getting information from local law enforcement is critical. Already, the FBI has heard from law enforcement in 340 jurisdictions. Even if some of those cases turn out to be unrelated to the serial killer inquiries, others do, and those that do might be key in solving slayings hundreds of miles apart, Harrigan says.

The FBI and other law enforcement authorities also are careful not to condemn truckers as a whole. "We don't view this as some sort of indictment of the industry," Harrigan says.

As Norita Taylor, a spokesman for a trucking trade group says, millions of truckers are on the roads each day. Even if all of the highway serial killers happen to be truckers, that's still a tiny minority of the profession, says Taylor, spokesman for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association.

Trucker Silio hopes motorists won't stereotype. "Not all people riding motorcycles are bad people, either," he says. Others, including Nashville detective Postiglione, wonder whether the trucking profession might be a draw for someone "predisposed to become a serial killer."

With help from the FBI, David Campbell, a detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, was able to link trucker Eugene Upshaw to a year-old sexual assault near a truck stop in Castaic, Calif. In late August, authorities arrested Upshaw near Rochester, N.Y. He stands accused of beating and raping a woman and is "a person of interest in similar sexual assaults," Campbell says.

"What a perfect manner if that's what you're into," Campbell says. "What better way to mask your wrongdoings than by going from state to state doing a legitimate job?"