My Unique Experience with Globalization

At my last job, I worked as a warehouse specialist at Aisin Brake & Chassis, a Japanese-owned automotive parts manufacturing company in Indiana. And as a consequence of this ownership, the vast majority of company high management positions were held by Japanese nationals who, more often than not, knew little about our language and customs.

To bridge this gap, Aisin held unique diversity classes that taught special but simple Japanese expressions and customs. These classes were open to everyone employed at the factory. Also, for some fortunate American workers who were being considered for management, Aisin offered an intensive diversity course where the candidate spent a week in Japan itself with all expenses paid.

I always thought that it was telling that the Japanese placed an emphasis on the American workforce learning their ways, and not the other way around. But, hey, it was their company.

Beware! Zero Credibility and Dangerous

Andrew Breitbart is a dangerous liar who deliberately distorts the truth to intensify racial resentments in America. This isn’t a partisan statement; it’s a fact.

Breitbart is a 41-year-old a conservative blogger, newspaper columnist and television commentator. He’s responsible for posting edited videos Monday (July 19th) that discredited Shirley Sherrod, an African-American woman employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The videos appeared to show Sherrod giving a reverse racist speech at a 2009 NAACP fundraising event. The clips were edited so that Sherrod looked as if she was showing off an unashamed discriminatory attitude toward white farmers while NAACP audience members laughed and shouted with approval. Sherrod was forced to resign in the resulting controversy.

Breitbart said he posted the clips because they contained “video evidence of racism coming from a federal appointee and NAACP award recipient”. However, the unedited video of the speech came out the next day (July 20th) showing almost the opposite happening. It revealed that Sherrod was, in fact, making an argument against racial discrimination, and the NAACP audience was applauding her call for tolerance. Shortly thereafter, the mainstream media backtracked and began exposing all the deception contained in the original clip, and Sherrod got a job offer from her old boss.

So with that hubbub behind, the “inside the beltway” crowd has shifted its focus back to Breitbart. Pundits from Politico.com, as well as CNN commentator Anderson Cooper have asserted that Breitbart is just an example of the out-of-control partisanship occurring in the blogosphere. Politico editor Jim VandeHei has said Breitbart is the right-wing equivalent of the left’s Arianna Huffington.

This is pure drivel. While definitely biased for the Democratic Party and progressive politics, Huffington has never intentionally manufactured a story and tried to pass it off as journalism. Breitbart is a scumbag whose messages go well beyond the boundaries of partisanship.

Yes, I said messages!

Do you remember the uproar over ACORN when an apparently incriminating video surfaced? This clip featured an apparent undercover reporter dressed as a pimp, who entered an agency office and supposedly exposed rampant corruption.


Like the Sherrod video, the ACORN pimp clip turned out to be fallacious and manufactured, and the person behind it was none other than Andrew Breitbart. But unlike Sherrod, ACORN never recovered because Congress decided to defund the community action agency after the pimp story first aired.

That’s two examples where Breitbart’s “partisanship” has poured gasoline on the charcoal embers of American racism by dangerously manufacturing stories. Breitbart is free to speak, but the media are free to quit giving him a podium. News sources must have at least some semblance of credibility. The next time CNN, MSNBC or FOX carries a Breitbart video, it should be one of him being dragged into court on civil lawsuit charges.

REEE-jected!!!

When I worked in broadcasting years ago, I quickly learned that job insecurity was one of the major pitfalls. As a result, I often found myself on the job market and the recipient of one of the more common negative business messages: THE EMPLOYMENT REJECTION LETTER.

Effective rejection letters in broadcasting essentially follow the standard rejection letter format that almost everyone gets when seeking employment. Since I’ve received a high proportion of rejection letters during my many job searches, I’ve read some that range from polite and encouraging to disrespectful and downright mean-spirited.

The worst came from a Program Director at a Danville (IL) radio station. He proceeded to explain to me how Danville was much too big for someone of my talent because it was a market of 200 thousand people. Whoa! It’s right up there with Chicago and St. Louis…NOT! Ironically, I was working at the time in Terre Haute (IN), a market roughly about the same size as Danville.

In my opinion, the most effective rejections began with a buffer statement, such as “Thank you for your interest in continuing your broadcasting career at WJX-FM”. Some rejections contained statements that were more direct, but I always appreciated getting acknowledged for taking the time to apply.

By the way, whenever I received a letter from a broadcaster during a job search, I could almost lay a wager that it was a rejection. If the broadcaster was interested in me, they would contact me by phone.

Joel’s Got Mail!!

I read all the e-mails that I get on my work account, but ignore and delete roughly 90 percent of the ones that I receive at home.

On my home computer, I have a personal e-mail account with Yahoo. The only messages I always open and read are from family members, friends, job search leads and DeVry University. However, I’m flooded with e-mails from Facebook, which are messages containing friend requests, notifications and gaming updates. I immediately send these to the trash heap because I can retrieve the same information by simply logging on to the social network. Plus, my home account is the target of both legitimate and not-so-legitimate sales pitches for credit cards, insurance plans, other online college degrees and a whole host of other items on which people are hoping to make a buck.

The e-mail subject line can make a big difference. Sometimes a properly-worded subject line will prompt me to open a message I’d normally cast off.

For example, I once received a message from some person locater service that had the subject line: “Joel Wells, we’ve found a friend of yours!”. This message was rejected after I found out that this service needed my credit card number to discover who it was.

My e-mail account at work, in contrast, gets messages from just one source: the company. The messages are from management, human resource personnel and other co-workers. They send information that’s work related (at least it’s supposed to be), and I take the time to read, or at least skim, it all.

Subject lines on work e-mails only affect the sequence in which I read them. However, they don’t have an effect on whether I read or skim the message since I open them all anyway.

Yes, I Once Wrote for a Newspaper...Really!

Back in 1981, I worked a stretch as a sports reporter at the Columbia Missourian, a daily, commercial newspaper run by the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Since then, I often went around bragging about how I once was a sportswriter. But, I had no proof...until now.

Thanks to some wonderfully diligent librarians at Mizzou's journalism library, I was able to retrieve some long lost samples of my work. After tracking down the articles on microfilm (They have every issue of the Missourian dating back to 1923.), the library sent me several PDF files of stories with my byline. Then, I conveted these to JPG.

Now,Jay Mariotti's job isn't in any danger, but here's some of the samples. All the stories were about track. This is a preview I wrote about an upcoming meet for Mizzou.

The second set is my story about the local high school (the Hickman Kewpies) winning the state title in girls track.

My stint as a sports reporter ended shortly after these stories were published because I had to withdraw from Mizzou for personal reasons. I did graduate later but my emphasis was changed to broadcast news.

UPDATE:

FYI, I wrote and submitted the girls state track meet story on the day it happened, Saturday, May 30, 1981. The Missourian published it the next day in their Sunday edition for May 31, 1981. I'm still uncertain on the exact date for my other Missourian story, but I believe it was published the week before.

The Disaster in the Gulf: Beyond Katrina

This may be the 2nd-worst disaster in the Gulf. The most catastrophic came when a rogue asteroid or comet smashed into the Yucatan peninsula some 65 million years ago. That calamity caused the mass-extinction of the dinosaurs and many other animal and plant species.

This oil spill should be thought of as a pending tragedy that easily has the potential for comparable damage. This is more than another Hurricane Katrina...it just may be another asteroid!

Before and After: The Power of Facebook?

I think there’s more than coincidence working here.

Last Monday (June 14th), severe thunderstorms producing high winds (some say tornadoes) and flash floods made an unwelcome visit to Vigo County and West-Central Indiana. As usual, the heavy rains left a nearby gravel road virtually impassable. It’s now five days later, and it appears the county has come out to make repairs. The following is a before and after shot of the area in question:

Now, this road, called Milliken Street, is along my daily bicycle-riding exercise route. “Wow!” I thought to myself. “The county is really on it”.

But, hold the phone… Milliken Street has been flooded many times. And never once did any trucks come out to pour gravel. Never once was the street leveled. Milliken’s puddles, no matter how deep, were always left to the goodwill chance of having at least a week of dry, sunny days to dry it up. And don’t forget, normally Milliken would still be a lake because it’s rained heavily nearly every day this week.

So what’s up? Well, the fact that I took pictures of the flooding and posted them on the Facebook page of the local television station (WTHI-TV, Channel 10) is, perhaps, the missing piece of the puzzle.

Channel 10’s local news is heavily viewed by the local powers-that-be, especially during weather events. They frequently broadcast Facebook mobile uploads on their newscasts. Now, I missed Channel 10’s newscast that night because the storm knocked out the neighborhood’s power. But, I’d say it’s a good bet that they broadcast my photos of the flooding.

Perhaps, my ego is getting the better of me. But I tend to think not. I think that it’s quite possible that my photos unintentionally made someone look bad, and provoked some long, overdue government action:

You gotta love it

An Equal Opportunity Wickedness

The most infamous example of human occupation began some 500 years ago when the leading European powers began invading and conquering the Americas. But it should be remembered that the history of humankind is full of conquest. It’s just that most attacks have happened on a much smaller scale.

Take the history of England:
-The Celts were overrun by the Romans.
-The Romans were overrun by the Germans (Anglo-Saxons).
-The Anglo-Saxons were overrun by the Vikings.
-The Vikings were overrun by the Norman French.

Each conquest was brutal to indigenous populations. The difference, of course, is that the invaders didn't have to travel half a planet to do their plundering and pillaging.

The only thing that sets Western cultures as more menacing is, perhaps, the lengths as to which they inflicted their oppression. However, no culture that exists on Earth has a spotless record in this regard, including the indigenous pre-Columbian cultures of the Western hemisphere.