Rancid Cabbage Patch Doll JD Vance (copyright: Kaiser) is so efficient as vice president: he can give the handshake of death to the Pope, blame a victim for her own murder by ICE, interfere in a foreign election and have it go the other way, AND still have time to write a book. It feels like Vance has been promoting Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith for an eternity, but the internet informs me the memoir only came out last month? Chalk it up to everything feeling interminably long with this maladministration. In any event, last week Vance went on The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe podcast to shill his book, and it went as well as every other time Vance has opened his mouth. Rowe, most known for hosting Discovery’s Dirty Jobs series, offered a definition of “dignified work” as something that “blesses someone and where somebody else benefits.” Vance used that as a launching pad to diss most American jobs, calling them “fake” and “kind of bullsh-t,” and extended the criticism to college graduates with four-year degrees. As a reminder, Vance went to Yale.
“There are a lot of jobs, I think especially [those] that grew up in the COVID era, where people would sit at a laptop and not actually do very much,” Vance said.
“I think that moment in time drove home the fact that there are jobs that really do bless people, that really do build things that are meaningful, and then there are jobs that are kind of fake,” said Vance, whose 2022 Senate campaign was backed by prominent tech billionaires he met during his time as a Silicon Valley tech investor.
Later on in the interview, Vance fired shots at college grads. (Vance, who chronicled his working-class Ohio upbringing in the book “Hillbilly Elegy,” graduated from Ohio State University before earning a law degree from Yale Law School.)
“A lot of the people who are going and getting four-year degrees, they’re not like engineers and doctors. They have fake jobs,” he told a smirking Rowe.
Given that roughly 60% to 62% of the U.S. workforce is employed in white-collar occupations — many of which the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies as “management, professional, and related occupations” — Vance’s “fake jobs” remarks (made on a celebrity podcast, of all places) were certainly a choice.
Union workers and organizers in both blue-collar and white-collar industries bristled at Vance’s remarks.
“JD Vance is only in the position he’s in because he’s a billionaire bootlicker, so it’s ironic that he would mock Americans who’ve had to work hard to earn their positions and achieve success and couldn’t rely on rich people to get them ahead,” said David Green, president and executive director of SEIU 721, a union representing government and healthcare employees throughout Southern California.
…“You’d think someone whose bread was buttered by Silicon Valley oligarchs would know this,” Green said. “Maybe [Vance] should look up the job requirements for vice president if he wants to find a fake job. Apparently, the job allows for time to do book tours and podcasts.”
Tyler Turner, president of the Office and Professional Employees International Union, echoed that sentiment.
“Vance’s accusation seems to be more of a confession from a man who has spent his vice presidency writing books few want to read, preventing the release of the Epstein files to protect his friends and being humiliated in negotiations with Iran,” he told HuffPost.
“The hardworking professional workforce, such as those working people OPEIU represents, do not have fake jobs, but instead are responsible for all the behind-the-scenes work that keeps our global economy running,” he added.
I am LIVING for these union leaders’ epic takedowns of Vance! Solidarity forever! Because yes, JD Vance does humiliate himself anytime he’s on the world stage (or the couch), and it is ridiculous that his schedule is open enough that he can write a book and promote it ad nauseam. Even if being vice president didn’t occupy all of his time (major side eye), then how about being a parent to three very young kids, with the fourth baby due [checks watch] any day now!! Who’s making Usha crappy vegetarian casseroles while JD’s out gallivanting on a book tour?? As for the suggestion that Vance “should look up the job requirements for vice president if he wants to find a fake job,” for one thing: solid burn. American Experience on PBS had an interesting episode a couple years ago on this topic, The American Vice President: Rethinking A Political Afterthought. It delved into how it’s only fairly recently that the full consequence of the role has been understood. And in a sinister way, that’s exactly why Vance was chosen by Trump, to be the buffoon VP who wouldn’t object to any demands, no matter how immoral, illegal, or unconstitutional. The late great Jill Sobule had it right: JD Vance is a c-nt.
Photos via YouTube and credit: Daniel Torok/Avalon
JD Vance is also copying bell hooks’ book titles.
THIS! We aren’t talking about this enough.
Everything about him is fake.
Yes! And I agree that we’re not talking about this enough. Though I am enjoying thinking about what his next Taken Title might be. “We Real Cool”? “Sisters of the Yam”?
Like His? I call him JD 3rd name of the moment. He is nothing but fake personified.
It is amazing to me that people do not get the utter and complete contempt that the republicant party has for all working people, for every single person who is not a billionaire. They literally say it and show it in everything that they do.
JD has been vacationing with most of his family every other week of his term. He flew into Louisville last week just to spend a few hours at Valhalla for a golf tournament. He should be ashamed at his own slothful behavior.
Interesting that all the why hasn’t Kamala Harris hasn’t solved all world conflicts as Vice President people, are mysteriously quiet as he spends his time writing books and going on podcasts.
Fun fact: Kamala Harris never took a real vacation as vice president. But she spent a lot of time on the road promoting the Biden administration’s agenda and holding town halls on important issues such as gun safety, climate change, and maternal health.
A lot of the time when I look at Vance, I see someone with whom I creep up to agreement only to diverge radically. Because it’s like…. He’s *almost* got it. But he’s got a weird kink in the fabric. The late Dave Graeber wrote a brilliant book called “B*llsh*t Jobs” that described the soulless apathy of clerical / bureaucratic / white collar work, in cubicles, for meh wages, with no real trajectory in terms of leadership or team building except as an HR exercise tacked onto a brochure. A lot of those occupations feel interchangeable and box-ticking and the reason is that there are simply armies of people required to keep a modern economy on its feet, but it’s like infantry for a long campaign: you’re just in the trenches. People rotate out, people rotate in. What would actually change this picture and make it liveable or human is not changing the nature of the work itself, which is fairly standardised, but, allowing people to have some quality of life. Where work is just the means to the end, and the end is raising your family, or building a home, or taking regular holidays, like 6 weeks a year, as is standard in Europe (including the UK), so having trips to look forward to. Something to break up the monotony. Corporations that are compelled to treat their employees as human beings who have lives, are forced to be more streamlined, productive, agile, and performance-based spaces, where your contributions are tangible, because they can’t afford to take their human capital for granted, and it’s not anonymous. The problem isn’t the nature of the work: it’s the attitude of the employers, who treat their staff as if robots would be just as good, if not much better. And they compare humans to robots and in their world humans lose. AI is only going to make this dilemma more acute.
For me, he’s never ever come close to “almost got it.” Not by a country mile.
I have done a corporate, soulless, clerical / bureaucratic / white collar job (or two), in a grey cubicle, and despite what Vance (or Graeber) says, I wasn’t doing nothing. It wasn’t an HR exercise (?); I was completing necessary tasks in exchange for pay. Yes, people rotate in and out, but that isn’t because the jobs are “fake” or the contributions aren’t tangible. It’s because people move on to what they hope will be better.
If everyone stopped doing their “fake” jobs, we’d all find out how real they are.
Yeah, I’m puzzled when peole say these jobs are useless. They might be boring for those who prefer a more creative outlet, but they’re not actually useless. These jobs do help to keep things organized and operations moving. Maybe no one grows up dreaming of doing these jobs, but organizations still need someone to do them. Even a doctor needs that person sitting at a laptop to keep things organized for him.
@YankeeDoodles Severance isn’t reality TV. The workplace has been changing and evolving for decades. Jobs are not interchangeable. In this economy everyone’s job is designed to improve the bottom line of the entity they work for.
I’ve never seen Severance, so I wouldn’t know.
The If Books Could Kill guys did a good episode taking apart “Bullshit Jobs”.
Yes, but there are absolutely bullshit jobs that don’t make anyone’s life better (or make one or a few people’s lives better, at the expense of the many; and it’s the nature of the job, itself. In capitalism, there will automatically be such jobs. In any system that breeds great inequality, there will be many such jobs.
That job is called CEO. It’s not the job held by someone in a cubicle who is trying to have health insurance for her kids.
Vance, BTW, has one such job.
“Angelica tell my wife John Adams doesn’t have a real job anyway….”
Exactly what I thought.
“But my Country has in its Wisdom contrived for me, the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived: and as I can do neither good nor Evil, I must be born away by Others and meet the common Fate.”
Vice President John Adams in a letter to Abigail Adams, December 19, 1793.
BTW Abigail would have been one of our greatest presidents
Reminds me of Prince William …spends the summer with his family because he doesn’t have a real job anyway
In my 58 years of life…you TRULY DON’T WANT a Republican POTUS to be a worker…because what you will get is Ford whitewashing Nixon’s crimes or old Man Bush pushing illegal South American wars & CRACK as if he’s STILL the head of CIA for POS Reagan…or Cheney running the country into the ground while committing 😱 war crimes while being de facto POTUS while the lessor Bush is a non motha🤬 factor…
Be thankful for the inept Republican POTUS like Dan Quayle & the current 🤬 💔🇺🇸💔
You make some excellent points!
Nobody actually likes JD. Including POTUS
Love the SEIU’s pushback
Petty besties pop up everywhere! Who left out the jar of miracle whip? Someone toss it already!
i used to like mike rowe, but i haven’t thought about him in ages. is he full magat these days?
I don’t pay much attention to him, but I feel like every time his name has come up in recent years, he seems to have gone that way, unfortunately.
boo-sad. thanks for the note!
Yes. He seems to have forgotten his communications degree and resume that includes opera singer and QVC host.
I was so disappointed to see that this was his podcast. I had no idea. I knew he was a snarky git, but I did like his show. I still remember an episode in which he & the rest of the crew showed great compassion for one of the camera men when he just could not bring himself to climb over a railing to dangle off the side of a very tall building (they were accompanying window washers in Honolulu). They gave him a lot of time & when he finally decided that no, he just could not, they let him step out with grace & showed him compassion.
And now this? Just as well I had heard he had a podcast.
He has time to write a book because Veep is a fake job. You’re just waiting around in case POTUS kicks it.
The job of vice president is whatever the current vice president makes of it with the approval of the president. A vice president can be a force for good or just a waste of the title. Vance chose the latter.
You are right. Sorry, I blacked out that time that VP Dick Cheney started an illegal war to enrich his oil company.
I have always, ALWAYS supported the GI Bill and have supported — and benefited from — the goals of diversity and inclusion. JD tho… seems like a sordid waste of both of these types of programs. Has he ever had a “real” job? Or has he just benefited from the very real jobs that his relatives have held?
I’m curious about who really wrote his books. I won’t read the second one. The first one seemed to be written by at least 2 different writers, and devolved into a political screed. Sometimes I think that Trump, Vance, and Miller represent the very worst of American culture, and possibly the very worst of humanity. Vance has benefited more from other people’s hard work, “real” jobs, and taxpayer’s sacrifices than most. I almost hope that the odious little toad decides to run for office on his own behalf — so that he can see for himself what real Americans think of him.
This from a man whose job has been called “as useful as a pitcher of warm spit” – by someone who did it, FDR’s vice president J.N. Garner.
That was the most memorable thing that man ever said.
And yet we have to work these “fake jobs” b/c they’re the only ones that provide decent insurance! The insurance this administration says we should have so we don’t go calling on them!
THIS !!! 🎯
Sometimes not even decent insurance. Unless something catastrophic happens, I will just be paying the very high deductible all year on mine. If I went up to the next tier, I’d barely have a paycheck to speak of.
@Worktowander: Garner was FDR’s first VP. He had three. They were all famously out of the loop most of the time. Harry Truman barely knew Roosevelt. When FDR died, Truman was unaware of the existence of the atomic bomb and had to be hurriedly briefed. Presidents have gotten better at keeping their vice presidents informed and well briefed, especially on national security issues. They now sit next to the president at national security council meetings. Everyone now seems to realize that the person who takes over when the president is incapable of doing the job should not be a potted plant. Or a pitcher of warm 💩 which was what he actually said.
People forget (or elect not to remember) the great Henry Wallace, FDR’s favourite VP, the one he wanted instead of Truman, as he had a pretty solid premonition he would not survive a fourth term, and died three months after he was inaugurated. The Democratic Party could have had Wallace as President. He has served as the Secretary of Agriculture during the New Deal in the rush to save the farmers who had been wiped out by the Depression and he later served as Truman’s Secretary of Commerce. Wallace was an original, and he would have been brilliant. Tragically, the corporate Democrats of the 1940s were terrified of him and staged a shameless and brazen manoeuvre to deny him the VP nomination, even though he was FDR’s choice. So FDR was saddled with Truman, whom he disdainfully neglected. Wallace knew all about the Manhattan Project and everything else that had gone down during the war. He knew which American oil companies, law firms, and banks, had been happy to do business with national socialist Germany, which of them had been sanctioned for trading with the enemy, literally, like Prescott Bush’s outfit. And he knew how they had turned to pivot to profit from the war effort, having fought the New Deal tooth and nail. Someone like *that* put the fear of god into corporate Democrats, to say nothing the the GOP. Hence we got Truman. The rest is history. Wallace is the road not taken.
@yankeedoodles: counterfactuals are interesting and entertaining but there is a bit more to the story of Henry Wallace that makes it difficult to conclude that all our problems would have been solved had he become president instead of Truman. During his vice presidency, he was given a propaganda tour of Stalin’s Soviet Union which led him to believe that Stalin’s Soviet Union was Utopia and that Stalin had no territorial ambitions in eastern Europe and western Europe. He was not shown any gulags or prisons so he was unaware of the human rights horrors under Stalin. As a result, he was constantly pushing for the US to have better relations with Stalin’s government against the more cautious and pragmatic national security experts of the time. He went on to run for president in 1948 as the candidate of the Progressive party whose leadership was riddled with Stalinist operatives. Long story short, I think we ended up much better off with Harry Truman than we would have been under Henry Wallace who admitted the error of his ways as early as 1950. The Red Scares of the late forties and early fifties would have been grounded in truth rather than demagoguery during a Wallace presidency. Book recommendation: TRUMAN by David Mc Cullough.
I should add that it wasn’t just Wallace’s politics that many Democrats didn’t like. They didn’t much like him as a person because he was considered cold and aloof. If that’s true, he would have been a terrible president following the beloved, charismatic Roosevelt.
And some people like you get very important jobs even though they are not qualified in any way, shape or form.
So, now that Medicaid health insurance will be attached to mandatory work requirements, what kinds of jobs will these be? How will people attain them?
It stands out to me that many of the jobs that helped to create Black middle class communities are being obliterated by this administration— including civil service and military careers. The changes with student loans will worsen this.* Is the plan for white males to be graced with the un”real” jobs that people like Vance get to have — while the rest of us do the “real” jobs that, in the recent past, have often been done by immigrants?
It’s extremely disheartening to continually fight the same battles — so that mediocre MAGAs can feel superior.
* I’ve read that federal student loans will be limited for those pursuing degrees that don’t pay significantly more than people without college degrees make. I haven’t seen any formula for figuring this out. Will it be by individual ? By school? By profession? Will incoming freshman have to declare majors in fields that they don’t yet have any actual experience with? What happens when people change their majors? In any event, this seems designed to penalize students whose professions may pay less — like the arts, and those that may employ high numbers of women and people of color such as teaching and social work. This administration is trying to recreate Trump’s white supremacist childhood — while grifting our tax dollars and weakening our strengths as a nation.
Like Vice President of the United States?
OK, that was based on the headline alone. Now I’ve got to go back up to read the article & other comments. That rat b*stard, always insulting the American people.
Now that I’ve read everything, f*ck that guy.
You need a four year degree to get into medical school though… (at least in the USA anyway— that’s the way the system has been designed…)
He himself has a fake job. Everything he says and does is untrue.
🎯
Kinda like trump
Exactly, The Real Queen. Criminal grifters.