01.14.11
Posted in Stumble and Fail at 6:03 pm by George Smith
And get what you pay for.
The next item is too flabbergasting. You can’t make up better satire.
The idea that candy can’t be made in America — too expensive (!) — so it must be done overseas, like in Pakistan — our best international pal in the whole wide world. So it can be made with lead because regulation doesn’t add to the bottom line there.
And the name of the candy. Well, just read …
The FDA announced that Candy Dynamics is recalling some of its Toxic Waste brand candy. Toxic Waste in Nuclear Sludge, made in Pakistan, has been found to contain elevated levels of lead that poses a threat of poisoning, especially for children. Toxic Waster is made by Candy Dynamics and under the Circle City Marketing and Distributing of Indianapolis, Specific Toxic Waste candies recalled include:
Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Cherry Chew Bar (UPC 0 89894 81430 6), Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Sour Apple Chew Bar (UPC 0 10684 81410 7), and Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Blue Raspberry Chew Bar (UPC 0 89894 81420 7). Each chew bar has a net weight of 0.7 ounces (20 grams).
To date no injuries or illness have been reported in connection with Toxic Waste candy. Toxic Waste tested with
dangerous lead levels of .24 parts per million. The FDA allowable lead content is .1 ppm. No other candy from Candy Dynamics or Toxic Waste brand is affected by the recall. Impact Candy requests that consumers not eat purchased candy and contact Eileen O’Neal, of Candy Dynamics at (317) 228-5012
Candy Dynamics specializes the production of extremely sour candy. Sour Candy Drums are designed to look like toxic waste oozing from a nuclear waste drum. Toxic waste comes in candy spray, soft chews, High Voltage and Short Circuit super sour gum. Other brands of very tart, luridly colored candy include Impact Confections, makers of Warheads. Often these kinds of candies are made in China or another Asian country. The concern with foreign made candy, particularly candy made in third world nations, is that the production standards may not be on par with FDA approved levels.
I am sometimes persuaded there’s absolutely no way to fix a country as scrambled and screwed up as the United States.
From the FDA:
Circle City Marketing and Distributing doing business as Candy Dynamics, Indianapolis, IN, is issuing a voluntary recall of all Toxic Waste® brand Nuclear Sludge® Chew Bars, all flavors, Net wt. 0.7 oz (20 g) package. The product is imported from Pakistan.
A recent test performed by the California Department of Public Health has indicated that a lot (#8288A) of the cherry flavor of the above-listed product contains elevated levels of lead (0.24 parts per million; the U.S. FDA tolerance is 0.1 ppm) that potentially could cause health problems, particularly for infants, small children, and pregnant women.
The bad news is that Candy Dynamics won’t be destroyed by the scandal. They’ll just ride the storm out.
In a related matter, DD did postdoctoral work at the Penn State School of Medicine in Hershey, PA.
Yes, the famous Hershey. And — uh-huh– you could smell the chocolate in the air. And on many afternoons, you could smell peanuts being processed at the Reese’s/Hershey factory in the west part of town.
Between the medical school and Hershey chocolate, the middle class could earn a decent living in the place.
By now you know where this is going.
It was too expensive to make Hershey chocolate, the chocolate made in America, in America. So Hershey moved a lot of it overseas.
From a relatively recent news item, on the outsourcing of something as basic as ‘American’ candy-making:
The next time you buy a package of Hershey’s candy kisses, take a good look at where they’re made before you put your money down.
Chances are, the answer is Mexico, not Hershey, Pennsylvania.
That’s because the iconic candy company closed its historic Hershey’s East plant in its namesake Pennsylvania town, idling some 600 Bakery Workers (BCTGM) members. There’s still another Hershey’s plant there, BCTGM researcher Matthew Clark, who tracks the candy company, told Press Associates.
“But the exodus from Hershey has been going on for a long time,” he adds.
Hershey’s departure from Hershey – a company town dominated by the candy firm and Hershey Park – is a symbol of the increasing trend of the outsourcing and offshoring of U.S. factory jobs. That trend has been increasing in the last decade, according to a new report, Outsourced: Sending America’s Jobs Overseas, published last month by Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
“They want to outsource, build plants in Mexico, shut down American factories and move stuff around,” Chocolate Workers Local 464 Business Manager Dennis Bomberger told a British newspaper, quoted in the report.
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01.10.11
Posted in Census, Stumble and Fail at 9:55 am by George Smith
UPDATED
Last week I mentioned once again that doing census work allowed one to see the truly radical poverty in Pasadena.
This in connection with Ted Nugent’s voicing of the usual far right cant that poor people are so because they are unproductive and lazy. It is an argument that seeks to reset any discussion on poverty and inequality by equating it with flaws in character.
Canvasing the downtown apartment complexes and housing developments off Colorado showed the wealthy and the very poor in Pasadena living side by side.
Here, as in many other places I would imagine, it is easy to overlook the bottom. In Pasadena much of it is hidden away in apartment complexes in fairly nice neighborhoods. Or stowed out of sight and mind in what look like nice big houses from the Forties and Fifties.
A step inside, however, always showed owners had subdivided these into tiny claustrophobic rooms, turning them into flophouses for the servant class.
None of this happened overnight. It is a consequence of the economic system that’s been in place in the United States over at least the last decade. In Pasadena, inequality and poverty collide with some of the highest rents and property values in the country.
The wealthy — the haves — had radically pushed up the value of land in Pasadena as part of the conversion of the city to as a go-to place (think Old Town on weeknights and weekends) in southern California and the expansion of the mansion district around the Rose Bowl. During the last five years, princely condo projects were started and completed along Colorado and Lake — actually almost everywhere — in bids to attract the young and upper middle class.
Much of the condo space around Hudson and Locust just on the south side of the 210 freeway, for example, is living space owned or administered by Oakwood Corporate Housing.
Oakwood is a vast empire, started by Howard Ruby. Some eyewash at National Public Radio is here where he’s touted as an environmentalist and photographer.
The Oakwood properties I canvased furnished temporary housing to a upper and upper middle corporate servant class. For lack of a better classification I thought of them as a fancy-pants type of migrant worker.
Many did not respond to their census questionnaires because they viewed themselves as temporary residents. For example, they spent most of their days flying here and there across the country. Think George Clooney in “Up In the Air.”
If one questioned a neighbor in an effort to gain information about their address, for instance, a common response was that such people were not home much because of ‘travel.’
Or the corporate migrant worker could be one who had been sent to southern California to do some semi-long term function by their masters.
And what they considered to be their permanent home — and place where the rest of the family lived — was elsewhere.
In any case, the census was required to categorize these addresses. And we had different line descriptions for varieties of temporary residence and procedures for enumerating their inhabitants.
These were the people who had not been hit quite as hard by the Great Recession. They appeared to still be working while those in the local service class hunkering in the dingier complexes or the flophouses that had once been fine Pasadena middle class homes had been really taking it in the shorts for some time.
“Would it surprise you to learn that Pasadena is the most unequal city in California?” is the question opening a recent 2007 article from the Pasadena Weekly.
“That’s one of the interesting facts now available from the recent release of 2006 data by the US Census Bureau.”
An interesting fact? Radical inequality is an “interesting fact”? [Shakes head.]
Keep in mind this was from 2007, a consequence of 2006 data. In fairness, things may still have seemed almost peachy. The Great Recession had not yet arrived.
I worked the 2010 Decennial census. And things aren’t better as a result of the Great Recession. In fact, they are much worse.
The weekly newspaper broke out some statistics from 2006:
In Pasadena, the richest one-fifth of Pasadena households — those with incomes over $123,641 — has over half (54.2 percent) of the income earned by city residents. The wealthiest 5 percent — those with household incomes above $255,106 — have over one-quarter (25.1 percent) of the income. Pasadena has a higher concentration of income among the richest five percent than the United States and California (both 22.1 percent) and Los Angeles County (23.6 percent).
In contrast, the poorest one-fifth of Pasadena households — those with incomes below $21,277 — combined have only 2.8 percent of residents’ income. Those in the next poorest one-fifth — those with household incomes between $21,277 and $46,375 — bring home only 7.6 percent of Pasadena’s incomes.
If we looked at wealth (stocks, bonds and other holdings) instead of income, the concentration at the top of the economic pyramid would be even more skewed.
Rising inequality and a skewed economy that only benefits the very wealthy leads to inefficiency and unpleasant death spirals. In Pasadena it’s obvious to everyone that the working people who provide the finery in the city’s restaurants, nice hotels and play places cannot afford to live here.
As a consequence they must either drive in from some much cheaper place of urban squalor or try to carve out a place to sleep with a bunch of roommates. Or rent a big closet-sized room rented out for still way too much in one of the previously referred to flophouses.
Reported the PWeekly:
Gentrification may be good for a handful of developers, but it isn’t good for most residents or for the city’s business climate. As the new census data suggest, Pasadena housing costs are skyrocketing beyond what most working families — including schoolteachers, nurses and nurses’ aides, bus drivers, security guards, secretaries, janitors, child care providers, retail clerks, computer programmers, lab assistants and others — can afford.
Rising rents and home prices are undermining our city’s economic, social and civic fabric. Our public schools are losing children. Many religious congregations are losing members. Youth soccer and baseball leagues, and other community initiatives, are losing volunteers.
Keep in mind, again, it’s census data from 2006.
Rising rents and home prices did undermine the city’s economic fabric and this has been compounded by the Great Recession. As a consequence lots of small businesses failed in Pasadena. And there is now no shortage of empty office space, rooms or housing. By example, one ritzy condo complex on Lake near the OneWest Bank has been conspicuously empty for the last two years.
If one has been at all observant over the last couple of years when walking or driving the city’s streets, one saw the evidence in cratered businesses, must-sell-everything signs, and turnover in store-fronts.
Paradoxically, prices still remain too high. Which has led to the phenomenon of owners who are care-taking, waiting around for things to tick upward again.
Previously, on the census in Pasadena — here. (Also see the tab at right.)
There is some irony in the fact that only an English news agency — not a local American one — was interested in a first-hand story from it.
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01.08.11
Posted in Stumble and Fail at 10:39 am by George Smith
Pine View Farm draws my attention to the rising scapegoating of middle class union workers. (The embedded vidoes are key so do clikc out there from here.)
Lamentable articles in the New York Times have outlined Republican and Wall Street efforts to attack state unions as root causes of our economic troubles. It seems to do no good to say that unions have been under public attack for a long time and that they’ve been crippled by US business interests.
Those with the money rely on scapegoating and resentment to fuel sentiment against them. The mental equation appealing to baser emotion is simple one: Because those in the private sector have had it very hard, then the middle class union workers left — mostly in state and federal government — need punishing as well.
There have been other ways to describe it, Nitzschean Ressentiment, being one: “[Because] (I or we) have suffered, it is appropriate and good that even more suffer.”
This is pure scapegoating, rationalized as austerity and belt tightening. The President helped fuel it last year when he fecklessly announced federal employee wage freezing after election losses.
“Obama flunks economics with pointless wage freeze,” reads the headline at FiireDogLake, for example.
Pine View Farm quotes from the Guardian, a UK newspaper, where the reporting columnist comments on the tactic:
At the Guardian, Paul Harris comments on the anti-worker frenzy, pointing out the dipsy-doodle to distract persons from the real culprits:
What is perverse about this trend is just how vastly it misunderstands what went wrong with the American economy. No one is denying that this is a time for belt-tightening. Or that some unions have problems. Or that some union contracts look over-generous in austerity America. But the fundamental truth remains: powerful and reckless unions did not cause the Great Recession by rampant speculation. Nor did an out-of-control labour movement cause or burst the housing bubble. It was not union bosses who packaged up complex derivatives to sell in their millions and thus wrecked the economy and put millions out of work. Nor was it union bosses who awarded (and continue to award) themselves salaries worth hundreds of millions of dollars for doing nothing of social value. Neither was it the union movement that was bailed out by the taxpayer and then refused to change its habits.
All that was the work of the finance industry.
One of the New York Times articles obliquely mentioned at the top of the column ran on the 4th.
It revealed the urge and strategy used to whack state union workers across the nation. In California, for example, it has been much the same. Jerry Brown seems poised to not only fire workers but to further cripple the survivors because of the state’s budget mess which has been boiling over for what now seems like an eternity.
Reported the Times:
Some union leaders say that proposals like right-to-work laws, which have little effect on state budgets, show that Republicans are using budget woes as a pretext to undercut unions.
“They’re throwing the kitchen sink at us,??? said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “We’re seeing people use the budget crisis to make every attempt to roll back workers’ voices and any ability of workers to join collectively in any way whatsoever.???
A group composed of Republican state lawmakers and corporate executives, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is quietly spreading these proposals from state to state, sending e-mails about the latest efforts as well as suggested legislative language.
One of the leaders is John Kasich, Ohio’s new governor.
From the Times article, here’s Kasich employing the language of the scapegoater:
Of all the new governors, John Kasich, Republican of Ohio, appears to be planning the most comprehensive assault against unions. He is proposing to take away the right of 14,000 state-financed child care and home care workers to unionize. He also wants to ban strikes by teachers, much the way some states bar strikes by the police and firefighters.
“If they want to strike, they should be fired,??? Mr. Kasich said in a speech. “They’ve got good jobs, they’ve got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for????
Early in 2010, the Times also ran a story discussing the fact that state and federal government workers now make up the most union members in the country, surpassing the private sector. It was not because of some evil intrinsic to government workers. The numbers refllected only that the US private sector had been steadily destroying US manufacturing jobs in the great de-industrialization, a trend accelerated by the mass layoffs brought on by the Great Recession.
It reads, in part:
Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, voiced dismay that government employees now represented a majority of union members.
“It’s a very bad sign,??? he said. “We’ve been banged around some, but when you see what’s been happening to the industrial base of this country, to the steelworkers, to the autoworkers, they’re been hammered much more.???
After rising the two previous years, overall union membership fell by 771,000 in 2009, to 15.3 million, largely because employment declined over all. But the rate of private-sector unionization fell because two sectors where unions are especially strong — manufacturing and construction — suffered especially large job losses. Construction lost more than 900,000 jobs last year, falling to 5.9 million, while 1.3 million factory jobs were lost, declining to 11.6 million.
Kasich had previously kept his face in the public on Fox News. His Wiki bio informs:
In 2001, Kasich took a job as managing director of the Columbus investment banking division of Lehman Brothers. He remained at the company until its collapse in September 2008. During 2008, Lehman Brothers paid Kasich $587,175 in salary, bonuses, and other benefits. Over $400,000 of that bonus is credited to Kasich using his political connections to facilitate investment of $480 Million from the state pension fund with Lehman Brothers.
In a better world, Kasich would still be on Fox News, the regular friendly puppet of Bill O’Reilly. But we don’t live in such a place.
In his book, Class, Paul Fussell had a few things to say about scapegoating and how it is tied to bitterness in the working class. And how easily it turns people on each other. Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it. The book, after all, was written many years ago.
However, I’ve mentioned it from time to time on this domain. And it seems appropriate to close from something back in 2008 on the old blog.
Class war, Fussell noted, was never far from the surface in the United States.
Now it has erupted. But we’re still losing because Wall Street and the Republican Party are adept at turning people’s loathing at the wrong targets.
From then (paradoxically, it was in a post on the common political instigation of class war against candidate Obama:
“Inflation, unemployment, a static economy” have set into stone conditions in which “the mass of Americans now find themselves” moving down. “There used to be room at the top,” [Fussell concluded]. Now there’s plenty of room at the bottom, vicinities near which many of us will become acquainted with, sooner than later.
Just cross out the ‘inflation’ bit.
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01.07.11
Posted in Phlogiston, Stumble and Fail at 9:28 am by George Smith
Good news, lads:
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sketched a more optimistic outlook for the economy, but said a $600 billion bond-buying program is needed because it will take up to five more years to bring unemployment back to healthy levels.
Bernanke told the Senate Budget Committee that there’s increasing evidence that a “self-sustaining” recovery is taking hold. He said he expects stronger economic growth because consumers and businesses will boost spending this year.
Bernanke spoke one hour after the government released a disappointing employment report. Employers added only 103,000 jobs in December. The unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent partly because people gave up looking for jobs.
And, from the same wire, with only a different title:
But the job growth fell short of expectations based on a strengthening economy. And the drop in unemployment was partly because people stopped looking for work.
Private employers added a net total of 113,000 jobs last month and the government shed 10,000 jobs, the Labor Department said Friday.
“The labor market ended last year with a bit of a thud,” [opined some fellow from Moody’s]. “But I think things will get much better this year.”
Why would people stop looking for work?
Roseanne Barr on CNN this week: “There are no jobs.”
But there are, apparently at Goldman and other financial institutions, if you’re the right god’s work-doing superman, one who can answer interview questions of dubious nature. Presumably chosen to winnow out only the best and brightest, according to a weekly Yahoo news feature on job-seeking and the best tactics in bowing and scraping:
If you were shrunk to the size of a pencil and trapped in a blender, how would you get out? — Goldman Sachs
Why do you think only a small portion of the population makes over $150,000? (Reportedly from New York Life)
How are M&Ms made? (Reportedly from USBank)
The article (no link) — which can be looked up in Google — avers that interview questions could just be troll bait from an Internet poll.
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01.06.11
Posted in Stumble and Fail at 2:27 pm by George Smith
He appoints a liver-spotted JP Morgan exec as chief of staff.
I wait for Matt Taibbi’s reaction.
From Politico:
The appointment of Bill Daley as White House chief of staff speaks to the White House’s desire to improve its relationship with the business community …
On behalf of our hundreds of thousands of colleagues at J.P. Morgan Chase, I want to congratulate Bill Daley on this great honor,” Jamie Dimon said in a statement on Thursday. “Bill is an outstanding leader who has played a critical role in heading our corporate social responsibility efforts. Throughout his time at our company, he has been an exemplar of wisdom, integrity and decency. While we will miss him greatly, Bill’s return to public service is great news for our country.???
The man led JP Morgan’s corporate social responsibility efforts. That’s rich.
Taibbi on JP Morgan, last year, in “Looting Main Street”:
The destruction of Jefferson County reveals the basic battle plan of these modern barbarians, the way that banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have systematically set out to pillage towns and cities from Pittsburgh to Athens. These guys aren’t number-crunching whizzes making smart investments; what they do is find suckers in some municipal-finance department, corner them in complex lose-lose deals and flay them alive. In a complete subversion of free-market principles, they take no risk, score deals based on political influence rather than competition, keep consumers in the dark — and walk away with big money …
If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff’s precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.
As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260.
The Wall Street bank which was the star of the feature: JP Morgan.
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Posted in Census, Stumble and Fail at 12:22 pm by George Smith
Poverty in Pasadena became obvious while DD worked the census last year.
One stupefying quality observed was the poor in Pasadena live right next door to the affluent they serve. They’re shoehorned into outwardly normal looking houses, now converted to stealth flophouses with individuals living in the equivalent of large, often windowless, closets.
Where their dire conditions are just out of sight of the upper class.
These are, according to Ted Nugent and his ilk, people who refuse to be productive. Who simply don’t have the creative power and work ethic of the wealthy US superman.
It is a repellent vision.
From the Associated Press today:
The number of poor people in the U.S. is millions higher than previously known, with 1 in 6 Americans — many of them 65 and older — struggling in poverty due to rising medical care and other costs, according to preliminary census figures released Wednesday.
At the same time, government aid programs such as tax credits and food stamps kept many people out of poverty, helping to ensure the poverty rate did not balloon even higher during the recession in 2009, President Barack Obama’s first year in office.
Under a new revised census formula, overall poverty in 2009 stood at 15.7 percent, or 47.8 million people. That’s compared to the official 2009 rate of 14.3 percent, or 43.6 million, that was reported by the Census Bureau last September.
Across all demographic groups, Americans 65 and older sustained the largest increases in poverty under the revised formula — nearly doubling to 16.1 percent.
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01.04.11
Posted in Stumble and Fail at 9:20 am by George Smith
From Forbes.com:
Bustling densely populated urban epicenters with high turnovers of tourists and business travelers are among the worst sufferers. Those cities include New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Chicago.
The state most afflicted by bed bugs is a bit of a surprise: Ohio. Three of the Buckeye state’s cities–Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton–are on the exterminators’ bed bug-infested lists.
“At this point we don’t know, nor does anyone know, why cities in Ohio seem to have a much higher influx of bed bugs per capita than larger cities,” says Orkin’s Harrison.
Never underestimate coincidence and more enthusiastic by commercial exterminators.
Reasons for bedbug blitz were discussed last year here and had to do with a couple of factors, some linked to the recession.
Bedbugs travel with people and their belongings.
Losing your job in the city, having unemployment run out, and having to move in with relatives elsewhere most probably took bedbugs everywhere, not only between urban centers but also from urban centers to smaller towns. Working the census, one could see the dislocation. And also pick up gossip about it by simply talking with apartment complex managers.
Bedbug populations also probably surged when property management companies, seeing a drop in tenancy because of the recession, cut back on pest control regimes to save money. Such decisions, in retrospect, were shortsighted.
Another factor possibly contributing to the spread of bedbugs in urban centers is also probably indirectly linked to transience in apartment complexes.
An entire service industry of cleaners, repainters, carpet-steamers and repairmen exist to renovate and perform minor carpentry and painting in the short term. When a tenant leaves, many property owners will bring in small business service workers to ready the units for new tenants. Since these workers bring tools and boxes, often spend the day in an empty unit, and travel from unit to unit across a city, they most probably are excellent vectors for bedbugs.
Bedbugs are very small and, annoyingly, while no one is looking, they will crawl into boxes and clumps of tarpaulin or rags left about in a unit. Particularly if left over night.
When the workmen come back the next day, or gather up their materials at the end of the day and take them to the truck, the bedbug (or plural) goes along for the ride to the next place.
It has also been DD’s experience that some property managers, plagued by bedbug eradication costs, have attempted to shift the responsibility onto tenants.
The last thing one wants to do when dealing with transmitted infestations is to blame and penalize those who are afflicted. Which is what such riders are designed to do.
It works this way.
The tenant has to sign a rider on their contract certifying that they guarantee that their belongings are free of bedbugs when they move in. Of course, there is no way to do this. However, it is coupled to legal language which then holds the tenant liable for any subsequent bedbug infestation when they are in the unit.
Since professional exterminations and mandatory damage or partial to total elimination of key furnishings — like mattresses — are unpalatable or too expensive to many people living in apartment units, they have no incentive to report bedbugs to property managers for removal.
In fact, the implied penalties — punishments — discourage them from doing so.
In such cases people may be more likely to undertake their own amateur attempts at pest control or just engage in extended battle with the insects while learning to live with them.
While some tenants would invariably report bedbugs and absorb liability others would not. And it would complicate efforts to totally eliminate bedbugs, since getting rid of the insects in one unit would not prevent them from reinfestation of cleansed units from other infested apartments in the same building.
Bedbugs being able to crawl through various conduits, you see.
The bedbug blitz has also led to annoying and repetitive stories on job opportunities having to do with the acquisition of bedbug sniffing dogs.
Dick Destiny’s Bedbugs tune — in mp3. Do give it a listen. It was quite the hit at our pre-Xmas show in Pasadena. (I considered making a video from all the bedbug footage now available. After an hour of viewing what was available on YouTube, a certain queasiness and headache had set in.)
Previously — on bedbugs.
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12.31.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, Extremism, Stumble and Fail, War On Terror at 3:37 pm by George Smith
As the year ends, I’d summarize the greatest threats to the nation as those of our own making.
al Qaeda hasn’t the manpower or resources to destroy the security of average Americans.
However, traditional American institutions have proven more than up to the task.
A striking illustration of fail over the last ten years is illustrated by my first choice — the now irrational size of the investment in homeland security, shown in the graphic.
The original version, larger, is here at a blog post entitled “Digging Into the Changing Regulatory State.”
Post 9/11 and upon the creation of the Dept. of Homeland Security the sudden reallocation of resources and growth in jobs and investment made sense.
As 2011 begins, however, the current state is shocking. The graph represents a now atrocious diversion of resources away from the middle class and into security aimed at protecting the country from external threats.
At the expense of everything else the government does domestically.
This expenditure does not aid innovation. It does not provide any path forward the country will need to combat its current problems. It does not fix infrastructure. It does not guarantee decent education. It does not make the national food supply safe from bad business and keep people from getting sick. It does not repair the middle class.
It just stands as a continuous investment in protection, walls, devices and restriction. Now entirely out of proportion to threats.
And the more that is invested in security the less there is to protect as the rest of the country withers.
In the last year we have also seen the emergence of the argument that more security, particularly cybersecurity, is needed to defend — most gallingly — Wall Street, bankers and big business.
But in news story after news story, everyone has seen that Wall Street is not good for main street.
The admonishments to defend it, by sending more money into the security apparatus at the expense of the middle class, is still more political dynamite.
The question that has to be asked is easy: Why do institutions now seen to be attacking the American way of life need more defending? And why should we pay for it?
The second threat, in no way lesser and to which the first is linked, is the fast growth of economic inequality.
Economic inequality and mass unemployment have given us very bad government, desperation and fear. These are, in turn, now proven fertilizer for even more destabilizing right wing extremism.
And it has left the country without the leadership needed to prevent slippage into permanent status of banana republic with the world’s most powerful military and security infrastructure.
Now there are regular cries for austerity, for even more cannibalization of government functions which protect the middle class. Famously, such calls seem to take no account of the actual conditions of austerity placed upon everything but homeland security in the last ten years.
And this leads directly to my next example.
I give you the case set by Austin “Jack” DeCoster and his illness-provoking egg farms.
Although most Americans still do not know his name, DeCoster is a living model of the Dickensian character now common in American business. In 2010, DeCoster was more threatening to Americans shopping in supermarkets nationwide than any jihadi terrorist a decade after 9/11.
DeCoster is a current standard-setter: A corporate boss successful at bringing about the biggest mass food poisoning incident in US history.
And this did not happen by accident.
Looking again at the above graph, one immediately notices the virtual total destruction of any government role in “consumer safety and health” and “industry specific regulation” relative to homeland security.
It is no coincidence that the Austin “Jack” DeCosters of the country have flourished. By conducting business the way they do, they exhibit a tacit understanding that the public can be menaced by unsanitary and disease-causing practices in pursuit of the bottom line because what exists of the regulatory process is ignorable.
What regulatory processes still existed at the local level were busy issuing DeCoster with certificates of healthy business even as the corporation was sending poisoned eggs all around the country.
Again, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that it is no random event when half a billion eggs are tainted and thousands of people become ill.
It is a direct consequence of malfeasance in corporate agribusiness.
It is the consequence of decisions to run a business as cheaply as possible, to take steps knowing full well that such practice exposes one to substantial risk — in this instance the causation and distribution of disease — but that an adverse outcome can just be written off as overhead under the current state of regulation.
In 2007, it was Stewart Parnell of the Peanut Corporation of America.
In 2008, it was the boffins of Baxter pharma shipping in counterfeit heparin from China.
And this woeful state of affairs stands in stark contrast to the constant exhortations for more spending against the marginal threat of bioterrorism.
While the Republican Party was unable to prevent passage of the Food Modernization Act during the lame duck session of Congress, the existence of the new legislation does not, in and of itself, guarantee change.
We will have to wait and see what becomes of the Jack DeCosters. What other corporate American time-bombs and landmines are waiting to explode?
And the last internal threat is again tied to the others.
The Republican Party is a threat to security. And not solely because of its descent into right-wing extremism or its desire to torpedo a nuclear arms reduction treaty because it despises the president.
As the party that denies science, one that will put people in committee chairmanships overseeing science and technology issues in the House who are basically opposed to science whenever it contradicts their political views, the GOP poses a threat to America’s future.
You can’t have a forward-looking and capable nation with people in power who truly believe global warming and evolution are hoaxes.
In 2010, the Pentagon concluded global warming was a serious security threat, a destabilizing one. It has been an issue the Department of Defense has mulled over for the better part of a decade.
And then there’s the current GOP.
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12.28.10
Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 10:55 am by George Smith
Sez the New York Times:
HONG KONG — China’s commerce ministry announced on Tuesday in Beijing a steep reduction in export quotas for rare earth metals in the first months of next year, a move that threatens to cause further difficulties for manufacturers already struggling with short supplies and soaring prices.
The reduction in quotas for the early months of 2011 — a 35 percent drop in tonnage from the first half of this year — is the latest in a series of measures by Beijing that has gradually curtailed much of the world’s supply of rare earths.
China mines more than 95 percent of the global supply of the metals, which are essential for smartphones, electric cars, many computer components and a range of military hardware. In addition, the country mines 99 percent of the least common rare earths, the so-called heavy rare earths that are used in trace amounts but are crucial to many clean energy applications and electronics.
Once the US was a world leader in rare earth mining, as documented in a Department of Energy report DD blog commented on before the holidays.
Now it doesn’t have a single mine although the economy depends on the material. As do US companies, like Apple, which have their all their electronics kit made overseas. (In a related matter, the US also experienced a road paint shortage this year because of two factors: The economic collapse laying off workers, and the additional shipping of all critical materials production overseas.)
The rare earth story is just another dismal chapter demonstrating shortsighted national leadership over the last ten years. And a complete anathema in corporate America to employing American labor in a US environment at any time because it’s simply more immediately profitable to do it overseas.
This has led to a serious dilemma, one with real negative impacts on the nation’s long-term economic and strategic postures.
The New York Times article notes that with China having cornered the rare earth business, the rest of the west is waking up to the fact that it will have to restart mining it abandoned.
This was noted in DoE’s report on the subject, which also explained the US would start to rely on mines in Australia and Canada.
Predictably, stock jumped in Molycorp, the US company that owns the only rare earth mine, in Mountain Pass, CA, which it will attempt to bring on-line next year after mining was killed there early in the decade.
“The Mountain Pass facility, which [Molycorp] bought from Chevron (CVX.N) in 2008, has not mined or milled rare earth oxides since 2002, according to an S1 that the company filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this spring in association with its initial public offering,” reported Reuters.
“The company is modernizing and expanding the facility, but does not plan to reach full planned production rates before 2012.”
It’s stock has quadrupled over the past year, as a consequence of China’s actions and the US epic fail with regards to mining the elements.
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Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 9:17 am by George Smith
A feature from today’s Associated Press lines underscores the fact the US business is allergic to American labor.
This is not a secret.
For example, it’s just fact that readers now the iconic maker of formerly ‘American’ guitars and amplifiers, Fender Musical Instruments, employs more Chinese than it does US civilians. And Gibson, its rival, runs five factories in China but only one big one here — in Nashville.
The economic crack-up, AP reports, has only accelerated the flight to foreign labor. Emerging markets and countries are where the profit lies. The US, in the doldrums, is not an appealing place to do business. Demand is off.
Long term and with regards to our history, this will have extremely bad effects for the security of the nation.
Having ceded all manufacturing of consumer goods to foreign shores, it will continue the beggaring of its civilian labor force. Which in turn will make the quality of life slip, reducing opportunity and educational vigor, in turn killing innovation. The country will be shriveled for the sake of overseas profits. The generation of thousands of apps for mobile phones will not restore the middle class or make the US a world leader again, in anything.
The implications of this are scary. And the AP deals carefully with the idea that Americans — not just people on the left — may come to realize that American business is not their friend. That it is, in fact, a perhaps irreversibly destructive force in their lives.
It’s also political dynamite. The collapsed hopes of millions have given birth to unstable and often irresponsible government as well as one party that has very clearly decided its future lies only with the wealthy. And that the more quickly it can transfer national treasure into the hands of the same, to loot what is left, the better.
Reports AP:
More than half of the 15,000 people that Caterpillar Inc. has hired this year were outside the U.S. UPS is also hiring at a faster clip overseas. For both companies, sales in international markets are growing at least twice as fast as domestically.
The trend helps explain why unemployment remains high in the United States, edging up to 9.8 percent last month, even though companies are performing well: All but 4 percent of the top 500 U.S. corporations reported profits this year, and the stock market is close to its highest point since the 2008 financial meltdown.
But the jobs are going elsewhere. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute’s senior international economist.
“There’s a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy,” says Scott.
“Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria worries that the trend could be dangerous,” it continued. “In an article in the November issue of the Harvard Business Review, he says that if U.S. businesses keep prospering while Americans are struggling, business leaders will lose legitimacy in society.”
Readers will have noted the paradox inherent in UPS’s overseas “hiring” in Yemen, earlier this year.
And DHL’s flight from the US was well documented in Glenn Beck’s Xmas travesty in Wilmington, Ohio, here, where he prescribed prayer and self-reliance for the locals.
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