From the wires, the standard story of the American business fronting made-in-China stuff with lead in it. Stuff that we used to be able to make. But American workers just cost too much. And it’s so much more profitable to bypass all consumer protections for offshored things.
Federal regulators launched an investigation Monday into lead levels in drinking glasses depicting comic book and movie characters, declaring that the items are subject to standards for “children’s products.”
Testing commissioned by The Associated Press revealed that the glasses contained lead up to 1,000 times the federal limit for children’s products — as much as 30 percent by weight. The items also contained lesser amounts of the more-toxic metal cadmium.
The glasses — with colorful designs depicting the likes of Superman, Wonder Woman and characters from “The Wizard of Oz” such as Dorothy and the Tin Man — did not release high amounts of lead from the decorations, and no one would be injured by handling them. The issue is whether the glasses, made in China, comply with strict federal law on how much lead can be in a children’s product.
The importer of the glasses, Vandor LLC of Utah, told AP the glasses are targeted to adult collectors and that they passed testing for lead.
But a spokesman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Scott Wolfson, said Monday that the agency considers the glasses children’s products and is currently collecting samples for its own testing.
Last week, while commenting on AP’s test results, Warner Brothers said, “It is generally understood that the primary consumer for these products is an adult, usually a collector.”
However, on Warner Brothers’ website, the superhero glasses are sold alongside kids’ T-shirts with similar images and a school lunch box. An online retailer, http://www.retroplanet.com, describes the 10-ounce glasses as “a perfect way to serve cold drinks to your children or guests.”
Note standard deployment of cya lying by US corporate businessmen.
Official photo is of DD’s made-in-China mojo free Mojo Deluxe Blues & Rock harmonica, the single most absurd piece of kit I have in my possession.
Made for use at corporate seminars where managers and cubicle workers can be taught to blow their blues away in unison.
Sadly, the Mojo Deluxe was not a success.
By the way, if you’re in Pasadena on December 12th, I’ll show it to you as bonus for attending the Dick Destiny Band’s free holiday party/rock show. Just ask for directions.
I’m appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don’t care about those below the decks. The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity. Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.
And then I see members of Congress in my own country who argue that it would be financially reckless to extend unemployment benefits during a terrible recession, yet they insist on granting $370,000 tax breaks to the richest Americans. I don’t know if that makes us a banana republic or a hedge fund republic, but it’s not healthy in any republic.
Saw it during the taking of the census. In review, all here.
So the GOP, and the usual Blue Dog fake Republicans, stopped extension of unemployment benefits, just in time for the holiday season. Of course, it’s well known they detest the last two thirds of A Christmas Carol.
On being pathetic: Scurry around rationalizing how to make tax cuts permanent for the wealthy, the only ones who did well during the last year.
Sneak them in on the two year thing under the buzz-term compromise, which actually means collapsing before your sworn enemy. From the LA Times political page:
“I’d love to see a longer extension, but I think two years gets us to where we need to go and then we can focus on these other issues coming forward,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).
A U.S. Chamber of Commerce letter Monday urged a “preferably permanent” extension, apparently leaving the door open to something less.
The president has invited House and Senate leaders to the White House on Thursday for a meeting at which the tax cut issue is expected to dominate the discussion.
“The president’s priority is providing permanent middle-class tax relief, and he is willing to compromise to get that done,” said Jen Psaki, a White House spokeswoman. “But he has been clear that we cannot afford to make the high-income tax cuts permanent.”
The New York Times reports Wal-Mart’s business is off in the US.
In the United States, where Wal-Mart stores open at least a year saw a 1.3 percent drop in revenue, a measure known as same-store sales, executives said they were continuing with changes like increasing the number of items for sale, adding in more $1-and-under products and underselling competitors.
Still, visits to Wal-Mart’s American stores declined from a year ago, as did the average price paid at checkout, Wal-Mart executives said.
“They’re focused on necessities and being practical with how they spend their money,??? the company’s chief financial officer, Thomas M. Schoewe, said in a call with reporters. “We still see what we call the paycheck cycle, where you see the spikes in comps the day or two after a payroll check,??? or from food-stamp programs, he said. “It’s every bit as pronounced as we’ve seen it.???
The nasty truth, unmentioned, is that Wal-Mart’s business model has a lot to do with why their customers now only buy necessities and use food stamps.
Selling only Chinese-made goods, so that everyone could be undercut, Wal-Mart contributed in a major way to the destruction of industry that makes stuff in the US. And when all the credit ran out and the economy went bust for its heartland customers, this is what they have.
And no amount of feel good commercials built around a few select workers praising their Wal-Mart careers on network TV will bring it back. They helped break it. Now we can count on Wal-Mart, whose owners are always in the list of Forbes’ richest Americans, to dry and do it somewhere else.
I couldn’t have hoped for better timing. Although it won’t do any good.
From Newsweek, on Sarah Palin’s Alaska, the mom bending down upon her grizzly knee:
Watching Sarah Palin’s new reality show Alaska is like listening to Sgt. Pepper.
You can’t buy a better ridiculous lead sentence.
More:
While driving a dog sled across the wilderness, her fur-trimmed parka so perfectly frames her face, she evokes Audrey Hepburn.
===
As Sarah Palin continues her climb, her knees feel trapped, she doesn’t know how to maneuver. Somehow, she musters the strength to climb higher, helped by the coaching from her guide who acknowledges her “Alaska-girl grit.??? He adds, “Good job, Sarah.??? And great job, Mark Burnett, who mines one more nugget from his newest reality star who says it was tough, but, “It’s fun when you reach the goal.???
Cue “Act Naturally.”
The Democratic Party has no one “white and crazy.” Nobody to beam at the camera with their name upside down in the background and have it painted as victory. No one for the media to gush over, to compare to Audrey Hepburn while outdoors fishing or sledding. It has no story, not even a ludicrous or bad one.
And I mean that in a critical way.
They have no one except Barack Obama to dominate television shows or news appearing to “Act Naturally.” Not a soul to destroy any mainstream media journalistic narrative by making their own. And he won’t do it, going absent without leave.
Instead, there are the likes of Heath Shuler and Jason Altmire. Fake Republicans only known to political junkies and news show tv producers — and not for any good things. Even as fools they have no hope of hitting the bigtime.
Even when the Democrats have MSNBC, they nuts it up, finding a situation in which Keith Olbermann has to take a few days off while no one bats an eye at Glenn Beck calling George Soros a Nazi collaborator.
On tv, even though they retain control of two-thirds of government, they appear a party of people with little backbone but lots of buyer’s remorse, eager to try and figure out how they can make tax cuts for the rich and even more decline look good.
And if they keep on going like this the Republicans will be able to get even someone fresh from a pharmaceutical straight-jacket elected in 2012.
This was cause for the delivery of an inspirational speech, the kind used at mass corporate rallies in the US where people pay to be told, by important figures and celebrities, that the only thing standing in the way of success is their bad attitude. If we were not to run with wolves but soar like eagles, we were told, we should separate ourselves from the drag of the complainers and critics.
About a day later, the census began firing what it thought were the complainers and critics, all the non-performers.
The speech was delivered to us as the wisdom of Colin Powell. Whether it was actually all his was hard to know. What’s certain is that it was a grab-bag of quotes attributed to him.
Intelligence-insulting shit, it had nothing to do with the work of being a census enumerator, which was a solitary business.
A sample from the speech:
Never receive counsel from unproductive people.
Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how.
Not everyone has a right to speak into your life.
You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person.
Don’t follow anyone who’s not going anywhere.
With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it.
Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life.
Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships.
If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights.
This nationwide fetish with the idea that positive thinking leads to success in all things and conversely, that critical thinking leads only to failure, is the subject of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America,now in trade paper edition through Picador.
As most observers of the players in the economic collapse now can tell, the book could very well be renamed “How Positive Thinking Undermined America,” past tense. The culture of lickspittle and constant delusional thinking based on only positive reinforcements played its role.
Ehrenreich’s book fully examines this inspirational brainwashing, first taken from the standpoint of its role in the wellness industry. Ehrenreich writes of it from a very up close point-of-view after being diagnosed with cancer. Happy thoughts and positive thinking now being the way in which all patients are counseled or cudgeled into dealing with potentially terminal illness.
Pulling back, the book observes that the practice is used to destroy critical thinking. Or worse and even more commonly, to gin up a labor force or group of employees whose morale has been crushed by bad business and endless rounds of downsizing.
Everyone in corporate America has felt its touch — management using it as a fob for its failures, pushing responsibility off onto employees who don’t have the right positive attitude and who must now change their thinking lest they too be sent into the wilderness.
And it has been coming a good long time, as anyone who has seen scenes from the sports movies can attest. Cue those where the team, slipping on a bad patch, sits in the locker room listening to a seminar for the banishing of contagious loser-ism.
For example, Ehrenreich writes:
Over the past decade, as icebergs sank and levels of debt mounted, dissidents from the prevailing positive thinking consensus were isolated, mocked or urged to overcome their perverse attachment to thoughts. Within the United States, any talk of intractable problems could be dismissed as a denial of American greatness. Any complaints of economic violence could be derided as the whining of “self-selected” victims.
So if Colin Powell actually does believe the slogans and rubbish attributed to him, his now infamous performance before the UN is not the biggest surprise. The good general, perhaps, did not wish to be a whining self-selected victim, excluded from the victory march toward Iraq.
And it underlines how, at the highest national level, unwarranted attitude modification and culture of lickspittle had disastrous consequences.
One might almost think that the current national economic crisis must lead to a modification in attitudes toward the religion of “positive-thinking.”
This is not the case. Ehrenreich devotes time to explaining how Must Think Happy Thoughts, Inc. is a business partially built upon salesmanship into corporate management. It is there where profit lies, in the mass sale of books and speeches for delivery to the listless and despondent employees. There are, it seems, even a handful of “scientists” pushing it.
[Another reason] for the Mojo Deluxe … made-in-China harmonica is so that it can be packaged with a lot of other stuff suitable for corporate seminar in the US of A.
The author of of “Instant Blues Harmonica” writes on his very last page in the very last paragraph: “[For] the last few years I’ve been doing most of my presentations for corporate non-profit organizations. These clients range from Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream to Merck Pharmaceutical, from the Blue Cross to Red Cross, from Kraft Foods to the American Society of Forensic Laboratory Directors. My unique keynotes and workshops can help your group to work more effectively…”
The image of a roomful of managers from Kraft Foods or directors from the American Society of Forensic Laboratories learning to “blow their blues away” on Chinese harmonicas during a compulsory leadership get-together is a shattering one.
At the risk of sounding too positive, DD heartily recommends Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided.
It’s impossible to support someone who can say with a straight face, on a trip to India, that it will be good for the middle class, generating a big 54,000 jobs.
“President Barack Obama on Saturday embraced India as the next jobs-creating giant for hurting Americans, not a cheap-labor rival that outsources opportunity from the United States,” reported the AP last Friday, its reporter seemingly not even willing to believe the bullshit being peddled this time out.
In the face of fifteen million unemployed and even more underemployed.
While the entire middle class regards India as a place of no value to them, a place of really cheap labor which giant US corporations uses for the efficient dismissal of even more Americans. (Before that, India was a place US megacorporations could treat murderously.)
The beneficiaries of trade with India are the usual culprits. Military contractors like Honeywell , Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
“Chicago-based Boeing expects to bid for $31 billion of military contracts in the next 10 years as it competes with suppliers including Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corp. following a tripling of India’s defense budget,” reported a San Francisco newspaper.
Include a company that can outsource its English data entry to Mumbai, McGraw-Hill.
And credit card collection services.
And, last but not least, Wal-Mart — which can open stores there, employing locals, after the firm has spent a couple decades helping to destroy US middle class make-stuff jobs by bringing Chinese slave labor goods here. You see, it’s consumer business is off in the US due to the economic crash. It can build it back up by using an emerging market to keep doing the same bad things it always has.
The only people who believe India has anything to offer the US middle class are the Tom Friedmans of the world, the fellow fond of telling the tall tale about how a creative, innovative American recaptured his career after having his job sent to India. By making and selling a T-shirt about it.
If America turns away from [the] values, [a leader of the National Association of Software and Services in India, an agency that promotes US outsourcing], the socialist/protectionists among India’s bureaucrats will use it to slow down any further opening of the Indian markets to U.S. exporters.
Middle class Americans might not lose jobs to India quite as swiftly! And that would really eat it.
There is no way rebalance the situation. India exacerbates economic decay within the US labor force because of the way the American system is set up. Saving or creating more jobs within the already very healthy national security industry is not a benefit.
Up next, pitches for losing trade to Panama and Colombia for the sake of the same handful of military contractors and, perhaps, American coffee companies with a pathological aversion to even a minimum of US labor.
Big ups for those!
And for this story from Yahoo’s business section, a place caught on the horns of cheerleading for US job loss now that the middle class is enraged with the American plutonomy, you can read of all the “iconic” American goods no longer made here, but in slave labor countries, because of corporate aversion to compensating US workers fairly.
However, if you’re still one of those who have a job, you can peddle a plastic robot — made in a slave labor country — for the guarding of your pile. Allegedly.
Reports the New York Times, from the cutting edge of the ‘artisan economy’ for the making of stuff for rich gadget freak people:
When Robert Oschler, a programmer, leaves his home, he knows it is secure. And if he ever has cause for concern, he can open his laptop and survey the house through the eyes of his watchdogs.
“I don’t have any pets. I just have pet robots, and they’re pretty well behaved.”
Naturally, the Times tech reporter promoting the stuff wanted one, too.
Quote of day in the print edition of the Los Angeles Times:
The brand name is still a tremendous liability. People of color are just turned off by the Republican Party. — GOP strategist
This coming in stories where a Republican said he woke up in the morning feeling he’d been run over by a truck.
“Tellingly, Latinos in California had a far more negative view of the GOP than other voters — almost 3 in four had an unfavorable impression …” continued the newspaper.
This because a big part of the GOP platform has been to cast the impression that Latinos in the west, as they relate to illegals, are parasites and to be deported or persecuted.
That’s great in most of the interior of Pennsyltucky. Not at all so, here. Except if you live in places of big acreage but not so many people, like the Hemets and Temeculas.
In California, those who’d been laid off in the last two years — and there were many — trashed the GOP, 56-38 for Brown, and 56-40 for Boxer. Unequivocally demonstrating that if the Great Recession had impacted you in a serious manner, you weren’t interested in Republicorp in CA.
Boxer’s ads emphasizing Fiorina’s sending 30,000 jobs overseas were effective. It was something for which the ex-HP exec had no answer.
One demographic the GOP won in California was the 65-and-older. Call it the coot vote from the interior, it went 48-47 for Whitman, 50-44 for Fiorina.
The hardcopy edition of today’s Los Angeles Times had an excellent county-by-county map of the Brown/Whitman results.
Sadly, latimes.com is absolute rubbish for finding stuff like this easily. So no link.
“We all either work for rich people or sell stuff for rich people.”
Except when the rich people don’t need Americans to work for them, just those in China and India. Or they aren’t interested in people working at all, just making and selling fraudulent or criminal financial services and instruments.
Earlier — on the ‘artisan’ economy, or the plutonomy.
A book on American plutocracy is reviewed here — at the NY Times.
