Today, a good professor writes on what everyone knows concerning where all the jobs and fortunes went. And the connection with the psychotic behavior of the Republican Party.
One of the takeaways, in the meta part, is that when all the perfessers (part of the class that’s professionally insulated against these misfortunes) are finally writing opinion pieces, some of them must be getting scared a bit concerned that irreparable harm has been done. And that, someday, it will affect even them.
The economy gained only 2.6 million jobs [during the Bush administration]. In fact, Bush’s job creation record in his first term was among the worst since Herbert Hoover’s.
And the numbers are even worse than they appear, because many of those jobs were produced by increased military spending related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan …
[By] 2003, more American money was being invested overseas than in the United States. In other words, those [GOP] tax cuts did help create jobs – in China, India, Brazil, and other foreign countries, but not in the United States.
Tax cuts create jobs! But clearly, in the last decade, they haven’t – unless you’re looking for work in China.
The juxtaposition of three graphs, which I’ve done before, illustrate it.
One — the expansion of the trade deficit with China, caused by the cessation of almost all domestic non-military production.
Two — the explosion in arms manufacturing.
Three — the burst in hiring by homeland security. And nobody else.
Ballistic ascension of trade deficit with China matching reality of all goods in stores providing materials for the middle class containing nothing but products from that country.
Yeah, I know, how boring. One of the conclusions I’ve drawn from the data is that the present-day GOP, in its fealty to big corporate money and plutocracy, is a great threat to the security of the country. It’s not an ideological thing. It’s simply backed up by the numbers.
Another thought: How did the country turn into a place where it statistically looks like, if there was a remake of the story of Robin Hood, everyone who makes the decisions would be standing in line for autographs from the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne?
Minor satisfaction over the weekend that Tom Hanks’ movie, Larry Crowne, on his character being fired and sent to retraining camp community college in LA, as a heartwarming reflection of the life in our times, is a major flop.
Yeah, that’s how everyone feels its going to turn out, Tom. They’ll get to ride around on nifty scooters and get the beautiful smart woman in the end.
Raw number of hits Google News returns for the mark of obsession with retraining camp as a cure: 2,065
Sampling:
“The AMERICA Works Act would allow community colleges to offer certification through the Manufacturing Skills Certification System …” — Burlington News
“Manufacturing jobs are a big source of economic growth in the Shenandoah Valley, and at Blue Ridge Community College, people can train …” — some radio station transcript
“And graduates will know that the community college diploma they earn ‘will be valuable when you hit the job market,’ he added. The White House also proposed a program to train 10000 engineering students a year …” — Fortune
“[Community] College will train chefs at New Mount Holly Center …” — the Philly Inquirer
Between bedpan technicians and chefs, we’ll guarantee the future.
“Train to be a master gardener at Spartanburg Community College” — Spartanburg Journal
Casino sees [community college] as work incubator … The company says it has had discussions with at least three central Ohio schools, including Columbus State Community College, to create several programs to train workers for the $400 million casino.” — Columbus Dispatch
You have to be trained to work at a casino? What, how to mix drinks, deal cards, polish slot machines and deal with people who need escorting from the premises?
“Warren County Community College to train [bedpan technicians]/hospice workers …” — Warren County newspaper
Push it toward 2,000 views, folks.
The DD blog fundraiser continues. Only a few days left!
In today’s New York Times, Roger Cohen has a piece that compares Europe and the US. It begins by focusing on the old meme of ‘can-do’ American exceptionalism and history, trying to point out how Europe was exhausted after the bloodlettings of the World Wars while we were poised to leap ahead.
This is tired news but a popular thing to reminisce about now because of national decline. It’s the equivalent of any standard pep talk given by any high school coach — “boys, we can do anything we set our minds to, it’s not the size of the dogs in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dogs, etc (!)” — before taking the field and receiving a good beating, anyway.
Bits Cohen uses as illustrative moments are the battles of Verdun and the Somme, two things which have no comparisons in US history.
One of the things you awaken to is that it’s now almost a century since Europe ripped itself to shreds at Verdun. Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently calculated in The New York Review of Books that British losses on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, given respective populations, were the equivalent of “280,000 GI’s killed between dawn and dusk.???
The Great War had its midcentury European sequel. And so power passed to America. It was of a United States ascendant that Berlin wrote, a confident nation assuming responsibility for the world.
Cohen later gets around to writing that Europe has obviously recovered and even has some stuff to teach us.
However, he might have added, for the sake of a cautionary tale, the American experience that introduced the nation into its decade of decline.
9/11.
This country lost a mere fraction of the people the French lost at one battle and the Brits saw killed at the Somme.
But we completely lost our heads, essentially declaring permanent war on about half the world. The military and national security infrastructure ballooned and we threw away millions of middle class jobs so giant multi-national corporations and the wealthiest could thrive even more during this period.
At one point Cohen wonders about what can be done, suggesting wanly that Bill Clinton recently had a good essay on the matter in Newsweek.
I’m trying to figure out why job seekers don’t have the skills companies need; why the community colleges and vocational programs, which have done such a great job for America, are not providing more people with the skills to fill these vacancies. Do people just not enroll in the right programs or do they drop out because of the economy? I hope we can find out.
Again, it’s an annoyingly stupid idea that’s taken hold in people who really don’t have any more ideas than the rest of us. It’s the obsession with community college as a magic wand or Philosopher’s Stone, the suggestion that if we could just get everyone into retraining camps them, everything would be fixed and a great leap forward would occur.
It’s a self-reinforcing delusion caught, like a disease, from just reading all the cant delivered by your social peers and cronies in the business and opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers.
People don’t lack skills in the US. When Fender and Gibson fired most of their domestic workforce involved in making electric guitars and shipped those jobs to China it wasn’t because the Chinese had set up community colleges which taught people how to make rock and roll instruments and Americans had grown stupid and unskilled.
If you look at pictures from the old Fender plants in a semi-official history of the company, The Soul of Tone, there were plenty of people in evidence making things. And they were obviously not all initially trained in community college. And they didn’t pick it all up in high-school industrial arts classes. Jobs were offered and they were trained, for example — to assemble guitar amplifiers, at the plants. Period.
It’s not that hard to train people. But “lack of training” is an excuse for the real reason corporate America isn’t hiring. It just isn’t interested in American labor. Bad for the bottom line when you can do it elsewhere.
The world didn’t stop wanting electric guitars because they are old and were invented back in the Fifties. And this country’s middle class can’t survive by complete conversion to making a few pricey big ticket items for the corrupt militaries of the world. Or whatever passes for made things that the world’s wealthiest can buy in the next few years. Becoming the equivalent of chocolate truffle and symbols of ostentatious living makers to the world isn’t going to cut it.
It’s absurd that “climate change??? has become an unpronounceable phrase under Obama and that green technology initiatives have been stymied by sterile ideological dispute. Intelligent use of resources makes strategic sense for America whatever your hang-up on global warming. It’s equally absurd that private U.S. corporations, having made $1.68 trillion in profits in the last quarter of 2010 and sitting on piles of cash, are doing fine while job numbers languish and more Americans struggle.
None of this makes moral or any other sense. America needs an energy policy and an industrial policy. It has to lead in green technology and — purist capitalist reflexes notwithstanding — it must find ways to get corporate America involved in a national revival.
Unfortunately he knows, and so does everyone else, that’s just not going to happen.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The photograph on Home Depot’s website shows a line of smiling soldiers unloading a truck stacked with power tools and other company wares.
The company says this shows “federal dollars go farther at The Home Depot.” San Francisco Attorney Paul Scott says the photo also shows the company providing Chinese-made products in violation of the Buy American Act, and the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating.
A federal judge in April refused Home Depot Inc.’s bid to toss a whistle blower lawsuit Scott and other attorneys filed against the Atlanta-based company. Now the country’s largest home improvement retailer is the latest company accused of running afoul of the Buy American Act, a 1933 law aimed at protecting U.S. jobs. The law requires that all materials used in construction of public projects originate in the United States or “designated countries.”
As a practical matter, this probably encompasses cruel and unusual punishment. That’s because it’s virtually impossible to find any goods not made in China (or other Asian country) in middle American big box stores.
China Radio International cybersecurity segment. L to R: CRI host Tom; Li Hong, Secretary General, China Arms Control and Disarmament Association; CRI host Qinduo. Obviously, lads, I’m not in this picture.
Taylors are high end acoustic and electric guitars. The company was always artisan. Now it’s a perfect fit for the new economy, high end instruments — like the Fender and Gibson custom shops — for old classic rockers, Nashville artists and the servants of the upper class who acquire them to fiddle about with in their spare time.
At Taylor’s 200,000-square-foot El Cajon factory, which is open for public tours, the company’s mixture of delicate hand craftsmanship and cutting edge technology is on display. One example of the latter is a robotic painting machine, built by Pinnacle Technologies Inc. of Italy for $250,000, which uses an electrical charge to increase the amount of spray paint that adheres to the instrument …
A roster of Taylor guitar owners reads like a guest list from the Grammys: Katy Perry, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, Taylor Swift, Prince, John Mayer, Jackson Browne, Sting, Paul Simon, Stanley Clarke, Bryan Adams and many others …
Scientist Joyce Jones, administrator at the Vaccine Research Institute of San Diego, owns two Taylors and is contemplating a third. She recently strummed an eight-string baritone at the company’s factory store that she said was “divinely inspired. I am basking in its glory.”
Taylor’s least expensive guitars — those costing around $300 to $1,300 — are made in a 300-worker factory in Tecate, Mexico. But the bulk of the company’s revenue comes from guitars that range from $1,900 to $10,000, and to as much as $20,000 for specialty jobs. Those are made by the 400 employees in El Cajon.
Representative Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, has been one of strongest proponents of using the trade agreement as a carrot to encourage Colombia to make additional labor reforms.
Under the plan, Colombia committed to hiring 480 new labor inspectors, including 100 this year.
It also pledged a number of actions by June 15, including enacting laws to establish criminal penalties for employers who undermine the right to organize and bargain collectively.
Other actions due by then included publication of regulations prohibiting the misuse of worker cooperatives to circumvent labor rights; the start of an outreach program to inform workers of available remedies in labor rights cases as well as criminal penalties for employers who violate the law; and a series of inspections to ensure employers are not using temporary services agencies to thwart unions from forming and exercising their labor rights.
The President continues his co-opting of tricks from the GOP playbook along with the community college obsession/cure-all in a swing through the south.
The latest, from the wires, is so Republican: We can only create jobs if we cut the deficit. Deficit cutting is job creation.
Also:
Before meeting with his jobs council at Cree, Inc., Obama toured a portion of the plant where LED lights are assembled. He met Josephine Lynch, a 43-year-old mother of four who landed the job two months ago after nearly three year of unemployment. She was a substitute teacher in New Jersey before losing her job. She then went back to school to get her electronics certification.
Obama hopes millions of unemployed workers will follow Lynch’s example by going back to school to get training for jobs in new industries, such as clean energy.
Empirical proof they’ve settled on the idea that mass unemployment is caused by stupid underskilled Americans who need to go to training camp to meet the skills of the 21st century. When all the data shows unemployment as a lack of demand, with the highly-trained as well as the unskilled hit.
Timed with Obama’s appearance with his “jobs council,” a Jeffrey Immelt authored piece on the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal.
You wouldn’t expect much from Immelt, now more famous because of GE’s reputation as a giant tax evader, and he does not disappoint.
Boost jobs in travel and tourism. This industry is one of America’s largest employers, but the U.S. has lost significant market share. By making it easier to visit the U.S. through improved visa processes, we can win back market share in travel and tourism and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Homeland security screening has not been good for tourism, it’s true. However, the idea that we’re going to magically rebound as a beacon to the world and a surge in an employment will result if we only loosen up the asshole at the Customs gate is surely grasping at straws.
Plus, there’s the community college thing:
There are more than two million open jobs in the U.S., in part because employers can’t find workers with the advanced manufacturing skills they need. The private sector must quickly form partnerships with community colleges …
Nobody, not the President or Immelt, mentions that a lot of the jobs that go to people successfully placed after retraining camp community college pay much less than the jobs held prior to entering camp. And some of them pay so poorly there’s no book for someone with a family to chase them around the country.
“By year-end we also will have looked at and made recommendations on building and improving systems for national competitiveness, including R&D investment, tax policy … ” Immelt continues.
Immelt had the gene for shame surgically removed years ago.
“America needs more growth … Government, business and labor need to work together to get this done,” Immelt concludes.
Thanks, Dad. Did you buy lunch for the staffer who wrote this for you?
Good news, lads! Good news! The view count ticks up every time Jeff Immelt is in the news.
In related matters, General Electric has permanently dispensed with the happy line dance. Now its commercials are about all the “imagination” it’s bringing to life, since a lot of this “stuff” is done overseas, a sore point.
Now the commercials are about GE Capital financing American businesses. Or technology not made here, like a medical scanner. Or technology that’s not really new but mostly sold to foreign countries, now misleadingly cast as improving American conditions, like GE gas turbines.
Some of GE’s biggest global growth drivers are built right here in the U.S. Our Greenville, South Carolina, site is the largest gas turbine manufacturing plant in the world, producing the majority of its advanced gas turbines for global export.
Built in 1968, this GE Energy site originally housed 250 employees and focused on building the Frame 7 gas turbine. Today, the Greenville site manufactures a diverse range of energy and infrastructure products on a campus spanning 413 acres with over 3,000 employees.
GE Energy’s innovative solutions, such as fuel flexibility for turbines, have been critical in winning major deals, including the $3 billion agreement signed between GE Energy and the government of Iraq, the largest single win in the history of GE Energy.
General Electric’s strategy of pursuing environmentally friendly business has given its Greenville site new jobs making wind turbines, softening the blow of layoffs that cut the plant’s work force by more than 600 jobs in the past three years.
More than 200 employees will be laid off from GE Security’s Tualatin manufacturing facilities this year, company officials confirmed Monday. GE Security, which makes video, access-control and anti-intrusion products, is cutting all of its manufacturing jobs in Tualatin, moving them to GE locations across the United States and Mexico, said spokeswoman Michelle May.
“GE exists for the benefit of the executives and the directors,” Meyer says.
“The four executives I looked at received and realized total compensation of roughly $30 million a year during a time when the stock price declined and underperformed the S&P 500. Immelt totally underperformed and totally missed expectations.”
Meyer made the right move for his client, as GE shares are down more than 45% since the beginning of 2007, before the financial crisis that crushed GE Capital, one of the company’s many business units. While the finance unit has stabilized in recent quarters after Immelt shrunk it, GE’s reputation has been tarnished in other ways.
The upshot is that it takes thirty seconds to find lots of Internet notices and news about GE destruction of jobs in the past decade.
But everyone knows this. Which only makes Jeff Immelt’s advice on job creation all the more odious.
But that seems to be the corporate lizard brain for ya. It was just two months the company was still into this smarmy ad campaign on YouTube.
Having assiduously fertilized the destruction of jobs in domestic manufacturing and middle class wages over the last two decades, the last year or so has seen Wal-Mart reaping some of the toxic fruit of it.
The world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT – News), saw its revenue rise in the latest quarter, but U.S. same-store sales figures fell for the eighth consecutive quarter. U.S. operations have been struggling since the recession, and now, rising crude oil prices and budget-conscious shoppers are chipping in to spoil the party.
For Wal-Mart, as with other US-born multi-nationals, emerging markets are still OK, still ripe for the same drawn out treatment that’s cratered the US economy.
However, the middle class has lost its buying power.
The story blames energy prices, which certainly contributes. But it’s a Motley Fool semi-cheery column and ignores the larger problem. Wal-Mart banked on the US consumer having expendable credit forever, able to always buy as all its assets were taken away and rebuilt in China.
The story beamishly proclaims how Wal-Mart has instituted on-line shopping to win back customers. Boosting loyalty through social media is on the company slate, too.
Buy shit made in China, not just in store, but also on-line! Wow, you sure can’t do that anywhere else. That’s worth a couple thousand “like” thumbs-ups for Wal-Mart on Facebook, surely.
If you click the link, a graphic shows Wal-Mart’s competition, which the piece claims is doing marginally better in comparison, not on the up-slope in the US, either.
