Your host didn’t quite know what to say after viewing the meeting of the President and the Hu fellow from China yesterday. A perfectly honest man might have created a stink and told the truth:
We’ve spent a lot of time digging our own holes and now you’re a part of that, an enabler. And since we’re not going to agree on anything, get out. But before everyone leaves I’d like to show some handy charts I’ve had prepared by government employees, people who still have jobs. Which is what this is all about.
The Commerce department on steel production is full of graphical data. All of it a horror show in terms of showing how the United States has disintegrated.
From 2009, another appalling graph — produced from data taken by the US Census, part of Commerce, on military production in the US versus everything else (and originally shown in the NY Times):
This continues on the blog riff that the US produces nothing but weapons. At the expense of everything else.
And that while what production of durable goods in the US that remains is charted, it — along with the fortunes of the middle class and the new mass of unemployed — cratered in 2009. However, military production did not.
It went through a minor dip and then soared.
This is immoral. It destroys any argument on fairness and shared burden and consequences being a part of US society. It broadly and mercilessly insults the intelligence of all those who must listen to, see or read about the Department of Defense making nibbles around the edges to trim its budget in the coming time of austerity.
The post a few days ago asked the rhetorical questions: What manner of leading western country has one company, General Atomics, devoted to only making killer drones for assassinating people elsewhere — that’s half the size of the Food and Drug Administration? Or where the budget for killer drones is the same as the one to ““Transform Food Safety System, Invest in Medical Product Safety, [and provide] Regulatory Science”?
In light of this, I had an idea for what would have been an appropriate response to the Obama/Hu joint appearance. People armed with creme pies, enough for those onstage and in the polite audience.
Today’s news, from AP, delivers this classic piece of instantly generated convenient American bullshit, the usual lame attempt to polish a really big turd:
[President Obama] said the newly announced business deals worth $45 billion — which include a highly sought-after $19 billion deal for 200 Boeing airplanes — would help create 235,000 U.S. jobs, in addition to the half-million U.S. jobs already generated by the United States’ annual $100 billion in exports to China.
Boeing, the big arms manufacturer.
Perhaps one of the problems rests in the idea that the people who lead this country, and those who follow them around reporting on their insubstantial statements, don’t really grasp how many things in the US are made in China.
It’s not just a lot. It’s virtually everything I come into contact during my daily travels, except cars and food. There’s no getting away from it. There are no alternatives.
Perhaps the people in power never look hard at the astonishing data revealing profound failure, all carefully produced by government agency. It’s too ugly and impeaching. It reveals economic treason on a grand scale.
Here’s a quaint poster, one sold to the upper middle class, a decorative thing that shows a government chart of US steel production from 1895. Now it’s sold as a gift, presumably made in China, for hanging on the wall where perhaps someone fancy and fine will momentarily wonder what happened to all that and how the word growth was redefined as looting.
As for the rest of the crowd, it was disturbing to observe what appeared to be a total lack of awareness of the bigger picture. The preoccupation, bordering on obsession, with what they define as “technology??? really costs all of us. In the minds of the svelte and young, it seems technology is only information technology: iPods, iPads, laptops, displays, and cell phones ad nauseam.
The concept of technology that you and I might define as the real iron that once drove this country — motors, valves, machinery, presses — that stuff that required the skills of engineers and craftspeople in this country to design and build, never seemed to cross the minds of the beautiful.
I suppose that is the root of the problem. The technology being discussed, software and cell phones and the like, is engineered and built overseas. The software is outsourced to India and the electronics built in China.
“[Dreamworks Animation] CEO Jefferey Katzenberg still takes time to call job candidates to encourage them to join,” it reads.
“Any DreamWorker can pitch a movie idea to company executives — and can take the company-sponsored ‘Life’s A Pitch’ workshop to learn how best to do it.”
But the real challenge is the rise of China’s education system and the passion for learning that underlies it. We’re not going to become Confucians, but we can elevate education on our list of priorities without relinquishing creativity and independent thought.
That’s what we did in 1957 after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. These latest test results should be our 21st-century Sputnik.
Kristof knows because he’s been there. Like Tom Friedman.
The fancy and fine class, very often the opinion makers, are always in China. All truth can be found there. That’s just a fact.
Here’s Friedman from late last year:
“Well, folks, Sputnik just went up again: China’s going clean tech.”
By making more melamine, exceptional coal burning and keeping the motor vehicles out of town when the world comes visiting.
I satirized it in this:
DD’s rule, perhaps a little like the ‘law’ about the appearance of ‘Hitler’ in any political argument:
The appearance of the word Sputnik or any reference to a Sputnik kind of moment in any argument signals the person who dropped it needs a pie in the face.
In other words, it means — at worst — the brain has stopped working. Or the person writing or saying it has run out time and needs to wind up with something hack and superficially gnomic-sounding.
The usage is intelligence insulting, among many things. It imagines the United States now is somehow, perhaps even only remotely, still the same place with the same powers the year after I was born.
That’s to laugh.
In 1957 the United States had much much stronger middle class. And it hadn’t deindustrialized. It was not an exhausted nation and not yet engaged in pointless and endless war in countries in which Americans have no interest or stake.
Yep, grade school education sure sucks in the US. So do many things in comparison to specifics taken from other locales.
Here’s a usage:
Watch out! The rocket has fired and the capsule separated! The Wall Street-engineered economic crash of 2008 was a Sputnik moment for the rest of the world.
File along with other great calls to resurgent achievement, gone until the next column runs:
From Reuters, news that China is rounding up a new group of melamine manufacturers and salesman.
Years ago it was discovered China had become something of a melamine mill, the compound cheaply produced as an adulterant/substitute in animal feeds. The purpose was an old one — to push up protein determinations in feeds and foodstuffs without actually adding protein.
In the US, Chinese melamine production came to light when the compound was found contaminating pet foods, where it set off a chain reaction that resulted in kidney stones that killed animals.
Mao Li Jun ran a company, Xuzhou Anying, which claimed to have solved the problem of finding cheap protein for food stuffs. It advertised its solution, a white powder, on Alibaba. That white powder was melamine.
“[The] high price of protein feed it improves the cost and decreases the benefit, which results in the pasturage develope [sic] slowly,” he claimed. ‘ESB Biologic Protein Meal’ settles the tableau of the protein resource in China, it decreases the cost of feed and improves the integral benefit and boosts the pasturage integral development of China. So developing the item is very necessary in this form.'”
In the US, companies named ChemNutra and MenuFoods were principally responsible for distributing it into the pet food supply chain.
The melamine scandal destroyed ChemNutra. A criminal trial against the company, in news from 2009, is here.
The trial was considered to be a joke and its outcome — two misdemeanor convictions in a plea agreement — is discussed here.
MenuFoods was sued. News of the subsequent class action settlement — to the tune of $28 million — is here.
All things considered, just a standard last decade example of bad corporate behavior getting off fairly lightly. The melamine, after all, only killed pets.
In China, melamine was linked to adulteration of baby food milk products. And it did result in fatalities.
Chinese police have arrested 96 people for lacing milk powder with the toxic additive melamine, state news agency Xinhua said on Thursday, the same chemical that killed several babies in a milk powder scandal in 2008.
Last July, samples of milk powder found in northwest China’s Gansu and Qinghai provinces had levels of melamine up to 500 times the permitted limit, underscoring the lax enforcement of food safety in the country.
Among those arrested, 17 had been convicted, including two people sentenced to life in prison, Xinhua said, citing a statement from the State Council’s Food Safety Commission.
Thirty-eight people were awaiting trial, the report said, adding that Chinese authorities had seized 2,132 tons of melamine-tainted milk powder. The remaining 41 were “under investigation in police custody”. It did not elaborate further.
The latest crackdown identified “loopholes in the quality control system of dairy products”, Xinhua said, citing the statement.
The exposure of tainted milk products in poor and remote parts of China’s northwest has underscored the persistence of food safety problems that have alarmed consumers and sparked criminal scandals that led to executions and official sackings.
It should also be noted that China’s justice system gives life terms to farmers who ride toll roads with forged military license plates in order to avoid paying.
However, the Chinese government’s pursuit of the melamine criminals stands in stark contrast to the US government’s treatment of corporate businessmen who have been caught sickening people.
Mostly, nothing much happens to them. After they get scolded by Congressmen, it’s up to class action lawyers.
Anyway, imagine for simplicity that America and China are the only two countries in the world. And imagine that as consumer habits change, American spending falls by $400 billion while Chinese spending rises by $400 billion. Trade imbalance gone, right?
No, it’s not that easy. If US residents cut spending by $400 billion, most of that reduction — say 75 percent — will come in reduced spending on US-produced goods and services (even that Chinese pair of pajamas you buy at WalMart has a lot of US value-added in distribution and retailing.) So that’s $300 billion in reduced demand for US output. Meanwhile, a much smaller fraction — say 15 percent — of that extra Chinese spending will fall on US goods. So we’re talking about, say, a $240 billion net fall in spending on US goods and services; correspondingly, we’re talking about a $240 billion rise in demand for Chinese goods and services.
If that’s the end of the story, then the spending shift produces a depressed economy in America and major inflationary pressures in China.
What’s needed to make it come out right is something to make both American and Chinese consumers switch some of their spending toward American goods — something like a rise in the dollar value of the yuan, which makes Chinese goods relatively more expensive. So the redistribution of world spending and exchange rate adjustment are complements, not substitutes.
But if you’ve kept apace of US events the idea of China seriously challenging the US militarily is laughable. The country’s aim is to be able to muss our hair just enough to trouble a theoretical defense of Taiwan.
China has no blue water navy that would last more than a couple days against the USN. It’s military is not battle-hardened. It’s air force would enjoy a short exciting life. And once all of its air defense has been destroyed by showers of cruise missiles, its industrial base in the eastern part of the country could be worked over good by a strategic bombing campaign. (Oh, they’ll use mighty cyberwarriors to strike back! That would be so scary.)
One has a hard time imagining most Chinese would even want to go up against the US military, considering how well things have been going elsewhere.
Why mess up a good thing?
It’s only thought for computer games, fiction, perhaps good for a Tom Clancy or Dale Brown novel.
The news value of it is diversionary, a distraction from real major problems.
Beijing can’t match our globe-spanning regional combatant command structure; possesses no foreign military bases, compared to our several hundred; and presents almost no capacity for projecting — and far more importantly, for sustaining — its forces beyond its immediate home waters …
The author notes that for the most part, there is no “plausible” avenue to war with China.
After all the analysis I’d only add that not only does China not have all the things said, militarily, but also that there’s no reason to suspect that what it does have would even work very well.
For reasons which have been abundantly discussed here.
We’re essentially asked to believe that an industrial base that’s good at making really lots of not very good things — just good enough for us beggars to wear and use, even though threadbare — automatically snaps to attention and makes great advanced military hardware.
Recall that the people selling the news about foreign military hardware — well, their paychecks depend upon you actually believing them. And that worked so well with the news about the old Soviet Union.
Lads, would you buy this on a nice black or white T-shirt?
Deindustrialization and the beggaring of the US middle class is the major security problem. It has led to obvious political instability in the US, among many other things.
China, while not the root cause, is only the enabling instrument. It was not, after all, China that compelled all US toilet seat manufacturers to fire their workforces and end domestic production.
Thought exercise: Consider the value and the morality of having a combined armed force good for crushing the Chinese military, or that of any other nation, in a couple weeks of busy work, if the middle class it’s ostensibly defending no longer has anything.
One of the recurring topics here is obviously my obsession with deindustrialization and the pipedream that this country will regain greatness through a DIY economy. In other words, when all Americans adapt to making something unique and which can’t be underpriced or replaced by an overseas good or service — something which will sell in the plutonomy.
The idea that a country the size of the United States could be rebuilt to be a pro racing car crankshaft/chocolate-covered truffle/$180 harmonica maker and regain any type of mojo is a stupefying one.
The entire labor force cannot be adapted to it. Individuals — everywhere, not just in the US — are not particularly suited to splintering into very small units of innovation providing consumer goods for the global wealthy. That’s just humanity.
As if the cost of living in the United States is the same as it is where labor is much cheaper. Or that, in some way, because it is expensive here relative to elsewhere, that a vast segment of the populace not capable of relocating to a global cheap labor zone deserves whatever bad fate befalls it.
Two recent items from the “artisanal services are the future” economy meme.
First, a letter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 4:
Barb O’Brien may not know it, but she is in the vanguard of an exciting new employment trend, which can be called either ‘artisanal services’ or ‘catering to the rich,’ depending on your point of view.
Ms. O’Brien, who owns Kirkwood’s Silver Garden, was featured in an article by Aisha Sultan in Tuesday’s Post-Dispatch.
Ms. O’Brien puts up holiday decorations for people with more money than time. For a few hundred bucks, she’ll come to your house, make it look splendid for the holidays, and then come back in January to put all the stuff away.
That puts her squarely in the middle of a trend described by economist Andrew Caplin of New York University in last Sunday’s New York Times: artisanal services. In an era of growing income inequality, he said, clever people will figure out new ways to serve the wealthy.
This trend is not actually new – the wealthy have always had butlers, maids, landscapers and the like. The trick is to figure out a new service that wealthy people don’t yet know they need. England’s Queen Elizabeth II, for example, has a guy who plays the bagpipes under her bedroom window every morning.
Hey, it’s a living.
And, prior, from a Sunday edition of the New York Times on how to fix the economy (note — most of the reprints around the web on artisanal services all point back to Caplin and this source):
How about a cheap technology that our mortal minds can’t currently fathom?
A decade ago, who could have imagined that more than a million people would pay $1 for a portable phone video game in which you slash watermelons with a Japanese sword? Who, in other words, could have envisioned the Fruit Ninja app?
”That’s a pretty wispy hope,” said Gar Alperovitz, a professor at the University of Maryland.
……..
Perhaps we are entering the era of the self-starter. Prof. Andrew Caplin of New York University thinks so. He begins with the premise that in the coming global economy some people will succeed and others will not, and income inequality will grow. While it’s noble to focus on how to spread wealth around, he says that it might be wiser to think of ways the poor and middle class could cater to the economy’s biggest winners.
”Unfortunately, there will be income inequality,” he says, ”but enough people will make money that those who don’t would do well, in as much as they understand the needs of that group.”
He says he expects a rise in what he calls ”artisanal services,” like cooks, nutritionists, small-scale farmers. He sees services emerging that aid the wealthy at the intersection of health and genetic science. He imagines a rise in technology services, too — experts who keep clients current about technology which can advance their interests in business, in the media, on search engines and so on.
Professor Caplin worries that this concept might be caricatured as ”cater to the rich.”
But he suggested that this country could use a lot more non-judgmental thinking about the future of the United States economy.
And they make things just good enough. Which really isn’t very good at all but when one has no choice in the matter, crap magically becomes the new excellence. Because it’s all you can afford and it’s all that’s in stores.
So socks that develop holes after a couple washings, wooden painted toilet seats that blister and crack a week after purchase or stub wrenches with no burrs become the new normal. Heck, you can still use a toilet seat that’s blistered or which immediately took up a yellow stain. It’s just unsightly but not quite useless.
Then there is the regular parade of stories about new Chinese weapons.
In these stories one hardly ever reads reasonable doubt about Chinese manufacturing skills or why one should think they can make alleged superweapons any better than the usual stuff.
Today’s Chinese whoopie cushion is the J-20 “stealth fighter.”
“Chinese combat aviation has made remarkable strides in recent years, moving from a collection of obsolete aircraft that would have provided a target-rich environment to potential adversaries,” it reads. “Today China flies hundreds of first rate aircraft, and even flies more Sukhoi Flankers than Russia …”
It adds that Chinese capabilities are still twenty years behind the US.
China is still years away from being able to field a stealth aircraft, despite the disclosure of images indicating that it appears to have a working prototype, a U.S. Navy official said on Wednesday …
“We’re anticipating China to have a fifth-generation fighter … operational right around 2018 …”
2018.
In 2018, the middle class will be mostly gone, the little still left having been shipped off to China. Except, of course, robot weapons manufacturing.
“The Air Force’s fleet has grown to 195 Predators and 28 Reapers, a new and more heavily armed cousin of the Predator. Both models are made by General Atomics, a contractor based in San Diego,” reported the Times piece. “Including drones that the Army has used to counter roadside bombs and tiny hand-launched models that can help soldiers to peer past the next hill or building, the total number of military drones has soared to 5,500, from 167 in 2001.”
195 + 28 = 223.
223 x $4,500,000 = 1,003,500,000
From the San Diego Union Tribune, one day ago:
The Defense Department says it has awarded $85 million to General Atomics Aeronautical Systems of Poway to provide logistical support for its Warrior A/Warrior Block 0 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which is being developed for the Army. The work will be performed in Poway but represents support to four unnamed sites outside of the continental United States. The company still refers to the UAV as Warrior, although it is technically known as the MQ-1C Grey Eagle. The aircraft is a refined version of the company’s well known MQ-1 Predator drone, and is part of the Army’s Extended-Range Multi-Purpose UAV program.
For 2011, “[more] than $2 billion will be used to purchase unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, which the Obama administration has used increasingly over the past year to target suspected terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” stated a news report from TruthOut, published way back in February.
By contrast, the FDA — which handles food and drug consumer protections for the entire United States — is requesting $4.03 billion to “Transform Food Safety System, Invest in Medical Product Safety, [and provide] Regulatory Science.”
As a thought exercise consider that General Atomics and US manufacturing of killer drones sops up at least half, maybe more, than an important domestic US regulatory agency spends for the betterment, health and welfare of society.
As another thought exercise, consider that a domestic arms manufacturer of flying killer robots and very little else is now half the size of the regulatory agency for food and drugs in allegedly the foremost of western nations.
Ah, so where were we? Lost. Talking about some rubbish having to do with a Chinese stealth fighter.
Over Xmas DD was visiting a friend’s house for dinner, drinks and conviviality. Sitting on the coffee table were various gifts sent in from around the country.
One was a photo mobile proudly advertised as of the Guggenheim Museum. You can see it here in the Guggenheim Foundation gift shop.
What the store doesn’t show was the rather obvious “Made in China” sticker on the box.
Many people my age remember making photo mobiles out of wire hangers and string or fishing line when they were in grade school art class.
The idea that even the manufacture of “photo mobiles” has to be outsourced to China is astonishing. It’s also a deadeningly obvious part of life.
Everything made for the consumer society, except stuff for the wealthy, was outsourced to China, so to speak. So everyone knows what happened to the US economy just by going into stores in their hometown. Not even a need to order from Guggenheim.
It emphasizes our dreadful history of decline.
Wall Street, shareholders, big business and government policy, all worked together to compress US middle class pay and increase business value. Part of the plan included downsizing manufacturing industry which employed American workers who had to be paid too much for the most potent bottom line. So they needed eliminating.
To compensate, it was convenient to extend easy credit and ship all manufacturing to China so that prices for consumer products could be depressed.
This worked only to a point and now everyone recognizes the poisoned fruit of it.
There is one industry not outsourced to China. It’s an industry where labor’s wages don’t need elimination or compression for the bottom line. Because the shareholders and CEOs know price isn’t an object that interferes with major profit.
On January 1, a fatuous opinion piece in the New York Times accidentally touched upon it in “China’s Naval Ambitions.”
It read:
The Pentagon has a long history of hyping the Chinese threat to justify expensive weapons purchases, and sinking well-defended ships with ballistic missiles is notoriously hard. But what should rightly concern American military planners is not so much the missile but the new Chinese naval strategy behind it.
China seems increasingly intent on challenging United States naval supremacy in the Western Pacific. At the same time it is aggressively pressing its claims to some worthless disputed offshore islands in the East and South China Seas. Washington must respond, carefully but firmly.
The Pentagon needed to move fast to counter Chinese naval developments by:
Cutting back purchases of the Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer (with its deficient missile defense system) was a first step. A bigger one would be to reduce the Navy’s reliance on short-range manned strike aircraft like the F-18 and the F-35, in favor of the carrier-launched N-UCAS, a longer-range unmanned strike aircraft.
The upshot here is that middle class jobs are worthless EXCEPT if they’re the small part of the American demographic for making robot weapons.
Robot assassins don’t build roads, they don’t improve the infrastructure, they don’t do anything for universal healthcare, they don’t fight disease, they don’t coach high-school wrestling teams, they don’t spread goodwill overseas. And it’s not an industry that is theoretically open to everyone for a good living regionally, like Detroit in its heyday.
Weapons and pricey ridiculous things, yes! Everything else, no!
Good news, lads! Good news! Most popular DD video/tune with the over 45 male and unemployed audience, ever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
