Whether it’s writing the next Harmonica-like app or making the $180 blues harp, one of the dogwhistles heard regularly is how every US worker will have be ‘value-added’ and very special to earn a living in the future.
It’s another way of saying that everyone unemployed now needs jettisoning. Forget about ’em. We need to get away from the slug dead weight.
For the plutonomy to succeed one has to focus on making stuff for the haves.
Here’s an example of the industry model, again on Harrison Harmonicas in Rockfield, Illinois.
Harrison Harmonicas is hiring two to three entry level workers to help construct its B-Radical Harmonica featuring replaceable reeds.
The premium harmonica is the only harmonica made in the United States. They sell for $180 each.
Harrison Harmonica is accepting applications in person from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Tuesday at the EIGERlab, 605 Fulton Ave. during an on-site application process.
For more information and to download an application, log on to the Harrison Harmonica website at harrisonharmonicas.com/careers.
It is the second day of the on-site application process for the company.
EIGERlab Director Dan Cataldi estimated there were 60 applicants for the jobs on Monday morning.
“Located in Rockford, Illinois, Harrison Harmonicas is the United States’ only harmonica manufacturer and was named by Businessweek magazine as one of America’s Most Promising Startups,” reads yet another press release.
The perfect model of the ‘artisan’ economy, one in which you make goods for the superwealthy is Elon Musk’s Tesla.
It also helps, if like Musk, you can get the US government to prop you up.
Another California ‘artisan’, of sorts, is Solazyme, the company that makes ‘biofuel’ from algae.
Here’s a laugher story on Solazyme’s big client, the US military, a couple sentences picked to tell readers all they need to know.
The [Navy’s experimental boat that runs on a 50-50 mix of algae-derived ‘biofuel’ and regular gas] is designed to be deployed in rivers and marshes and will eventually be used to guard oil installations in the Middle East, The Guardian reported. It’s part of the Navy’s first green strike force, a group of about 10 ships, submarines and planes that run on a mix of biofuels and nuclear power. They’re expected to be developed by 2012 and deployed to the field by 2016.
Last month, the U.S. Navy ordered more than 150,000 gallons of ship and jet fuel from Solazyme, a California company that produces biofuels from algae.
‘[Be] used to guard oil installations in the Middle East,” is all you need to read. Does … not … compute, Will Robinson.
Solazyme’s ‘biofuel’ costs the Navy $424 a gallon. Which makes it, by definition, anti-green in terms of energy and carbon footprint needed to get it to the Navy. Despite the Navy’s insistence that it is committed to fielding a ‘green strike force,’ whatever that may be.
The ‘artisan’ economy is warmed-over hash. It has been written of many times.
It goes like this: Creative and innovative Americans need only start their own businesses, come up with great ideas for stuff, and have it made overseas, like in China or India.
The most popular example being Tom Friedman famously airing the claim, in 2004, of an alleged American who had lost his job to outsourcing and recovered by selling a T-shirt on it.
This was subsequently exposed as a joke on the Register, where it was discovered by cartoonist Tom Tomorrow who called the columnist over it.
Still another way of looking at it: The ‘artisan’ economy is a modern variation on the Pet Rock concept of business.
If you can come up with something like the old Pet Rock — or some similar gimmick like they used to sell in the old black-light junk gift shop stores in shopping malls, then that’s the ticket.
For those who can’t make something that cheap, through manufacturing in China, there’s stuff like Harrison Harmonica’s $180 blues harp.
Fender Musical Instruments is another example of ‘artisan’ business.
The book on its musical amplifiers entitled The Soul of Tone is an unintentional profile of a company that went from being a middle class employer in California, one making things for the middle class, to a company that sent all its manufacturing overseas, reserving its domestic manufacturing — greatly decreased — to stars and big deal corporate lawyers.
In the context of the book, it’s written of as straightforward smart business. When it was published, three years ago, it seemed that way.
Now it reads poorly. The first part of the book is filled with great amplifiers made in America by guys and gals in Hawaiian shirts.
The end of the book is quite different. It’s filled with oral history from its current designer/artisans explaining how they ship their everyman stuff manufacturing to whatever overseas place is the cheapest.
Coincidentally, all the guys pictured in the front of the book are dead.
This transformation is encapsulated in a quote about one premium domestically made guitar amplifier, the Vibro-King, a $2500 item used by Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend.
“If you’re a rock star or a lawyer who wants a Vibro-King, you’re gonna get one, but the Cyber-Champ (a low end Chinese-made Fender-branded amp) is an example of the relentless march to Asia for manufacturing,” states Shane Nicholas of Fender.
Coincidentally, all economic reports indicate that class hit hardest by the Great Recession has been the low wage earners, those customers targeted by Fender’s cheap goods made in China.
The other option is to get your ‘artisan’ business, like Tesla or Solazyme, gifted partially or entirely by the US government.
However, as a model for the future of employment in a country as big as the United States, the ‘artisan’ idea is utterly ludicrous.
Tom Friedman, today, filling the job he does so well. Being a public enemy, telling everyone else to eat their peas, consulting with his fancy and fine pals on what the unlucky proles are going to have to morph into so as not to always be in the poor house.
You’ll have to be an “artisan.” In other words, the concept I’ve relentlessly dumped on over the last few months.
Or work in the Fender Musical Instruments custom shop, making $25,000 Eddie Van Halen relics.
Friedman:
Fifteen years ago, there were no industries around Google “search??? or “iPhone applications.??? Today, both are a source of good jobs. More will be invented next year. There is no fixed number of jobs. We just have to make sure there is no fixed number of Americans to fill them — aided by good U.S. infrastructure and smart government incentives to attract these new industries to our shores.
But not everyone can write iPhone apps. What about your nurse, barber or waiter? Here I think Lawrence Katz, the Harvard University labor economist, has it right. Everyone today, he says, needs to think of himself as an “artisan??? — the term used before mass manufacturing to apply to people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch in which they took personal pride. Everyone today has to be an artisan and bring something extra to their jobs.
Yes, it’s pretty obvious not everyone can write Harmonica or be enough of a programmer to spend their spare time putting stubbornly antagonizing thirty second videos of their iPhones to their lips on YouTube.
You must bring something “extra” to your work of cleaning toilets, of delivering pizza, of greeting everyone as a potential shoplifter at the door of the big box stores, of being a whore.
Yes, even the days of doing a simple blow and go are over! That’s so average.
When you get a part-time job at the giant consumer electronics store selling everything made in China, you will have to have a deep knowledge of the crap you’re peddling to earn that barely about minimum wage.
Only the application or rocket scientist expertise and exquisite public relations with the customer in all things will get us where we need to be.
Friedman instructs, employing the wisdom of some Harvard vizier:
For instance, says Katz, the baby boomers are aging, which will spawn many health care jobs. Those jobs can be done in a low-skilled way by cheap foreign workers and less-educated Americans or they can be done by skilled labor that is trained to give the elderly a better physical and psychological quality of life. The first will earn McWages. The second will be in high demand. The same is true for the salesperson who combines passion with a deep knowledge of fashion trends, the photo-store clerk who can teach you new tricks with your digital camera while the machine prints your film, and the pharmacist who doesn’t just sell pills but learns to relate to customer health needs in more compassionate and informative ways. They will all do fine.
But just doing your job in an average way — in this integrated and automated global economy — will lead to below-average wages. Sadly, average is over. We’re in the age of “extra,??? and everyone has to figure out what extra they can add to their work to justify being paid more than a computer, a Chinese worker or a day laborer.
Think of all the people you pass on the sidewalk. Or those you jostle with in line at the supermarket.
Boy, that’s a crowd where everyone can easily figure out how to be “extra,” how to earn more than a computer or a Chinese factory worker.
All the young men in droopy shorts, the middle-aged guys with stomachs hanging over their belts, etc. Yeah, that’s doable.
In related news, a reader comment from Friday begs republishing:
DD, let’s help fund your fine blog and future tomes by releasing a China Toilet Blooz ringtone, made right here in the USA with homegrown talent for use on crap China phones.
Because Steve Jobs is the most important man in the world, he was apparently consulted by President Obama on how to cure the nation’s ills.
My guess the best advice Jobs could have given would have been telling the President to forget all Americans who don’t have iPhones or iPods. They’re structural drags and don’t count when considering the shining future.
It’s the I-fart-sunshine-and-piss-champagne crowd that’s the fountainhead of innovation, progress and job creation.
Why, if you can’t make an app like Harmonica or Jerk In a Box or Pocket Guitar for the empowerment of tens of thousands of annoying and creepy nerds, what good are you?
The Register drew my attention to the tete a tetehere.
Quoth el Reg:
Barack Obama called on Steve Jobs yesterday to discuss the challenges facing the US economy.
As for restoring the competitiveness of the United States? Well, Apple already depends on Chinese workers to build most of its kit. Perhaps Obama can look at shifting key US government technology production over there as well – missiles, nukes, and the like. It’s entirely likely the Chinese already have a pretty good idea of the blueprints anyway, so the US taxpayer might as well get the full benefit by getting the stuff built there as well.
That just leaves energy independence. We’re sure there’s some kind of skunkworks project down Infinite Loop that can take care of this. Presumably the biggest challenge is how to squeeze a nuke plant into a white plastic box with a single button.
Good news, lads! Good news! Welcome to the future. The joke’s on us!
Right before posting an ad to the personals on Craig’s List.
Jump on this grenade if you dare, lads! Half a million views!
Some old dead guy playing real harmonica, not so popular lads!
Here’s a philosophical question for turning you inside out.
What’s better? Buying a Chinese-made 16G Apple iPhone for $299 and Harmonica for 99 cents or buying a Chinese-made real harmonica and a Chinese-made Fender guitar and amp kit in a box for $199?
Ken Langone, the alleged co-founder of Home Depot, is peeved. Mandatory health insurance for his employees! Rapacious trial lawyers!
“If we tried to start The Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it’s a stone cold certainty that it would never have gotten off the ground,” Langone writes.
You mean to tell us there would be one less giant chain store — the kind lampooned in various famous cartoon series — selling nothing but goods made exclusively in China, toilet seats, hardwares and such, staffed by grossly underpaid Wal-Mart-type workers?
[You] seem obsessed with repealing tax cuts for “millionaires and billionaires.” Contrary to what you might assume, I didn’t start with any advantages and neither did most of the successful people I know. I am the grandson of immigrants who came to this country seeking basic economic and personal liberty. My parents worked tirelessly to build on that opportunity. My first job was as a day laborer on the construction of the Long Island Expressway more than 50 years ago.
DD is the grandson of immigrants who came to this country seeking basic economic and personal liberty.
It seemed like the thing for them to do — nothing more, nothing less.
About a month ago, Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy blog published one of the many Congressional Research Reports, a taxpayer funded analysis withheld from the public.
It’s title: Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain.
It discussed China’s virtual monopoly on the rare earth elements “needed in many industrial and national security applications, from flat panel displays to jet fighter engines.”
And over the past few weeks, news agencies in the US have published stories, usually in the backpages, on China cutting Japan off from rare earth shipments in a trade war, political retaliation for the latter country’s seizing of a Chinese ship.
Faced with separation from rare earth shipments, Japan promptly caved in.
The Congressional Research Service issues studies on policy issues when they’re requested by various members of that body, usually in advance of hearings or possible proposed legislation. The CRS reports do not reveal the identity of the requestors.
Today in the New York Times, Paul Krugman addresses China’s monopoly on the rare earth elements. It is just another example of American corporate business and political shortsightedness.
Or the attitude that rare earth mining had to be disposed of in the US because it was too damn dirty and there was so much more money to be made by shipping it to China and turning to financial instruments made by Wall Street.
I don’t know about you, but I find this story deeply disturbing, both for what it says about China and what it says about us. On one side, the affair highlights the fecklessness of U.S. policy makers, who did nothing while an unreliable regime acquired a stranglehold on key materials. On the other side, the incident shows a Chinese government that is dangerously trigger-happy, willing to wage economic warfare on the slightest provocation …
You really have to wonder why nobody raised an alarm while this was happening, if only on national security grounds. But policy makers simply stood by as the U.S. rare earth industry shut down. In at least one case, in 2003 — a time when, if you believed the Bush administration, considerations of national security governed every aspect of U.S. policy — the Chinese literally packed up all the equipment in a U.S. production facility and shipped it to China.
The news here, as usual in the US of Fail, is all bad.
“The United States was once self-reliant in domestically produced [rare earth elements], but over the past 15 years has become 100% reliant on imports, primarily from China …” states the Congressional Research Report at Secrecy blog.
Notably, manufacturing of all the domestic consumer products requiring the rare earths was also shipped to China.
Military hardware and weapons production that requires them — stealth bombers and smart bombs … was not.
“Made in China” as a liability has probably saved Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat here in California. Boxer’s recent political ad on Carly Fiorina, which now exists in two forms, one showing an HP office in Shanghai seems to have put a stake in her rival.
With mass unemployment in the daily news, the segment of Fiorina aridly saying work needed to be done elsewhere while enjoying life at the top is a show stopper.
It exploits class anger, of course. And over the weekend the New York Times ran a story — here — over its political utility:
In the past week or so, at least 29 candidates have unveiled advertisements suggesting that their opponents have been too sympathetic to China and, as a result, Americans have suffered.
The ads are striking not only in their volume but also in their pointed language.
In journo-fashion, it found an expert — someone from the swell class and unaffected by the Great Recession — to explain, not so expertly:
“China is a really easy scapegoat,??? said Erika Franklin Fowler, a political science professor at Wesleyan University who is director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising.
====
The ads are so vivid and pervasive that some worry they will increase hostility toward the Chinese and complicate the already fraught relationship between the two countries.
Hmmm. The Boxer ad is notable for making Fiorina, and by extension her company, HP, the “easy scapegoat(s).” While there is a “Made in China” stamp in it, there’s an assertion that jobs were sent to Bangalore, instead of Burbank, too.
China is the destination of outsourcing. But it takes two to do the deal. On the other side of every one, US big business. The thought — that corporate America is antagonistic, even psychopathically adverse, to much American labor, isn’t in the Times’ report.
“Never mind that there is hardly any consensus as to what exactly constitutes outsourcing and how many of the new overseas jobs would have stayed in American hands,” waffles the piece.
“The Democrats cite studies this year from the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, that assert three million jobs have been outsourced to China since 2001 because of the growing trade imbalance.
“But Republicans, backed by some academics, say the number is much smaller. Indeed, Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana University, said that most of the jobs China had added in manufacturing through foreign investment had come from Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, not from the United States.”
Journalism reasons: Somewhere between the two extremes must be the truth.
Here’s another truth.
And some more, in a longer and amusingly mocking form, even if you don’t get all the jokes (tip o’ the hat to the reader who originally pointed it out):
Ha Ha Ha America was done three years ago, China Toilet Blooz around the same time, although the latter wasn’t burned into my homemade slide show until this year.
Last week, A4 of the Wall Street Journal had one story entitled Strategy This Year: Bash China.
The last sentence: “But Democrats unsuccessfully pushed a measure to end corporate tax deductions for expenses related to shifting jobs overseas.”
Its opinion page featured an essay by Dee Woo, from Beijing, where that person “teaches in the economics department at the Beijing Huija Private School.
Woo wrote ‘the US Will Lose a China Trade War.” “Before a strong yuan created any US jobs in manufacturing, it would kill jobs at Wal-Mart and elsewhere …” Woo wrote.
And if the Chinese ever get to believing that the dollar is “useless paper,” it will be very bad for this country. China is good for American corporations, Woo added. Which would seem unassailable.
“Building a harmonious society is the Chinese government’s most important imperative,” Woo informed Journal opinion page readers. “Once a Chinese person can make a living, he rarely challenges authority.”
Which is another way of saying mass unemployment leads to political and national instability.
The frontpage story in today’s Wall Street Journal led with the headline: Americans Sour on Trade
“The American public, already skeptical of free trade, is becoming increasingly hostile to it,” it reads.
“It is also prompting concern among US businesses reliant on the rest of the world for growth.”
“Even Americans most likely to be winners from trade — upper income, well-educated professionals whose jobs are less likely to go overseas and whose industries are often buoyed by demand from international markets — are increasingly skeptical.”
A whopping 94 percent of “professionals/managers” and 89 percent of “white collar workers” agreed with the statement: “Do you agree or disagree that outsourcing of production and manufacturing work to foreign counties is a reason the US economy is struggling and more people aren’t being hired.”
“To many, China has replaced Wall Street as the villain du jour,” the newspaper continued.
Not entirely. DD thinks many aren’t so stupid to believe the two aren’t related, Wall Street tending to reward US multinationals when they shuck US labor in favor of outsourcing.
For example, in the newspaper’s “Marketplace” section, the lead story is “Propelling the Profit Comeback.”
“Aggressive retooling helps American companies wrest near-historic earnings from reduced revenue,” reads the subhed.
And how has this been done?
More predatory behavior: Firing people and shutting units, mostly.
“Starbucks Corp. eliminated 648 US stores …
“Despite the hefty profits, executives aren’t expected to boost spending on new employees, products and equipment anytime soon.”
Priceless stereotypical quote from the CEO of Electronic Arts, a company that laid off more than a quarter of its workers, moving jobs to “China, India and Canada.”
“The human cost of eliminating jobs is always painful, but in a way, the economic melee has helped us build a stronger company,” he told the Journal.
That was Carly Fiorina’s tune, too, until the recent political ad with her saying it started killing her chances of unseating Democrat Barbara Boxer in California.
A viewer of the China Toilet Blooz video on YouTube recommended an older clip, recommended Ha Ha Ha America.
That unfortunately hilarious clip, well worth a view, is here.
Continual lameness: Job training programs, sponsored by McDonalds and The Gap
This is what the president thinks is a good plan?
Reaching out to big business, President Barack Obama is set to announce a new program that links top companies with community colleges in hopes of ramping up America’s job skills.
The partnership plan — called “Skills for America’s Future” — is a key recommendation of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which has a meeting scheduled later Monday with Obama at the White House.
A White House official said the plan aims to improve industry partnerships with community colleges and build a nationwide network to maximize workforce development. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan had not yet been publicly announced.
The initiative has the backing of Gap Inc., McDonald’s, Accenture and other big-name companies, the official said. — AP
Skills for America’s future — working the hamburger chain and retail sale of jeans made in China.
I commented on the president’s increasingly bizarre fetish for community college boosterism last year in “Bed Pan Technician-Training Schools Rejoice.” The idea that encouraging people to go into debt at community college for minimal jobs that may not exist for them, anyway, seems more parasitic than anything else.
It has, however, led to an explosion of questionable and possibly immoral on-line advertisements for loan services which will enable one to buy some on-line or community college chit.
The interior joke is that you really don’t need any training to do such jobs, just a chit from a community college that reassures human resource departments at hospitals you can read sufficiently well enough to know exactly who, in the room of two, is supposed to get the enema. For a big $20k a year.
“President Barack Obama wants unemployment insurance to become a stepping stone for future work by making it easier to enroll in school or job training,??? reported AP today. “Whether he succeeds will depend on the willingness of states and colleges to change the rules.???
“‘Community colleges applauded the president’s plan. George Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges, said Obama would remove obstacles that keep the unemployed from heading back to school. The association represents about 1,200 such colleges.???
“Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former Republican Party chairman, said his state already allows the unemployed to enroll in job training and encourages them to do so,??? informed the AP.
=========
Such unemployment reforms may quickly clear the way for the jobless to enroll in community college, making courses available to train them for a multiplicity of jobs.
Such jobs will include but not be limited to: test-tube cleaning, shelving and getting reagents, learning to use a Metler balance, mucous, surgical drain and breathing pipe maintenance, teeth scraping, gram-staining, changing oxygen tanks for those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, blood pressure-taking, temperature taking, enema giving, supervision of administration of Fleet’s Phospho-Soda, cleaning up messes in hospitals and clinics, airport security, turnstyle security, public transit security, frisking, pat downs and strip searching, simple detentions, immigration status checking, herding, temporary staffing, manning the metal detectors at court houses, X-ray smock fitting, checking dosimeters, wheelchair-bound patient moving, massage, bed pan emptying, restraining and strapping the old and mentally ill into chairs in various warehousing environments, bed sore monitoring, security work in privately administered prisons, embalming, corpse dressing, using word processor and accounting software, installing anti-virus software, transcribing, bank tellering, cafeteria work, how to wear a sterile smock, simple sterile procedures, transfers and transport of pees and poos in the clinical lab setting, refrigerated organ transport, transport of organs reclaimed from cadavers, preparing cadavers for organ reclamation, selling door to door, telemarketing, on-line promotion and astro-turfing, using Blogger, search engine optimization, building a network with Twitter, repeat calling debt collection, data entry and processing tax returns, using Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop and using Microsoft Powerpoint.
Robert Titman, an expert on the economic impact of continuing education at the City College of Gobble-Wallah in Birmingham, Alabama, predicted that in the next two years the US would see a big economic boom from the new highly educated and skilled workforce. The country would leap to the forefront in retraining the unemployed, providing a leading example for the rest of the world, he said.
Some of the names have been changed for purposes of satire. I’m not telling which ones.
James K. Galbraith, in “The Predator State”:
“The problem is that poverty and unemployment are not much influenced by the qualities and qualifications of the workforce. They demand, rather on the state of demand for labor.”
And, “Training and even education are no substitute, in other words, for ensuring that good jobs at decent wages are actually available when needed.”
[Geithner]: “We’re not going to have a trade war; we’re not going to have currency wars. I don’t know what that means, but people are saying that.”
I suspect that he was trying to reassure the markets — but if we’ve learned anything lately, I hope it is that actions, not talk, matter.
And look, if China continues on its present course, eventually we will have some serious currency and trade conflict. Furthermore, we should.
All Geithner did here was signal to the Chinese not to worry, U.S. officials will keep making excuses for China’s behavior and doing nothing, regardless of provocation.
Go to your local supermarket, hardware store, or Guitar Center.
As a thought exercise, imagine all the substandard slave labor junk suddenly costing twice as much. Pretend the wine corkscrew now costs twice as much, the $119 Fender Strat (or First Act electric guitar in a cardboard box) costing two and a half times more, with no case or extras.
In many ways it’s a delightful fantasy. A trade war which encompasses such things immediately makes the substandard materials undesirable, even in an economy where the consumers the products are aimed at need stuff to remain cheap because they’be been beggared.
Suddenly the stock in pawn shops — and there’s a lot of it due to the Great Recession — looks more attractive.
And that’s spent money that stays in the US, at least paying a clerk, albeit awkwardly.
If the Chinese-made LoDuca “Chicago blues” harmonica goes from $10.99 to $20.99, suddenly becoming less desirable in price compared to a good standard German-made harmonica, it is a bad thing?
If the LoDuca company has to shift their product line to one of higher quality, but more expensive, can we afford it?
The recent history of Mattel’s stock price is here, — the quintessentially anti-American US company taking advantage of Chinese monetary policy and labor markets.
Title of piece in LA Times business backpages — hardcopy — today: China faults US tariff bill.
Salient quotes, placed at the end.
Unintentionally hilarious:
[Some in China] worry [that allowing currency to rise] could undermine the nation’s export-driven economy and threaten the jobs of tens of millions of manufacturing workers.
Imagine that. MUST … AVOID … AT … ALL … COST.
Further:
If all China’s exporters are levied tariffs it will be quite a devastating event,” said Li Wei, a researcher for the Commerce Ministry. “Migrant laborers would lose their jobs and it would be a huge problem for political stability.”
Boy, lots of workers would lose their jobs. It could cause instability, pain and hardship. No way that’s fair.
And, in closing, the western businessman threatened by it all:
“Blaming China won’t help the US economy, but the legislation may cost American jobs,” said John D. Watkins, Jr., chairman of AmCham-China, an organization that represents American companies doing business in China.
You buy that toilet, it was made in China! That’s where all the jobs went, nothin’ could be finah!