A fresh example today, an artistocrat’s Telecaster from the Fender Custom Shop, American-made — 4,000 dollars. The original electric guitar made for everyone, priced as a gem stone.
That’s an order of magnitude times about 2.3 more expensive than the offshored Telecaster I borrowed to do this tune.
You think it could have $3830 more twangy sound?
The 40-Year Slump, at the National Prospect, which explains how it got this way, among other things.
Excerpted:
The decimation of manufacturing wasn’t due to a sharp acceleration of manufacturing productivity—indeed, productivity increases were higher in the previous decade, which saw less job loss. What made the difference was trade policy. Economist Rob Scott has calculated that the United States lost 2.4 million jobs just to China in the eight years following the passage of normalized trade relations.
Offshoring has had an even broader effect on the jobs that have remained behind. Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist who was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1990s, has estimated that roughly 25 percent of all American jobs are potentially offshorable, from producing steel to writing software to drafting contracts. This has placed a ceiling on wages in these and myriad other occupations that can be sent overseas.
The mightiest military in world history didn’t waste an instant, immediately flying B-52s over a couple worthless islands after China announced it was claiming the airspace over them.
Who is the Pentagon fooling? Itself.
War with China? Laughable. Not even the exchange of spitballs, Apple wouldn’t have it.
Who would make all the iStuff?
Keywords: General Jack Ripper, Lionel Mandrake, B-52s, Diaoyu, Senkaku, IOU.
Defying China, two long-range American bombers flew through contested airspace over the East China Sea, days after the Chinese announced they were claiming the right to police the sky above a vast area that includes islands at the center of a simmering dispute with Japan.
Pentagon officials said Tuesday that the B-52s were on a routine training mission planned long in advance of the Chinese announcement on Saturday that it was establishing an “air defense identification zone??? over the area. But the message was clear.
“The bigger question there is why employers feel entitled to employ people, often at low wages, without providing healthcare for them. Is the idea that when they get sick or die, they’ll be replaced like lab rats? That’s a pretty diseased view of how capitalism should work.”
To which I say: Disease is us. We like disease.
Adds the paper, “When Walmart is implicitly acknowledging that its wages won’t let people afford one good dinner, its financial issues are way beyond Obamacare.”
The picture [in the Plain Dealer] alone says it all.
Walmart is a company that’s deservedly earned (and earns) … loathsome press. Yet nothing is ever done and conditions never change.
One can think of a lot of creative ways in federal, even state, law could be changed to punish a predatory corporation that uses food stamp subsidy of its workers to keep wages down and enhance its bottom line. One could do a calculation of a business based on its payment of such workers, retrieve an estimated number of them, and deduce what their food stamp benefit would be, then hit the firm with a claw-back in the form of a tax plus a large penalty for victimizing its workers.
Such money, collected nationally, could be given back to workers by placement in a national fund from which they could extract their share by simply presenting proof of employment at Walmart and a photocopy of their latest SNAP card.
With a little thought there could be a lot of remedies like this. None of them could ever happen in our world, unfortunately.
Anyway, from this we can conclude that Walmart management, as opposed to its labor force, consists entirely of sociopaths and that is what they look for when hiring. In fact, we have a national corporate economy, a fascist one, that selects for and elevates sociopaths. It explains why everything continues to turn from bad to worse.
Since it’s been building for decades, a good portion of the voting populace has now been conditioned to view it as normal, even proper, or worse — to be applauded. This, in turn, explains the malevolent nature of modern America.
“The next proposal is more severe: Charge back the amount of public assistance any employee receives to the company he or she works for. It would be separate from tax filings, and simply be a direct penalty charged to the firm. I doubt there is much political will for this proposal, but I can see some people — especially on the Left — supporting it … My politics are pretty middle-of-the-road, and I find myself offended by subsidizing profitable companies this way.???
Could substitute the Waltons for the Kochs. Let’s sing for economic blight. Just sayin’.
Someone should put my Culture of Lickspittle album out on iTunes, I’m telling ya. Then I could come to your town, maybe, and play it for you.
Thanks to those who kept the comments alive over the weekend, if you know who you are and I think you do. It keeps things interesting.
Today, more ridiculous advertising from the American guitar industry, one among many good examples of inequality, the abandonment of a middle class society, and the shift of domestic manufacturing to lavish goods for the one percent and their still employed white collar servants.
If you follow the rock instrument industry you run into hordes of American men who actually think these things are fine, to be coveted, great artisan examples from America’s top-of-the-heap craftsmen. And if you look for video tours of the Fender Custom Shop, you easily find hagiography in which the people who put together priced-for-the-aristocracy basic electric guitar models designed fifty years ago are called master builders. It’s to laugh bitterly.
Here, the eight thousand dollar Fender telecaster, customized until its original reason as an instrument for the Bakersfield country sound or weekend entertainment in the beach ballrooms of southern California.
Better, follow this link to pricing for crystal pickguards.
Fender is the choice for this lampooning in the Culture of Lickspittle because it is a company that continuously drapes itself in the glories of its decades past history when it no longer has any moral or legitimate connection to it other than the fact that the instruments look the same.
You can say many things about the two wine ads. What you can’t say is that they have something to do with the rock ‘n’ roll, only that the concept and spirit of it is demonstrably dead at Fender. When you’re a music equipment manufacturer passing off 35 dollar bottles of snob wine from Sonoma as something cool you deserve to be put down.
Readers may note that six bottles of said Fender wine cost 80 dollars more than a Fender telecaster, made in China, pictured below.
These advertisements are only small bits from the great national decline: Once justifiably famous businesses, places where things that changed the world for the better were made by everyday people, now corporations focused on making intelligence-insulting and/or idiotic luxuries for the top class who laughably think of themselves as rock n rollers.
Today’s face of American employment, what’s left for you when nothing else is available, the great innovation of crowd-sourced free-lance slave labor. May more soon be welcomed into it.
My account on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the pay stub after a half day of work.
Originally designed and made by Leo Fender, in southern California, as the first mass-produced electric guitar for the working musician. Now part of the bifurcation in US society, marketed for the 1 percenters, corporate fascists and their yet un-obsoleted upper middle class servants, the $3,700 Fender Telecaster. (By contrast, the “crafted in China” — really, that’s what it says on the headstock — Fender Squier Telecaster, recently on sale at Guitar Centers nationwide: $119.00.)
That’s an order of magnitude x 3 times difference in cost, the latter item — an electric guitar originally a southern California icon, sent back across the Pacific to its ancestral origin in a container ship. (And if you think there’s an order of magnitude difference in the sound and quality, you need to be put to death.)
The travesty of this is easy to grasp.
Global trade, what once was a good idea, or could have stayed an at least tolerable idea, is now twisted well into the bad.
There is no way to reverse conditions other than the very unlikely institution of a global minimum wage, mandated elevation of US wages, or imposition of tariffs on things like entry of container ships into US ports, tariffs to be paid as dividends to taxpayers, like oil or geologic asset revenue sharing. The latter would be reasonable under the thinking that it was the conditions in post WWII America that allowed for the creation and development of goods, desired around the world, that were domestically produced and then moved overseas. In all these cases more money must be put into the hands of everyone but the top tier types.
Until then, it remains one of the many and growing consumer choices in the new Culture of Lickspittle
Today, a short return to a common subject here, the bifurcation of “American” goods, following the rise of inequality, a study in contrast.
The video is of major US guitar and western guitar brands being made in China. You can ascertain the different brands by headstocks. But it’s an omnibus factory that does work for virtually all the majors.
Here, the Culture of Lickspittle is in the fawning over he who already has everything, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.
American companies that have outsourced a great deal of manufacturing regularly complain about Chinese theft of their intellectual property. In fact, as readers know this was one of NSA director’s Keith Alexander’s big claims/hobby horses before the Snowden affair shut him up on the matter.
Does corporate America deserve concern and sympathy, even action, over this? Not anymore, I’d argue.
There is now a good business in the sale of Chinese counterfeits, guitars sold as cheaply as the licensed copies of the big names made in China, but with “Made in USA” and copies of the US trademarks on them. With Gibsons, they’ve come to be called “Chibsons” and there are quite a few videos on YouTube by WhiteManistan dudes who’ve bought them. Unsurprisingly, Chibsons are made by Chinese salesmen gone off the range who’ve availed themselves of the training and parts available from Gibson’s licensed manufacturing of Epiphones in China.
They are not of the same quality at all as the domestic-made high-end models. But it doesn’t really matter because people who buy them know what they’re getting and seek them out, primarily because they are cheap copies, with infringed trademarks that look like the high end goods.
Fundamentally, you should not care if corporate America loses its intellectual property to China. It made that deal along with one to sell out American labor for the sake of shareholders long ago. What’s the morality or even reason to support intellectual property for domestic goods made for the upper tiers because that’s where the purchasing power is?
I say there’s a fairness in encouraging a global environment in which American corporates are increasingly ripped off. Sadly, it’s far from crisis level yet. And the idea that NSA, or the intelligence and defense structure be empowered to defend them is appalling, the equivalent of protecting the gold of kings in a feudal society.
“About 2,000 Chinese employees of an iPhone assembly company fought a pitched battle into the early hours of Monday, forcing the huge electronics plant where they work to be shut down …some employees and people posting messages online accused factory guards of provoking the trouble by beating up workers at the factory …”
The closest Americans got to rioting against Apple products happened in Pasadena last week when homeless men who were bussed in from Skid Row to wait overnight in front of the Apple store got angry with the man who “hired” them for gypping them out of what he owed.
On the other hand, when people peacefully picket Walmart for being shafted and having to go on foodstamps, we can count on seeing pictures like this…
And sometimes you can even count on an armored car, courtesy of Homeland Security block grants for fighting terrorists.
Consider the changing identity of the most valuable company in America. For a long time, it was GM, then Exxon, then IBM. These were companies with huge visible production activities …
But now it’s Apple, which has hardly any employees and does hardly any manufacturing. The company tries, through fairly desperate PR efforts, to claim that it is indirectly responsible for lots of US jobs, but never mind. The reality is that the company is basically built around technology, design, and a brand identity.
There was an old Dilbert in which the pointy-haired boss explained that the company had discovered that despite its slogan, people weren’t its most important asset — money was, and people only came in at #8 or something. Actually, in Apple’s case market position is its most important asset.
There are a couple of obvious implications from this change in the nature of corporate success. One is that profits are no longer anything remotely resembling a “natural??? aspect of the economy; they’re very much an artifact of antitrust policy or the lack thereof, intellectual property policy, etc. Another is that a lot of what we consider output is “produced??? at low or zero marginal cost.
Smartphones and mobile computing haven’t been transformative for the American populace, at least from what I can see at Baja Ranch everyday. Everyone has an iPhone with apps for every social networking site and more processing power than many older PCs. But they still can’t earn enough to get out of the WIC, SNAP and EBT programs.
Every day it becomes easier to detest Apple and the rest of America’s “tech” industry.
Between Ricin Mom and the Snowden affair, an embarrassment of riches. Too amusing to pass up.
After serving as conduits for the US government’s push tarring Chinese cyber-spying as a serious threat to the nation, as well as being unsporting, our free press is hip to let us all know what “state run” Chinese media has to say.
From the Los Angeles Times, where the reporters don’t know shit from shinola on the topics of cybersecurity, cyberwar and cyber-espionage (no backlink, tar-baby scripting and infinite load):
After days of silence, state media have let loose with a barrage of criticism concerning Snowden’s allegations of a massive electronic surveillance program by the United States. The English-language China Daily ran a large cartoon of a shadowed Statue of Liberty, holding a tape recorder and microphone instead of a tablet and torch …
In Hong Kong, the pro-Communist Party Takungpao newspaper added: “If the U.S. is the true defender of democracy, human rights and freedom like it always described itself … President Obama should sincerely apologize to the people from other countries whose privacy was violated.’’
Of course, the criticism is irresistible, the opportunity too rich to pass up. For months now, the U.S. government has demanded that the Chinese government rein in an extensive military-sponsored hacking operation. During last weekend’s summit between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping, cybersecurity was the main item on the U.S. agenda.
Snowden, the 29-year-old former U.S. government contractor who says he leaked National Security Agency secrets and is now in hiding in Hong Kong, alleged in an interview published early Thursday in the South China Morning Post that there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations internationally, hundreds of them directed against China and Hong Kong.
“Chinese dissidents say they fear that the scandal will weaken the United States’ ability to take the high ground in pushing for more freedoms from Beijing,” adds the reporter.
“It is unfair to compare what the U.S. does to China … The U.S. program is trying to prevent certain terrorist activities, while China is listening in to monitor what dissidents are saying and writing. People get thrown into jail here just for an email,’’ one dissident told the reporter.
And people get thrown in jail for lots of things in the US. That ain’t much of a counter-argument anymore.
But we have freedom to shop and say whatever we like on Facebook and Twitter.
Bet on it, this will be just a faint memory by August. Especially after we’re told about all the terrorists we were saved from, Monday.
The massive leaks on the Obama administration’s cyber-spying and cyberwar initiatives to the Guardian come at an incredibly damaging time for the President.
In the run-up to this week’s talk with Chinese premier Xi Jinping in California the US government carefully laid the stage with selective news leaking on rampant Chinese cyber-spying. The cyber-spying operation, it was claimed, was aimed at everything, from priceless corporate intellectual property to the Department of Defense’s most expensive weapons systems.
There was the creation of a stealth corporate national security lobbying agency called the Intellectual Property Commission, its aim to recommend how the nation could protect its business stuff and ideas from Chinese predation. Millions of jobs had been lost, it claimed, billions of dollar in profit made gone.
It has all been a carefully wrought publicity operation, a deliberate and studied massage of the media to get out a message, one to shame and embarrass China’s rulers.
That was never going to work.
And this week, someone — in cahoots with the Guardian, has leaked explosive material on the US government’s cyberspying and cyberwar activities. Turns out, it’s not particularly surprising the National Security Agency (NSA) has been into everyone’s stuff domestically, all in the name of the war on terror.
Moreover, it appears this release has been strategically timed to come just at a delicate time for the Obama administration. News would have filled with just more of the same on Chinese cyberespionage.
Now the news is filled with information on NSA snooping.
Truth be told, the US has been in terrible position to lecture people on proper conduct in cyberspace since releasing the Stuxnet virus into Iranian networks in an effort to physically damage its nuclear program.
It set off an escalating cyber-arms race. This, in turn, triggered retaliations against US networks and greased the black market for the hoarding and clandestine sale of security vulnerabilities.
And for what? What has the exceptional nation, the one that can say do what we recommend but we reserve the right to do as we please, achieved?
What has the scooping up of all this private data accomplished?
Terrorism just isn’t that common in the US. The use of the biggest digital vacuuming operation in the world hasn’t accomplished much, looking at the black box from the outside.
For example, technically, the government would seem to have been able to sweep up all the on-line and credit card purchases of castor seeds as they happened or shortly after and, therefore, have had a database with the three latest perps in it.
But the FBI still went the wrong way a couple times, had to seize computers and finds the information within hours after descending on places. James Everett Dutschke, who bought on-line, was only identified after Paul Kevin Curtis’ lawyer fingered him. And it was Shannon Richardson who summoned the FBI to New Boston, not credit card purchases of castor seeds.
Anyway, a couple years back Tim Weiner’s history of the FBI, “Enemies,” mentioned the agency getting access to national e-mail through a program called Stellar Wind. It probably used the NSA as the technical collection means. This is more of the same. Only the names, data-mining software applications and corporate security contractors change.
More broadly, this is another issue where, if the national security megaplex can do something that means more for itself, it will do it.
The American people were never asked if they wanted everything about themselves in cyberspace and on the telephone shoved into a massive database, for the sake of safety during the war on terror. No one you know was consulted or asked for permission. It was just done.
And when you read the shock in some places on the net now, in this country anyway, you’re reading the opinions and feelings of the shoeshine upper middle class types who haven’t been sloughed off the US economy yet. They are so put out.
If you asked the people I see in the supermarket in Pasadena every evening about it (and I’ll be walking out to it in a few minutes), they wouldn’t know what’s being discussed. FISC? PRISM?
What’s NSA stand for?
They haven’t had the time or luxury to know. Their snooped-on smartphones are their connection to cyberspace and there’s not anything in this great mass of people that poses an existential national security threat.
So what does Keith Alexander make per year as the 4-star who’s head of the National Security Agency? He’s famously claimed that Chinese cyber-spying is resulting in the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
Who’s wealth, precisely?
It is fair game to discuss his compensation in relationship to these issues because nobody involved in this game is in the bottom three-quarters of the economic scorecard. The people implementing the mechanics of this kind of massive digital spying are all from the top, or employed in the national security servant class.
Alexander’s salary: somewhere between 230,000 and 290,000/year.
