Entitled “North Korea’s threat to Guam is deadly serious,” I re-posted part of it last week here because of the appearance of John Pike.
Foreign Policy, like the rest of that part of the national security infrastructure establishment responsible for threat-seeking and writing memos of rationalization on who needs to be blasted, is useless.
For instance, I doubt there’s anyone in Pasadena, not Asian, under 50 who knows where or what Guam is.
In fact, I doubt there’s anyone in the entire chain of small newspapers to which the Star News belongs who ever reads Foreign Policy. Yet little crummy newspapers over the United States picked up the absurd thing, because it’s a classic troll piece.
Foreign Policy, like others in the national security metroplex, would like a war. Because the United States has no foreign policy other than conducting war, starting pre-emptive war or blowing up people in poor countries with drones.
Everyone would feel good because the mouthpieces at the old think tanks would be empowered to crank it into overdrive again.
The North Korean imbroglio plays like a cartoon.
And that’s because North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is a living cartoon character, an absurd-looking fool who wouldn’t last a minute in an American supermarket without being ushered out by security for doing something crazy and annoying, like spilling all the potatoes in the produce section onto the floor so everyone knew he had arrived. His only friend in the world is another person who is crazy and annoying, Dennis Rodman.
What happens if Kim Jong Un shoots a rocket at Guam, no one can tell what is in it, and like everything from North Korea, it’s substandard and breaks up or goes crooked and doesn’t hit anything?
Do we try to shoot it down? Go out to part of the ocean where we think it landed looking for stuff to see if we have to unleash Strategic Command to destroy North Korea? (I asked Pike these questions in a facetious e-mail, like this post, this morning. “Yup,” he answered.)
North Korea is Serbia in 1914.
We should look at the bright side. A world war might bring on necessary stimulus. At least until China opens up its nuclear arsenal.
When I put that question in striking bold yesterday I got to thinking about what has happened in the last fifteen to twenty years. The time period encompasses my writing and work on various matters having to do with security ranging from the old origins of malware to chemical and biological weapons.
That started, depending on where I choose to pick an event, either in the administration of the first Bush, or a little later, with the presidency of Bill Clinton. Long enough to have something to say in terms of perspective, I think.
A number of things are very clear and profoundly disappointing.
The US has always been burdened by an excessively large analytic structure in national security, one in which the primary function is very much not analytic. It’s purpose is to arrive at justification for whatever leadership wishes to do.
That in itself is a major problem and it is at the very roots of the phenomenon that I call shoeshine.
Shoeshine is the work of a managerial and interpretive class of American labor, generally upper middle class, one that is employed to come up with stuff, rationalizations, justifications, all for the convenience to those at the very top in American national and business leadership. Shoeshine has virtually no social value except as employment. It keeps people in work and they can, of course, buy stuff in the economy.
But, fundamentally, shoeshine is a government in collaboration with the private sector employment jobs program that produces nothing of any material value for the vast majority of Americans.
For example, assertions that China is spying away American wealth in cyberspace are signally not important for any Americans except those generating them and the people paying for it to be disseminated. They have no meaning. There are no statistics, except the numbers of news stories and memorandums produced. But there is a big structure that has been employed to embed this information in American culture.
And it has not just been with China.
It goes on to encompass the bogus rhetoric that constantly speaks of the American financial system being threatened by devastating cyberattack, of the electricity being turned off nationwide, of calamities brought on by alleged digital assaults that require one to believe they can rival the destructive power of natural disasters.
Add to it the now impossible to reverse received wisdom that people in the sandy wastes of some poor country you barely know can easily make weapons of mass destruction. Or whatever reasons are given this week for piling up more dead with drone strikes. There really is no end to it.
And there is immorality to this because, at its heart, it’s the human machinery of rationalizing destruction.
However, when I started this there was a class of middle and upper middle class managerial and interpretive workers, smaller, which pushed back.
It was a class that inhabited philanthropic non-profit agencies devoted to such things as the furtherance of public understanding on national security issues, interpretation of treaties and global compliance and arms control.
With eight years of the Bush administration and another four with Barack Obama in charge, that’s all virtually swept away. Agencies I used to call when I was a newspaper reporter for independent from the national line information either became stunted versions of their former selves are ceased operations altogether.
Readers will have also noticed that, in the last decade, the United States isn’t even remotely interested in arms control, unless for the convenience of beating up on Iran and North Korea, and launching a clandestine war against the former.
Arms control was actually perverted into an excuse for invading Iraq.
The US is for arms proliferation big time, the best, as long as we’re doing the selling.
The world wide web, blogs, Wikileaks, whatever you want to name, didn’t fill the vacuum. Almost everyone just quit. They had to. All the money, what small amounts there were, went away. The only money spent for analysis of national security issues now is all on the other side. And its function is simply to pay people to come up with enemies lists and memos to be publicized on who is attacking us and who we are to be frightened of.
Over this period I had acquaintances who also did the progressive critical side of the coin. They wrote blogs or ran websites, worked for little agencies trying to do their part.
As the national security megaplex ballooned they either faded away or went to work for it. If they went to work for it, they went silent, never to speak again. Worried about careers, some even pulled down their old works.
And I was not being at all facetious when I mentioned earlier in the week that the state of rational discussion on cyberwar had been so degraded by this long process of attrition that it is mostly reduced to 140-character Twitter tweets.
The best people can come up with is a short (not too long so as to bore the audience) indignant squawk on social media.
It was the occupational role of managers and engineers (the professional managerial class), along with many other professionals, to manage, regulate, and control the life of the working class. They designed the division of labor and the machines that controlled workers’ minute-by-minute existence on the factory floor, manipulated their desire for commodities and their opinions, socialized their children, and even mediated their relationship with their own bodies.
At the same time though, the role of the PMC as “rationalizers??? of society often placed them in direct conflict with the capitalist class. Like the workers, the PMC were themselves employees and subordinate to the owners, but since what was truly “rational??? in the productive process was not always identical to what was most immediately profitable, the PMC often sought autonomy and freedom from their own bosses.
This class grew rapidly from the 1930s to about the mid-Seventies when the “capitalist class” reasserted control and began to cut it back with waves of layoffs tied to de-industrialization.
Technological advances and, most recently, the Internet, have continued to hack at it.
What’s left is now also employed, keeping jobs as long as possible, in cannibalization, boiling down other sections of the economy, finding ways other people can be cast off.
“Then, in just the last dozen years, the PMC began to suffer the fate of the industrial class in the 1980s: replacement by cheap foreign labor,” they continue.
That part of the managerial interpretive class that cannot yet be replaced is in American financial services and the national security megaplex. For the defense infrastructure, it’s been a relatively safe harbor of jobs for those whose work is to furnish information conveniences and processes for the very top of the pyramid.
It is not a mystery why their work has not even the slightest connection to the lives of great numbers of other Americans.
WTF is wrong with these people is that counter-reality and satisfying the political needs of their uppers is what they must do to earn a good living in view of the increasingly throttled prospects offered by this country.
And so they have been transformed into the bleak concrete of a predatory process and structure. In this structure it is imperative they not understand anything which conflicts with the purpose of the job and that they not give a shit about that. Or, if they do, to at least stuff it.
People who work at the Pasadena office of the California Department of Motor Vehicles provide more value daily than the shoeshine workers in national security. Whether you like standing in line waiting your turn or not, the public sector employees get things done that are necessary so that you can drive a car in California. And that’s important to everyday people.
One of the easiest ways to evaluate how this structure’s frankly idiotic, paranoid and self-serving fantasies have broken off with reality is also their presence in (or contamination of) entertainment.
You can compare their weird and estranged myths to the parallel proliferation of zombie and vampire movies, tv shows, books and comics.
Cyberwar is as present during the week in scripts for television and movies, maybe more so if not as successfully, as zombies. So is apocalyptic chemical and biological warfare. Add electromagnetic pulse armageddon.
All of these, propagandized into American culture by the managerial corps of national security shoeshiners to such an extent they’ve become silly popular primetime diversions, crap that has virtually nothing to do with day-to-day life over the last two decades.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — The head of Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group says he will invite dozens of American engineers to his factories in China to learn about manufacturing.
News reports here say Terry Gou told a business meeting on Wednesday that he did not believe President Barack Obama could succeed in moving production lines back to the U.S. because Americans have outsourced those jobs for too long.
But Gou says he hopes the Americans can learn how factories are operated so they can return home to set up facilities with automated equipment to resolve the lack of skilled laborers.
Foxconn employs 1.2 million people in China to assemble products for Apple Inc. and other global firms. It has introduced more robots in China over the past two years as it faces soaring wages there.
[“I assume said training also involves advice on where to put the suicide nets…” adds Chuck in e-mail. Couldn’t resist.]
The short news piece contains an internal contradiction. Introduction of automation so as not to pay higher wages is not congruent with a lack of skilled labor.
In fact, anyone who has read the stories on iJunk manufacturing at Foxconn knows that it is hardly skilled labor.
And in the US it has been repeatedly demonstrated that unemployment is the result of lack of demand, rather than labor skills mismatching.
Paul Krugman has dealt with the issue again and again. It is one of those zombie stories used to explain away the need for doing anything about the recession, as accepting the present as the new normal.
Lazear goes through the data, and finds overwhelming evidence of inadequate demand, little if any evidence of structural problems.
I was especially struck by his data on “mismatch??? (which everyone I know calls mishmash): the extent to which there appears to be a misalignment between where the workers are and where the jobs are. In the early stages of the Lesser Depression some data seemed to suggest a sharp rise in mismatch; it was left for us demand-siders to argue that this was actually a cyclical, not structural issue, and not fundamental to the employment problem. Now Lazear informs us that sure enough, mismatch was cyclical, and has in fact come way down even though unemployment remains high …
What all this tells us is that the vast suffering still going on is gratuitous — that we could end this quickly with appropriate monetary and fiscal policies. Unfortunately, between the GOP and the Very Serious People (who love, just love, the idea that it’s structural), it won’t happen any time soon.
Timely as ever. First simple video, too, actually.
[China] built up state-owned “national champions” in industries from oil and telecoms to steel and banking with monopolies, low-cost bank loans and other favors. Beijing’s huge stimulus after the 2008 global crisis flowed through state companies, increasing their dominance while entrepreneurs who generate China’s new jobs and wealth struggled.
The government defends the privileges given to its oil, telecoms and other major companies as necessary for building up Chinese global competitors. But entrepreneurs complain those companies abuse their control over essential resources such as energy, phone service and bank loans to gouge customers and pay their managers inflated salaries …
DONALD BARLETT, Co-Author, “The Betrayal of the American Dream”: The “Advertising Age” has written off the middle class in this country. They say the age of mass affluence is over. And now you’re going to have to learn to cater to the super rich and the affluent in other countries, because the middle class in China, Brazil, India, that’s the source of the coming wealth, not the U.S. middle class …
DONALD BARLETT: On the surface it sounds great, open trading, other countries. What’s to be against? The problem is, when the theory was developed back in the early 1800s, it was envisioned as countries operating comparably.
The incomes of the United States and China are so disparate that it would never work. It’s always going to be cheaper to go over to China to build what you want to build.
PAUL SOLMAN: As manufacturing jobs migrated aboard, Barlett and Steele point out, the Middle American standard of living sank steadily.
JAMES STEELE: If you’re going to get the smart jobs in this country, the brain power, and it is not working out as everybody said it would, because now many of those jobs are starting to go offshore faster than the old manufacturing jobs did.
PAUL SOLMAN: The job drain, especially to China, has become a staple of both presidential campaigns.
NARRATOR: Under Obama, we have lost over half-a-million manufacturing jobs. And for the first time, China is beating us.
NARRATOR: Romney’s never stood up to China. All he’s done is send them our jobs.
DONALD BARLETT: The real bottom-line question is, what kind of a society do we want? Do we want a society built on the principle that the only thing that matters is the lowest possible price or a society built on the principle that everyone should have a living wage?
And those are going to be two very different societies. And this goes back again so what we’re talking about. The people up here, they don’t want everyone to have a living wage.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, you actually think we could have an economy in this country in which lots of Americans would simply be not part of the economy at all?
DONALD BARLETT: Irrelevant.
JAMES STEELE: You know, they will have jobs, but these are going to be jobs that don’t pay much.
JAMES STEELE: Maybe things will have to get a lot worse before people realize that there are some things, some positive things that government can do. These things didn’t use to be so partisan in this country. We used to be able to get together and do things for the benefit of everybody. And we hope one of these days we’re back to that. We’re definitely not there now.
Finally, most of the US citizenry gets this.
However, Mitt Romney built his expanded fortune on shipping jobs to China and destroying middle class livelihoods. This fact has allowed the Democrats, and the President in last night’s debate, to tag him as an “outsourcing pioneer.”
He is, in other words, the vulture mega-businessman who most Americans should be running away from as fast as they can.
Romney: “They hack into our computers.” Yes, definitely, that’s why all the jobs went there.
Barlett and Steele are essentially arguing that you can’t have an economy for most Americans where the only stuff made is artisan goods for the very wealthy and portions of emerging upper middle classes in other countries. It’s a point I’ve made numerous times under the Made in China tab.
Mechanical Turk, and others like it, allow corporate America to get around the minimum wage by making more and more work — which is all service and task oriented — free-lance labor where people are paid pennies.
In this smartphone applications are used make life worse by speeding up the leveraged destruction of the ability of average people in the street to make a living.
When Fernando Navales lost his job last June, things looked pretty grim.
His efforts to find gainful employment proved futile until he downloaded an app called Gigwalk, where companies offer small amounts of money for small tasks that take little time. (Users simply swipe to “accept” the task and complete it within a set time period.) Within days, he was earning more than he had in his previous position.
Navales threw himself into the work, taking between 30 and 40 “gigs” per day (often photographing restaurants for Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine). Over the past year, he has completed about 750 gigs – and this new kind of employment has changed his perceptions of the working world.
“It’s a large part of my life,” he said. “I actually turned my brother onto it. He’s in Ohio, but we flew out to New York together and we basically took a working trip to NY taking pictures of restaurants.”
Not included: The part where the journalist asks the man and his brother how much they actually netted after deducting living expenses and two round trip air tickets from Ohio to NYC.
While there have been businesses catering to this audience for some time, it was the advent of the smart phone that allowed them to take off.
“But as these services now get pushed to your phone … it’s more convenient for the task consumers to receive the jobs when they’re out already,” said Henry Mason, head of research and analysis at TrendWatching.com.
Beyond Gigwalk, there are a few leaders in the business-to-consumer tasksumer space, including TaskRabbit and Mechanical Turk, a division of Amazon (AMZN) …
“What you’re starting to see is a higher degree of comfort with the concept,” said Ariel Seidman, CEO and co-founder of Gigwalk. “Where [it] really shines is when you get to places that are hard get to, like Kalamazoo, MI or Kodiak, AK. Those types of places, you can all of a sudden reach into them with the same efficiency and speed in which you can reach into a Chicago or LA …”
Other firms bring people together in a different way. PleaseBringMe acts as a handshake service between travelers who can volunteer to bring things like hard to find items to someone at their destination.
“My wife is pregnant and craving In-n-Out,” wrote one user. “We used to live in CA but are now in the NYC area. If anybody would be willing to buy 4 Animal Style cheeseburgers and bring them on a plane to me in NYC, that would be awesome.”
Another user, from Brazil, is on the hunt for a drink that’s only sold in Greece. “I want Mythos beer!!!!,” he pleads.
It’s difficult to get past the brainlessly towering odiousness of a request for fast food cheeseburgers to be flighted, in passenger, from soCal to NYC, which — of course — has no cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers.
One begins to wonder if it’s even real or just another among millions of Internet trolls and pranksters posting something vile to see how many people are crushed and stupid enough to jump at it.
Most people with sense instantly recognize things like Mechanical
Turk as mechanisms for an economy mediated by vultures and predators, using trivial mass computing applications and bad economic conditions to slice more flesh off a shrinking active labor force with few ways to protect itself.
One comment, chosen from many — all of them pretty supercilious — on the GigWalking brothers:
If their total income from this is under $400, they wont [sic] need to report it as self-employment income.
Maybe you can have a temporary minimum wage job in retail with bad hours and no benefits for three months this year, ringing the cash register for stuff made in China. You may not be able to afford holiday gifts but you might be able to wrap or bag them!
There are also signs of an improving jobs picture. The best gift this holiday season may be more jobs.
Toys “R” Us said Tuesday it will take on 45,000 seasonal workers this holiday — 5,000 more than last year.
Kohl’s, the department store chain, is adding more than 52,000 holiday workers, about 10 percent more than last year.
Target’s seasonal workforce will be 80,000 to 90,000, down slightly from a year ago.
But Walmart is adding 50,000 jobs, slightly more than last year, and Gamestop will add 17,000.
But a much better job would be to be the kind of journalist writing these evergreen stories, positions which pay more, come with benefits and, perhaps, longer duration. Plus you get to think and act like you eat paste all day.
“Apple has already sold more than 5 million iPhone 5s,” it reads. “That doesn’t sound like an economy in recession,” said a vice president from GameStop.
Lessee, 5 million iPhones versus 46-47 million unemployed/underemployed or on food stamps. Ignore the eaters of paste.
You’ll get to work into January, too. Returns, ya see.
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.
Authorities in the northern city of Taiyuan sent 5,000 police to restore order after what the plant’s Taiwanese owners Foxconn Technology Group said was a personal dispute in a dormitory that erupted into a mass brawl.
However, some employees and people posting messages online accused factory guards of provoking the trouble by beating up workers at the factory, which employs about 79,000 people and is owned by the world’s largest contract maker of electronic goods.
Apple uber alles. Gotta have the iJunk.
“Comments posted online, however, suggested security guards may have been to blame … In a posting on the Chinese Twitter-like microblog site Sina Weibo, user ‘Jo-Liang’ said that four or five security guards beat a worker almost to death,” reads the story.
It just gets worse and worse for Mitt Romney (edited for brevity):
“When I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there. It employed about 20,000 people. And they were almost all young women … about 18 and 22 or 23 … they made various uh, small appliances … the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with uh, with little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10, 10 room, rooms. And the rooms they have 12 girls per room … And, and, and around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire and guard towers.”
No emergency public relations team can fix what’s wrong with Mitt Romney. It’s the smirking, happy tone of voice that’s the trick.
Also, see
toff
…
From the Urban Dictionary:
A wealthy person of English origin that also happened to be born that way.
Usually you will find Daddy paid for his education and his Dad paid for his, they also get their jobs because of their Fathers/Uncles pulling strings, yet still have the gall to look down on the millions of unemployed people due to their efforts.
In David Cameron’s case all said Dads of Dads who got him where he is were stock brokers or so he told other stock brokers at a particular conference.
They rarely have any problems in their lives …
They have an awful tendency for getting involved in politics, law, finance and big business despite having very little clue about the real world and holding extremely derogatory views about ordinary people. The world is in a far worse state because of this.
Support American jobs and businesses. Buy a Gibson guitar and throttle some good old American R&B love songs of defiance.
Nugent plays Gibsons and the entire column is a rant about the government investigation into Gibson’s illegal importing of ebony, something every other guitar company manages to avoid getting into trouble over. (For the record, the government recently signed an agreement with Gibson letting the company off the hook on the condition that in the statement of fact it essentially admitted it had violated the law. It was a decent deal.)
Gibson employs more people in China, Korea and Indonesia than it does in the US. It’s US manufacturing is for the high end of the market. All American guitar manufacturers abandoned US production for the low and middle markets, the meat of the business, over a decade ago. All of it was sent to China.
The pricing of its domestically made product, and the company’s move into China exploded the demand and market for counterfeit Gibson guitars. Documented on YouTube, many American buyers show little brand loyalty to the firm, even wanting to buy counterfeits, because of the current state of guitar manufacturing.
For months they have watched their plant being dismantled and shipped to China, piece by piece, as they show teams of Chinese workers how to do the jobs they have dedicated their lives to.
“It’s not easy to get up in the morning, training them to do your job so that you can be made unemployed,” said Borman, pictured, a mother of three who has worked for 23 years at the Sensata auto sensors plant …
Borman knows her eventual fate in the stricken economy that surrounds Freeport. “I am going to be competing for minimum wage jobs with my own daughter,” she said.
Such scenes have been common in America as manufacturing has fled abroad in search of cheaper wages.
But, in the midst of the 2012 presidential election, Freeport is different. For Sensata is majority-owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm once led by Mitt Romney, that has become a hugely controversial symbol of how the modern globalised American economy works.
The middle class blames Congress as the lead culprit for its demise, but blames itself least of all. While 62% of middle class respondents to the Pew survey blamed Congress for their worsening state, 54% blamed banks and financial institutions, 47% blamed corporations, 44% blamed the Bush administration, 39% blamed foreign competition and 34% blamed the Obama administration. Just 8% of all respondents blamed the man (or the woman) in the mirror.
An inexact metaphor for the middle class’s election choices during the last few decades — good at self-destructive dick biting.
