This website disrupted that campaign but in those posts one noticed the US companies had effectively damaged their brand names through past behavior. Some people actually liked the Chinese-made knock-offs, even though they were inferior.
Their is a palpable resentment among them of the American brand, not of its past, but of its present image.
American companies show no loyalty to American labor and customers. So why should anyone show loyalty to them? And perhaps that extends to the market for counterfeits.
If the only way to make a living is by selling knock-offs because so many companies have outsourced manufacturing and helped to collapse economic opportunity, it is reasonable to assume some will try to undermine the state of affairs.
Counterfeiting seems to be on the rise, with thousands of fake iPhones found in seizures in California in 2010 and 2011, said Leander Kahney, editor and publisher of CultofMac.com, a technology news site devoted to Apple. Last summer, a South Carolina woman believed she was buying a new iPad sealed in a FedEx envelope, only to get home and find that it was made of wood. In 2009, an electronic store owner’s video of his examination of a fake iPhone became a cult hit. Most knockoffs are sold over the Internet, with stores like the one in New York far rarer.
Bernie Minoso, a manager at the store Tekserve, worked at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store for more than five years, and had to face many unhappy owners — up to five a day — right after a new product was released. Their new devices would not communicate with the iTunes store.
“We started seeing this nearly perfect iPod with a different operating system inside,??? Mr. Minoso said.
The fakes are believed to come from China. Some are made of real Apple parts stolen from company factories there, but most are wholly produced with separate materials. “It has to be a clean environment??? to make the fakes really work, Mr. Minoso said. “If I were doing it, it would be a dust-free shop.???
Some of the fakes have their fans. “There are some really sophisticated ones coming out of China that some people actually prefer …”
In the case of Apple and American guitar brands — all are known for their fancy iconic goods. All are completely reliant on Chinese labor for their profit streams. You can think of them as leaving the brains of the operation — the generals — in the US, as harvesters of the spoil of selling to the plutocracy and the shoe-shiners (and, boy, from this vantage point the cult of Apple really fits the latter pejorative) in the upper middle class.
AP Ticker takes on Charles Murray who’s latest bit of genius tries to make the case that shiftless downwardly mobile white people are that way because they don’t share the core values and ways of the more upscale tribe.
Krugman destroyed Murray and the thesis that the upper class has morals and that’s why it’s successful last week.
The Scrapple News bit features footage of old black and white film from when Philadelphia was a factory town a long time ago. Then the jobs all went to Mexico. And, finally, China. It’s congruent with the old 8mm of Fender yesterday, which went, first, to Mexico, and then to China.
The Murray argument also fits with the idiot claims that Americans simply lack the skills to fill manufacturing jobs in this country, as if making guitars or much worse, cleaning glass touch screens with organic solvent in the Chinese manufacturing district, requires some kind of right stuff the lazy non-upper class white tribe no longer possesses.
Trivia: The Nation’s submissions editor liked the “Mitt Romney Blues.” “Love it,” were the words. Not quite enough, or easy to fit for the magazine though.
So how do you catch a break around here? Anyone know?
Today Fender, the “iconic American” guitar maker, employs more people in China and Indonesia than it does in this country. However, at one time it was an obviously proud-to-be-American company. And average Americans, as seen in the above home movie, worked in guitar manufacturing for it. There was no rubbish spouted in newspapers about Americans not being skilled enough for a manufacturing economy.
Leo Fender and his fellow businessmen trained people and put them to work.
An aerial view [of the old Fender factory] in “The Soul of Tone,??? a coffee table book on Fender, shows old pre-CBS Fender filling nine medium-sized warehouse-type buildings. CBS then immediately doubled the company’s manufacturing floor space.
The American manufacturers of rock and roll equipment have all offshored to China.
What remains in the US is essentially custom shop business. The American-made items are ten times or more the expense of the same models made in China. And the former are reserved largely for people with major label music contracts and that part of the upper middle and plutocrat class which dabbles in guitar playing. For them, the expensive American made guitar is a status symbol for a gilded age.
All down the line in the Guitar Center showroom, all the famous American-made guitar lines are now produced in China. Gretsch, like Fender, divided into two tiers. The famous big semi-hollow body guitars popularized in Nashville and Memphis, played by the inventors of rock and roll — the guys in the bands backing Elvis and Gene Vincent — are made in China. If you want to pay ten times or more for one, the premium models are still made here.
The middle class jobs and factories that produced those instruments which made the sound that went worldwide are gone. And this country, and the rest of the world, isn’t better for it. It was profit driven decision-making in a race to the bottom. And it destroyed tradition and a proud legacy in something the made the whole world a brighter place. You could be proud of working in a factory that made guitars and amplifiers for everybody in the USA.
Am I bitter? You bet your ass I am. The people who did this deserve stoning.
A number of giant multi-nationals have finally figured out, or their CEOs have, that the mass downturn has soured a lot of the populace.
A decade of relentless outsourcing, squeezing out through automation and economic shrinking has done it.
People are figuring out corporate America really does hate them. It doesn’t like to pay even miserly American wages. It doesn’t like even minimal regulations preventing the fouling of the community.
So some have launched a massive p.r. effort in an attempt to convince those at the top of government that they’re not just offshore tax evaders.
Largest among the p.r. campaigns is that launched by General Electric.
The dancing people and elephants are gone — I’m glad to have had a very small hand in it — replaced by blue collar actors/workers in a bar telling the Joe Sixpacks they make the power, the electrical motors, so all can have Budweiser.
Hand in hand are regular news stories claiming manufacturing is coming back to the United States. Yes, very small increments here and there. However nothing to change the employment landscape in any major way.
Big manufacturers moved their production out of the country too quickly over the past decades and now see a competitive advantage in building up their footprints back home, top executives said on Monday.
The chase for lower-paid workers drove the migration, which resulted in employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector falling by 40 percent from its 1980 peak. But big companies including Boeing Co and General Electric Co are now finding that the benefit of lower wages can be offset by higher logistics and materials costs.
“We, lemming-like, over the last 15 years extended our supply chains a little too far globally in the name of low cost,” said Jim McNerney, chief executive of world No. 2 planemaker Boeing. “We lost control in some cases over quality and service when we did that, we underestimated in some cases the value of our workers back here.”
GE CEO Jeff Immelt said the largest U.S. conglomerate’s thinking evolved on the value of manufacturing inside the United States versus outside it.
“We’re basically moving our appliance manufacturing back from Mexico and China to basically Louisville (Kentucky),” he said …
Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE said at the event that it plans to hire some 5,000 military veterans over the next five years.
Manufacturers say they like to hire veterans because their experience in figuring out how to solve problems quickly is useful in high-speed modern factories.
It’s all crocodile tears. Jeff Immelt surely knows he’s detested by many who know his name as the CEO of the company the government paid tax bonuses to last year. More recently he was on 60 Minutes letting on that he thought Americans should cheer his company as his employees do when he visits.
Let’s do the math on the employment numbers attributed to GE.
GE will hire 5,000 veterans over five years. That’s 1,000/year.
Spread over a country the size of the United States at 311.5 million.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the employment/population ratio is 58 percent, which means 180.7 million people in the labor force this year.
Here’s the calculation:
1000 divided by 180 700 000 = 5.53403431 × 10-6
General Electric’s beneficent plan to bring manufacturing home to the US for veterans will contribute 5.53403431 times 10 to the MINUS SIXTH POWER to the work force.
When corporate p.r. arms and CEOs work these types of stories they must surely count on journalists and readers who won’t do any arithmetic.
The story also contains the usual received wisdom that Americans aren’t skilled enough for modern manufacturing jobs.
The wisdom expects you to actually believe the average Chinese worker has somehow been trained to be superior in the making of electric guitars, consumer electronics, or anything else formerly made in America.
I ask the rhetorical question, again: Do the line-dancing workers in my GE video look like they have or need any particularly special set of skills?
What special skills are on display here? Wiping glass screens with a squeegee soaked in hexane?
Wintek gained notoriety for making workers use n-hexane, a toxic compound, to clean iPhone touchscreens because it evaporated much faster than rubbing alcohol, enabling workers to increase their output. In 2010 interns told SACOM there were 500 students at the plant who worked 11 hours a day, seven days a week with a maximum salary of 500 yuan, less than $80 a month. According to the report, “Wintek pays the students’ salaries in accordance with law, but the lion’s share goes to the schools directly.??? Over the course of a year, 500 students could net a school more than a million U.S. dollars in income.
“Those jobs aren’t coming back.” — Steve Jobs, via the NY Times
There’s never any shortage of hand-clapping and delight for taking an old cheap wind instrument, made to be played by hand, and rejiggering it into a software emulation that’s not quite as good but lots easier, for the iPhone. Even the cigar box guitar isn’t immune to being screwed up.
The top app orchestra in the list at YouTube is from Stanford University. And I stole a bit of it for Steve Jobs & Meat Blobs. The hopeless nerds in black body-stockings, not even particularly good as imitations of Dieter from Sprockets, were too priceless to pass up.
If you hang around until the end of the Stanford video you’ll find one of the iPhone mavens has made an ocarina for it. One that also tells you when other people around the world are playing their fake iPhone ocarinas, too.
Now if you wanted to be famous for dressing in black stockings while playing the ocarina, the New York Times would probably tell you to piss up a rope.
“If you have open ears and open minds, you see the value,” says one of the iPhone ocarina players.
“Somebody said it was revolutionary,” remarks another. Somebody said, surely.
iPhones nudge people into being creative, expressive.
Ultimately, these all fail for me because they lack any real physical resonant structure that along with a person, makes a wind, string or percussion instrument. You can beat a guitar and it will very much contribute to the music you make. iPhones? C’mon.
The Apple juggernaut crushes all in its path, might makes right, the end justifies the means, those jobs aren’t coming back, no wire hangers, I want a glass screen in six weeks, put that thing in your mouth!
Inspiration: Frank Zappa & the Mothers’ “We’re Only In It for the Money”
Key gear: harmonica — Mojo Hand/Conqueror Root — made in China, Jay Turser Stratocaster funk guitar — made in China. The Deutschlandlied. How’d that get in there?
Boycott American goods!
Oh wait, you can’t. Nothing to avoid at the store.
Known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.
[Nothing] like Foxconn City exists in the United States.
The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,??? he said.
Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.
Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,??? said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms????
Steve Jobs died poorly, exuding contempt for everything not his way or the highway until the bitter end as a withered but still mean husk, delivering the blunt message to President Obama that iKit manufacturing was never coming back to the US.
For the Times, that message is drawn out to indicate the same holds for much domestic manufacturing.
Corporate America de-industrialized the US. Now the infrastructure and everything else needed to be competitive is completely gone.
It exists in China and other countries and there is no way to rival it.
Weeks ago reader Chuck brought this up in the comments section of an earlier post. With the exception of arms the US can’t do manufacturing anymore.
The New York Times deals with the high end of manufacturing, describing the power Chinese industry can bring to bear on complicated things like iKit.
It goes without saying Steve Jobs was reprehensible when it came to labor. iKit is built under conditions which create despair, in a system which cannot be done in the US precisely because it’s the pinnacle of capitalist sweatshopping, government support and mass material resources.
We can rival despair. It’s the super-factories, resources and will to protect industry that’s gone for good.
There is much talk about the employment of Chinese “engineers” in the superfactories. But these “engineers” only have a bit more than a high school education. Certainly, Americans are capable of the same jobs. But the structure is gone, recreated much better there.
There’s one industry that didn’t fall to the great removal. You know it. Arms production.
In the US, it’s protected. Arms production doesn’t have to be efficient like the making of iKit.
Making Predator drones and their follow-ons is not subject to the fast turnarounds and tyrannical equipment modification demands of the consumer electronics industry. Arms manufacturers can do whatever they want and their employees don’t have Steve Jobs to worry about. They just have to worry about making sure Congress doesn’t slash the
budget too much.
There’s a short comedy movie in showing an alternative near future where an aggrandizing asshole scornful of everyone not like him, someone like Steve Jobs, insists all drones and guided missiles be insanely great at arms trade shows. He’s subsequently put in charge of defense procurement. And promptly sends it all to China, much to the delight of wealthy shareholders and petty toadies in the shit nations we sell the stuff to.
Might as well do the entire middle class on the spit. Why stop at just non-military?
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,??? economist Jared Bernstein told the newspaper. “If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.???
Made five or six years ago, this video, embedded last week, makes a joke about America not knowing how to “pull pipe.”
However, the middle class knows all about being forced to suck it.
General Electric, the largest US industrial group by market capitalisation, reported a 3 per cent rise in earnings per share from continuing operations in the fourth quarter, thanks to another strong performance at GE Capital, its finance division …
Jeff Immelt, the chief executive, warned of “continued volatility in 2012???, but said the company was preparing for it by investing in new products and technology, expanding in emerging economies and strengthening risk management.
He said GE Capital, which provided 46 per cent of last year’s post-tax earnings from continuing operations, was “safe and secure and rebounding sharply???, and the group overall was “positioned for a strong 2012???.
GE has been widely criticised for its low corporate tax rate, which has benefited from writing off losses at GE Capital, its finance division. The tax rate is rising as those losses are exhausted …
Earlier this week, the President praised his jobs council for their recommendations on how to improve employment in the US.
About the opposite of the populist stance the President has been taking since starting his re-election campaign. Perhaps coincidentally, later in the week the President gave an initial thumbs down on the Keystone Canadian oil sands pipeline project, one that was billed as an allegedly big jobs creator.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, also a member of the jobs council, avoided the meeting at which it handed in its report this week.
Instead, he wrote a dissent, part of which is excerpted here:
Perhaps most profoundly, the [jobs council report] does not ask the critical question: why is our country suffering a manufacturing crisis, complete with massive job loss and a structural trade deficit, when countries with higher overall taxes, higher wages, and more robust health, safety and environmental regulations are enjoying trade surpluses?
The answer lies in the view that we share with so many of our fellow Americans: that our country has become dominated by the interests of the wealthiest 1% at the expense of the remaining 99%. It turns out that a country run in the interests of the wealthiest 1% systematically underinvests in public goods; systematically silences, disempowers, and underinvests in its workers; and in the end is less competitive and creates fewer jobs than a country that focuses on the interests of the 99%.
GE & Jeff, best corporate song and advert, ever. Not like the one where the fake cancer patient wants to thank the token employees who bolted the GE CAT scan machine together.
GE over the land, they made a real good plan
Pay no taxes to the man, no cash money for Uncle Sam.
Fire all that labor now, they’re all just real fat cows
Gonna implement a real good plan, no money to the man
But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation …
Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.
But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed …
America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now — and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.
“America is not, in fact, a corporation.” A remarkable sentence to have run in the New York Times since the ideology that it is is held by many more than Mitt Romney. America has, in fact, been run like a predatory corporation for the benefit of those running the world’s other predatory corporations for the last decade, at least.
And the corporate motto, as ably shown in this old video, has been: Go fuck yourself.
Guitar Player magazine has bowed to the inevitable. The issue now on newsstands features a cover story on affordable guitars for the rock n roller. With one exception, they are all made in China or Indonesia. The outlier is manufactured in Canada and is on the high end of the price range the story dictates, instruments under $500.
All the guitars are either licensed American designs, copies of US designs, or fundamentally based on old US models. Many of them are made under American brand names, companies which now manufacture more in China than they do domestically, where production is relegated to high end custom pieces for the artisan (read wealthy snob) economy.
The magazine is a bit tortured by the turn of events, as evidenced by loud assertions in the introductory ‘graphs on how every guitar was rigorously tested for quality in workmanship by its reviewers. But its editors now well know that the buying power of a great deal of its readership, being American, is either destroyed or seriously impaired. (No link — GP magazine does not put publish its features on the web.)
And the only instruments average readers can afford are those made in China.
There is a bit of delicious irony here. The Chamber of Commerce being a trade lobbying group which represents so many of the large multi-national corporations which have mercilessly downsized American jobs, for the sake of cheap labor in China.
The hacking story is not novel. There is nothing new here, just the usual revelation that Chinese spying operations are aimed at everything.
Although true, most of the quotes — taken from the usual officials — take on a laughable quality, considering how much has already been either carted off to China, or ceded to that country, simply for a corporate shareholder’s grasping benefit.
“I don’t think the Chamber of Commerce has anything worth stealing, but it’s part of a pattern of the Chinese stealing of everything they can, and that’s worrying,” Clarke said.
“You stack all of that up and I think there’s a case to be made that this may be the greatest transfer of wealth through theft and piracy in the history of the world and we are on the losing end of it,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
“This is a national, long-term strategic threat to the United States of America. This is an issue where a failure is not an option,” said Robert Bryant at the National Counterintelligence Executive.
National long-term strategic threat. The greatest transfer of wealth in history. The sound you can’t hear in cyberspace is DD’s loud horselaugh when reading the pompous piffle of miscellaneous hypocrites and shoeshine boys.
Nice drink, not made in China. I heard about it from the famous cyberwar plutocrat.
