Systemic features of the US American economic model have destroyed any concept of “awesome possibilities” for most of even the most wishful thinkers not in the 1 percent.
This week’s issue of the Financial Times focuses on the American employment picture. It’s unremittingly grim.
It touches on issues that have been discussed before on the blog.
1. Big corporate America’s dislike of American labor. The result, except for taxpayer-funded weapons production, was the shipping of everything to Chinese plants. The destruction of jobs became paramount and remains that way.
2. The work that cannot be outsourced is not enough to sustain a country as large as the United States. This means a gradual slide into the irrelevance of a banana republic with the world’s largest military. (Like a patient just diagnosed with incurable cancer, the slope of decline is gradual but inexorable and sure. However, it is expected in all cases that at some point the cancer load, in this case US economic dysfunction, becomes too great and the rate of decline accelerates into fatal catastrophe.)
3. Primary non-military/security growth jobs are all in parts of the economy which produce nothing and, except for moving money and creating money products, pay very little. They’re either in finance, food service preparation, sales of retail goods (all made in China) or the old DD blog pejorative — bedpan technicianry — workers who will be needed in the warehouse industry for the elderly and sick.
America used to be exceptional. Postwar, it maintained lower unemployment than the Europeans and a higher rate of jobs turnover … No longer. Today, somewhat remarkably, US joblessness is higher than in much of Europe.
[In decades past jobs] might be lost rapidly in a downturn but were swiftly reallocated to more productive sectors when economic growth resumed. That is not now the case.
“I know companies that employ senior engineers whose only job is to find ways to reduce the headcount,??? says Carl Camden, chief executive of Kelly Services, a booming staffing agency based in Michigan. “The name of the game everywhere is to reduce permanent headcount and we are still only at the early stages of this trend.???
This is hardly a novel observation. — DD
… America is employing a decreasing proportion of its people.
Manufacturing is nowhere in the top 20, and such jobs cannot replace the pay and conditions once typical of that sector. “The food preparation industry cannot sustain a middle class …???
Some have moved from claiming unemployment benefits to disability benefits, and have thus permanently dropped out of the labour force. Others have fallen back on the charity of relatives. Others still have ended up in prison. In 1982 there were just over 500,000 in jail; today there are 2.5m.
There are no solutions in sight. Great inequality is intertwined with the inability of the country to mobilize its human capital. And the lack of interest and ability to maximize is human resources, historically, leads to decline and the inability to rise to any and all future challenges.
This is very much about class war, one conducted, since the Eighties, by a corporate monarchy imposed on the rest of the population, for the sole benefit of itself. There is no social compact.
The FT acknowledges this has made the 2012 election one about class warfare.
“This should be both welcomed and feared,” writes one columnist. “Welcomed because America needs an election focused on the economy.”
Finally, more of the obvious. Still, it is worth repeating:
Mr. Obama is not a class warrior. But he has not yet found a compelling way to address what lies behind America’s deepening inequities. The Republicans are even further from a solution. Let us hope class warfare marks only the starting point for a conversation.
The only thing missing is a detailed discussion of another big factor which accelerated the dysfunction of the American economy since 2000: The hardening of the state’s condition into one justifying a permanent war footing.
The permanent war footing separates one entire class of American workers — those who work for arms manufacturing and in the large homeland/natsecurity support role of finding and identifying enemies to use them on — from the ills affecting all other portions of the 99 percent.
The best song DD wrote in 2011. It should be on your critic’s list.
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary; we all get there,
eventually.
We lock up the poor for all the rich; and we do it right, without no hitch.
Welcome to the United States of Greed; it’s the only country you’ll ever need.
If you’re into frauds and useless devices — Uncle Sam, the best of choices!
The biggest danger, however, and the one most likely to go on for years, is the determination of China’s Communist dictators to dominate not only Asia and the Pacific but also, recalling the ambitions of Hitler and the Japanese imperialists, the world.
This danger takes several forms. One is the chance — unlikely but an acknowledged element in Beijing’s war plans — of a Pearl Harbor-like sneak attack on North American cities with nuclear-tipped missiles. Another is China’s stepping up economic pressures on capitalist countries — or taking over enough natural resources, particularly Canada’s oilsands, to change economic balances. Perhaps the greatest threat — but in the long run a welcome development — is the collapse of Communist China due to inflation, corruption and widespread popular protests. This might well ignite the fuses of an economic assault on the rest of the world, or a last-ditch nuclear attack. It would surely create chaos within China.
China to attack it’s primary dry goods customers with nuclear missiles, eh?
The middle class sees all US stores run out of stock of sundries. Wal-Mart, Target (and every giant box store like them), BestBiuy, all hardware stores, all consumer electronic stores, Bed/Bath & Beyond, sporting goods shops — all crash and go bankrupt. Salvation Army outlets become the sole garment distribution centers for the entire country.
Unemployment becomes massive and all-encompassing; a new recession to make the Great Recession look small ensues. People watch video of our bombers methodically destroying China’s military for a month. In fact, the military is the only place where employment is stable. After two months, television watching stops too as cable is disconnected for non-payment.
Fender Musical Instruments and Gibson guitars are put out of business when all their factories in China are cut off. The value of old, even mostly crap, instruments skyrockets. Old classic rockers enjoy revival as they are one of the only groups of musicians who can still go out and entertain locally.
In the next election, every incumbent — from top to bottom — is voted out of office.
With the flow of exports to the US and everywhere else cut off, China is also engulfed in a tidal wave of unemployment. Caught between the US military and rioting in the streets, the Chinese government destabilizes. All its new and fine military hardware is destroyed in detail. This takes four to six weeks.
The war ends. The world is dragged into a great depression, having lost what’s left of the buying power of the US and almost all its sundries and electronics manufacturing in the short term.
Happily, Apple goes out of business as manufacturing for all its iKit ceases and demand subsequently plummets for what’s left because of indigence in the US working class.
“David Van Praagh, a journalist who has covered many countries, is the author of The Greater Game: India’s Race with Destiny and China,” reads the tagline.
Paradoxically, the sports garment industry in this country was destroyed and moved to China. Which is where all the real stuff (and its counterfeits) come from now.
So Americans saw their jobs making such garments go bye-bye. And now, some Americans — trying to make a living selling counterfeits from the same place their jobs went, get to have their domains seized, too.
An investigation by Channel 2’s Jim Strickland revealed fake chips have been discovered at a Georgia military base and at a Roswell military supplier.
Technicians repairing an F-15 flight computer at Robins Air Force Base in 2008 said they discovered that four replacement microchips were fake just in time.
“Our job is to ensure that those who want to counterfeit parts, that we don’t allow them into the supply chain. It’s a battle every day,” said base commander Maj. Gen. Robert McMahon.
McMahon is battling back-alley operations like ones in Shenzhen, China. Video of laborers there revealed an operation in which workers peel chips off old circuit boards, Strickland reported. Some are reconditioned and relabeled as military grade …
“Anyone who has legacy-type products is forced to go into the independent world of electronics distribution, and that world can be a scary place,” said Dan Ellsworth, CEO of World Micro in Roswell. His company is a global components dealer. Ellsworth infiltrated the Shenzhen facility himself.
China may have been flaunting its scientific capabilities by meddling with U.S. Earth observation satellites in past years, according to space and computer security experts.
Two unusual incidents involving signals targeting a U.S. Geological Survey satellite in 2007 and 2008 were referred to the Defense Department for investigation, USGS officials said Monday. NASA also experienced two “suspicious events” with a Terra observational satellite in 2008, officials at the space agency confirmed. An annual report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission slated for release Nov. 16 is expected to characterize the events as successful interferences that may be linked to the Chinese government.
“I would say they were demonstrating the science and technology to be able to see what they could gain from it,” said Charles Vick, a senior analyst at GlobalSecurity.org who has been briefed on other government reports about China’s cyber skills. “To a degree one would think that [getting caught] was part of the mentality. It’s a warning. We could do this and a few other things.”
Since the event appears to have been trivial and is now three years old — AND is being publicized at a time when budget-cutting fever is in, I explained to the journalist one of the potential reasons were finding out about it.
Ammo for rationalizations on positive cyberwar/cyberdefense spending. Which readers know is always in vogue.
The journalist agreed this was one sound explanation and nicely addressed it near the end of the piece:
As hackers target U.S. computers with increasing intensity and frequency, the White House on Friday took the unusual step of asking Congress to pass stalled cybersecurity legislation. At first the Obama administration was the slow actor, taking a year to tell Congress which pending measures the president would enact. Now, with pressure to pass other bills, including a Dec. 23 deadline for deficit reduction legislation, the House and Senate are unlikely to agree on comprehensive reforms this year, experts say.
Obama cyber czar Howard Schmidt on Friday tried to light a fire, writing on the White House blog, “Unfortunately, time is not on our side. Since the White House delivered the administration’s proposal to Congress, a number of new security breaches have been reported. We need congressional leaders to move forward with a cross-committee and bipartisan approach.”
“The time is ripe to make proposal into law, and give the government and private sector the extra tools needed to fight those who would harm us,” Schmidt wrote on a White House blog.
George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, said he would be surprised if the Chinese government was behind such sloppy execution, speculating that this may have been practice for a more aggressive attack.
“It would seem unusual to me that they would fiddle with satellites — which gets up the United States’ antennae — and then get caught with it,” he said. “That doesn’t rule out that this was a nation state doing a test run” …
As to why the government is making these sensitive events public now, Smith pointed to the federal government’s push for additional cyber defense funding.
Decent article covering all the bases and quoting from a variety of sources on different sides of the line. Read it here.
Chinese-manufactured Stratocaster electric guitar, famous around the world. Invented here in California, promoted worldwide by rock ‘n’ roll, now made in much greater number there than here. Those we still make are for the wealthy and major label musicians. Everyone else, including me, gets the China-made copy. The parent company, Fender, keeps a domestic business that’s mostly a custom shop, goods designed by people with good opinions of self-worth but who are not so strong in the way of improvement or innovation.
Same as above. In the Seventies there was a real big Fender factory in
soCal. Now they’re all in China. The blue box, an Adrenalinn III, is not made in China, although its computer chips are. Shot at Studio Dick D.
The real China toilet that inspired “China Toilet Blooz.” The seat blistered as above one week out of its box. It was the third we bought in Pasadena So we left it.
Truly, corporate America has been so very bad for most Americans in the last decade, all brand loyalty should be well and truly dead.
The human thing to do is not even buy Fender-branded guitars made in China, but to get another less famous brand doing the same pieces. In the pic above, it’s a Jay Turser.
In fact, one might encourage Chinese business to simply dispense with their American partners and replace them with new names including the multi-nationals out. If possible.
I’d support that.
Weapons, of course, are mostly all still made here.
Wood ducks and one Canada goose who blutzed into the photo looking for a handout, at the Arboretum in Arcadia. Not made in China.
A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation???…
Faced with this prospect, Republicans — who normally insist that the government can’t create jobs, and who have argued that lower, not higher, federal spending is the key to recovery — have rushed to oppose any cuts in military spending. Why? Because, they say, such cuts would destroy jobs …
Appeals to confidence have always been a key debating point for opponents of taxes and regulation; Wall Street’s whining about President Obama is part of a long tradition in which wealthy businessmen and their flacks argue that any hint of populism on the part of politicians will upset people like them, and that this is bad for the economy. Once you concede that the government can act directly to create jobs, however, that whining loses much of its persuasive power — so Keynesian economics must be rejected, except in those cases where it’s being used to defend lucrative contracts.
So I welcome the sudden upsurge in weaponized Keynesianism, which is revealing the reality behind our political debates. At a fundamental level, the opponents of any serious job-creation program know perfectly well that such a program would probably work, for the same reason that defense cuts would raise unemployment. But they don’t want voters to know what they know, because that would hurt their larger agenda — keeping regulation and taxes on the wealthy at bay.
And it’s worth adding that arms manufacturing jobs have been the only ones that are protected.
You can throw away all manufacturing to China. You can throw teachers and other government workers to the wolves.
But you can never go after the laborers in the weapons shops.
About once a week DD spies a story in the mainstream on how the jobs are out there, it’s just that Americans are too stupid to do them.
These are all part of a a structural unemployment argument, one based on the idea that most of the mass unemployment is due to jobs and skills mismatches. It’s all working Americans fault because they simply aren’t highly trained enough.
It’s been refuted again and again by many respected economists who look at the plight of the US and call the current morass a demand side problem.
To come up with this argument it has essentially one data point, the say-so of Siemens in America.
Further:
Technology giant Siemens Corp., the U.S. arm of Germany’s Siemens AG , has over 3,000 jobs open all over the country. More than half require science, technology, engineering and math-related skills.
Current unemployment, according to the BLS is 14 million. Another 2.5 million were only marginally attached to the workforce and so were not counted. And 9.3 million people were underemployed.
Three thousand unfilled jobs at Siemens in the USA, if filled, would make up 0.00012 of the shortfall.
If Siemens had 100 times the openings, it would still only be 1.2 percent of the entire unemployment picture.
“Caterpillar and Motorola … has at any given time about 200 open positions,” reads the Reuters piece.
The numbers are fly specks, dribs and drabs, statistically unimportant
in terms of the magnitude of the unemployment crisis.
To continually air the complaint from US manufacturers re these small numbers and the unsuitability of American workers is odious.
“These companies’ inability to fill open jobs suggests that part of the unemployment problem confronting the nation could be more of a structural nature rather than a downturn in the business cycle,” asserts the Reuters article.
The numbers in the agency’s own story do not slightly support this argument. But reporters have never been good with arithmetic.
Americans are not suitable for the new manufacturing positions because they are deficient in “math-related skills” as well as other things, it is said.
Politically, part of this seems to be some high-end private sector manufacturing initiative to get more engineers into the workplace. And since they cannot be quickly furnished by universities, this ties in with Jeff Immelt and the presidential jobs council recommendation earlier in the week to expand hiring for foreign scientists.
Which, of course, has nothing to do with easing unemployment.
News from the wires today on Mr. Corporate American Hates You — GE’s Jeff Immelt — on his compensation (as well as the compensations of his cronies in the President’s jobs council) and a new report on how to fix mass unemployment.
Sure to be on the agenda [today] will be the country’s stagnant labor market, but it’s doubtful the council will discuss their own executive compensation, which runs well into the millions annually for many in the group …
4. Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO: $15.1 million General Electric (GE), energy, technology, consumer products and financial services company
A spokesman pointed out that since 2009, GE has announced the creation of 8,000 new U.S, jobs, 7,000 of which are industrial jobs and that GE will hire about 15,000 people in the country in 2011.
5. W. James McNerney Jr., CEO: $13.8 million Boeing (BA), defense and aerospace contractor
In January, Boeing announced 1,100 layoffs but had a spokesman said the company will have a net gain in U. S. jobs this year in Washington state and South Carolina.
There’s more, of course. But one gets the gist. It has been repeated so many times it’s now simply a pro forma list of the same old corporate kings and dukes consulted for their wisdom on everything because to go elsewhere for advice would be to roil and disturb the plutocracy.
GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt, who also chairs the non-partisan advisory panel, said the long list of proposals — which include streamlining drug approvals, reducing costs of initial public offerings and improving air traffic control — could have a big impact taken together.
“We never thought there was going to be a silver bullet to create jobs,” Immelt told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“What we want to offer the president is a very broad set of ideas that can help more the economy forward,” he said. “It’s comprehensive and it’s specific.”
The ideas, as excerpted by Reuters, are all old bathwater, the same stuff the US has practiced for decades, the entrenched thinking of people who want things to stay just the same.
But who now realize that with public anger at a high level they must make up some new lies for purposes of repackaging.
So we get demands for more investment in domestic fossil fuel exploitation, the same stuff you can see in commercials everyday on MSNBC, ads from Exxon and the national propane lobby for expanded aggressive exploitation of domestic “fracking” in shale aquifers and mining Canadian oil sands.
We get the old model of expanded hiring of foreign scientists and engineers because they’re governments have a much more attractive track record of paying for their education here.
And we get Immelt’s biggest practice, more rent-seeking, in reduced taxation on the biggest corporations, tax repatriation holiday, less regulation on pharmaceutical industry, etc:
It also recommends lower corporate taxes for new companies in their first three years, a reduced capital gains rate for investors buying equity in young firms and other measures to encourage people to launch start-up companies.
The report calls for tax reforms to make it more competitive for companies to locate in the United States, part of an effort to attract more foreign direct investment.
All his employees love him eh? He wants people to root for him? Not very likely with the globalist corporate/business culture he’s engendered.Not to mention that there’s an engrained elitism towards those who work on the? factory/shop floors from many in mgmnt. How so many knowledgeable engineers were driven/forced out because the bs was incredible. Only to be replaced by inexperienced,arrogant brainwashed pricks who’ve been pumped up to reinvent the wheel
Immelt is the boss because he knows how to make you feel good while he’s screwing you. He’s making friends with GE’s investors, he has no moral obligations, it’s? all about the bottom line…profits. If it means he’s selling his soul to the devil and throwing middle class america under the bus, so be it.
Insane. Wall Street is alive with a movement that makes the tea party look? like a corporate funded joke (which it was), and Obama sends out this 1%er to cry about how Americans don’t “love” GE?
Tone Deaf!
I don”t trust that greedy bastard. He only cares about money, not creating American? jobs. The president needs to get rid of this poker face bastard.
Of course, it would be unfair to omit the contributions of the few who defend the king and the markets:
Fucking great. A super-major company (mostly owned by Buffet) CEO is hired by the Prez, and people talk about shooting him. That’s what’s wrong with this country, white-hot hatred. I don’t give a shit whether you or I trusts him. If he can help dig us out of this mess, he’s my boy. Now for the dark side. His success is building plants overseas where he believes (correctly) the opportunities lie. Does anyone really believe he can do the same for the US? ?
I do not? blame Jeff afterall Unions demands and regulations are over the top. If Obama got out the unions pockets and stopped the regulations that kill jobs we would have more jobs. Push coal and oil and jobs would be back in a month. It is a joke to think GE could pay 50 dollars an hour here instead of right to work states or China and Brazel. But even Obama said we would be Brazels biggest customers for OIL? are you kidding me why not America being the producer not the customer …
Immelt: “I want you to root for me. Everybody in Germany roots for Siemens … I want you to say, ‘Win GE!’
“I think this notion that it’s the population of the US against the big companies is just wrong, it’s just wrong-minded … Our employees root for us, they want us to win. I don’t know why you don’t.”
“I am not a commie!” T-shirts, coming soon from the Pasadena Consulting Group.
