By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity …
“There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front,” said some expert to the news agency.
White alienation. Geez. That’s what it will take to start the food riots, eh?
Big version. Do statistics belong in modern folk art?
CAHY — or my abbreviation for Corporate America Hates You, its open hostility to people — is recognized as real. Awhile ago I wrote about it, in the economy of strangle:
In Sunday’s New York Times, a front page piece on how corporate America has shifted to staffing with part-time employees, to avoid benefits and the payment of wages:
While there have always been part time workers, especially in restaurants and retailers, employers today rely on them far more than before as they seek to cut costs and align staffing to customer traffic. The trend has frustrated millions of Americans … reducing their pay and benefits.
“We’re seeing more and more that the burden of market fluctuation is being shifted onto the workers, as opposed to the companies absorbing it themselves,??? said Carrie Gleason, the executive director of the Retail Action Project, an advocate for retail workers …
Here is seen the maximizing of profit by compressing wages and having government programs in the tattered safety net picking up the slack. This from corporate America, where the prevailing sentiment during the last four years is that socialism and entitlement has run rampant.
However, the kind of entitlement spending that allows corporate American to pay people so poorly that there aren’t yet food riots [because 48 million working people are compensated with a food stamp benefit] is apparently OK.
The answer isn’t near at hand.
It will be generational as the current climate of corporate predation can’t be changed, only slowly replaced.
And the only way it can be supplanted is through the strengthening of labor after decades of attack from the private sector. And law requiring that people must be paid a living wage.
At PBS today, a discussion on the inexorable decline of labor in the US, accelerated by “innovation” that does not achieve any social good.
The PBS piece explains how capital has stayed the same globally, but an explosion in labor availability and ease of using it, has radically reduced what people can earn.
The piece also dallies with what this means for the future and none of the prognostications are good.
Near the end of it, a couple statements stick out, both having to do with a recognition that social norms have changed and not in any good way. Destruction of union power and compensation became normalized and, increasingly, technology driven.
Gary Marcus, a psychologist at NYU: “I have a question for those of you here that are more optimistic about the future. What specifically do you think might be the future economic domains in which there might be large-scale employment? I’m not interested in the cases where there’s a cool new job that really, really smart people who read Wired magazine can do. What I am interested in are new occupations that hundreds of thousands of people could do, in game-changing ways like when the automobile industry once opened up.”
Thomas Kochan, MIT: “In terms of a market failure, it’s the reality that it’s not in the interests of any individual firm in the United States to try to solve the jobs problem. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with that…and the only way that you solve this is by getting people and institutions and organizations to work together, to engage these issues collectively.
“It’s about an institutional failure over the last 30 years. With the decline of the labor movement, you’ve seen a lot of institutions go downhill equivalently. We don’t see the kind of dialogue, we don’t see the enforcement of our social norms and social policies that discipline corporations, and that really provided the kind of collective spreading of wage patterns and wage norms across the society.
“We’ve got to rebuild those, but we can’t try to rebuild them in an old-fashioned way. Now we’re in a more digital economy, a more knowledge-based economy, and we need to invent the new institutions that will cut across and aggregate these interests to address these challenges. We’ve got to get the education community working with business and employers, working with labor and civil society.
“I’m not a believer that technology is going to naturally eliminate jobs and cut income, but if we don’t do anything about it, if we just leave it, as we have, to individual market forces and to individual corporate actions and to individual technology innovations, then that’s probably where we are headed.”
Hanan Kolko, a labor lawyer: “Until this social norm of trying to crush unions and workers in general is changed, you’re going to have more and more instability for working people. And it’s a very bad thing for the economy, because at the end of the day, if there’s not enough aggregate demand, there’s not going to be enough people with money to buy the stuff to keep our economy going. This is a structural change in the social norms of our economy that makes me pessimistic about the future.”
These are technologies which do not increase the economic pie. They only fractionate it in favor of the holders of the technology and at the expense of low-wage workers who cannot defend themselves from it.
As far as innovation goes, it is not a future.
Specifically, we can talk about Uber, the Silicon Valley cab-summoning app that serves limousines and free-lance drivers to the top most and that part of the upper middle class which retains work as high-button servant labor.
Los Angeles sent Uber a “cease and desist” order to stop operations in the county and the company ignored it.
The LA Times piece provided precious little about the problem a company like Uber professes to solve using smartphone innovation.
That problem is claimed to be transportation dysfunction and lousy cab service.
First, transportation is hard in LA County because of its sheer size. It’s an automobile economy.
There is a need for shuttle service to airports. And, indeed, there is an effective network of shuttle companies. They work and anyone who has lived here a long time has come in contact with them.
Uber cannot improve upon it. The job remains the same whether summoned by smartphone app or through the old fashioned way of simply calling them by voice.
Shuttle drivers don’t get rich. They are not parasites who need cutting down by digital innovation. But what Uber purports to do in such things is just use technology to summon a swarm of free-lance workers to undercut business and undermine costs. This is not expansion of an economic pie.
It is the same with cab drivers. Do you know anyone who is one making as much money as a Silicon Valley tech company CEO?
So concierge apps be damned as progress. Parasitic apps for chiseling the cost of labor is a much better description.
Companies like Uber, or TaskRabbit, call themselves leaders in the emerging world (and here is another Orwellian tech industry term) of the sharing economy.
If it is so much about sharing, how come most in American society receive so little benefit?
This was placed within the larger context of how inequality is very high in the US, and rising, as those with access to the means of the sharing economy employ it to take larger and larger pieces from an economic pie through divestment from fair compensation for labor. More gallingly, the Internet does not create fabulous opportunity because perceptions of popularity mean a lot when society is grossly unequal. In other words, algorithms that put something in the first page of results because of counts of various things make everything below the top few rungs displayed untenable.
Now you can surely say that Apple and iTunes store funneling digital music purchases through a country with a legal mechanism for tax evasion is innovation. And Google’s development of YouTube as a service that provides a great deal of free pirated music with the salve that by attaching a link to a copy of it at the iTunes store is certainly some kind of wee innovation. But you can also call such things parasitic or predatory.
[In] Jaron Lanier’s new book Who Owns The Future? … he argues: “Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be customers.” Lanier, a computer scientist and a musician, is rightly called a visionary because he sees what is happening, when everything is live-streamed but no one knows the name of the person who made the music any more. Content is free.
Governments play up the idea that a digital future creates jobs rather than eats them up. Culturally, there is now a fantasy world of start-ups and blogs and YouTube TV where a very few people manage to make money but most work simply for “experience”…
He describes a winner-takes-all world, with a tiny number of successful people and everyone else living on hope. “There is not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.”
But the digital economy operates as a kind of sophisticated X Factor. Someone will make it, sure. For more than 15 seconds even, maybe. But most won’t. This is why Lanier says the internet may destroy the middle classes, the people who can’t outspend the elite. And without that middle group, we cannot maintain a democracy.
This is why it is easy to root for the downfall of Uber.
The California Public Utilities Commission could see that the company is not really tech innovation at all, that what urban parts of the state do not urgently need from a company like Uber and its rivals is more poorly paid free-lance cab and shuttle drivers. The place won’t fall if it never gains traction.
I can compare a world class innovation in the US, with the alleged world class innovation of free digital music content.
There are three electric guitars that are historic technology: The Fender Telecaster, the Fender Stratocaster, and the Gibson Les Paul. The three defined pop music around the world, the first two being invented by Leo Fender and co-workers in California.
Leo Fender did not invent the idea of an electric guitar. Technically, he was not even the first to bring one into market. But he was the first to produce a genuinely great iconic model that revolutionized that market.
The invention of the Telecaster and the Stratocaster electrified pop music creation in the United States. It created jobs, entire large industries. The pop music industry, from the Sixties to the Nineties, simply would not have existed as it did without Fender innovation and all the companies it did business with and competed against.
Electric guitars were not about fractionating the economy, using widgets to chisel labor costs downward, or make millions of people claw against each other for the privilege of almost-unpaid work. (Despite what you may have experienced in struggle for a major label contract.)
The coming of the electric guitar did not take everything the majority had and throw it in the trash for the profit of a small slice at the very top.
When you see terms like concierge app or the sharing economy, you should choke. They always mean a lot of people are about to lose big.
Zuckerberg, in the pages of the Washington Post, a few weeks ago:
Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone. Unlike oil fields, someone else knowing something doesn’t prevent you from knowing it, too. In fact, the more people who know something, the better educated and trained we all are, the more productive we become, and the better off everyone in our nation can be.
This can change everything. In a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country. A knowledge economy can scale further, create better jobs and provide a higher quality of living for everyone in our nation.
Many people can grasp why this isn’t really true anymore.
In a global knowledge economy everyone knowing the same thing around the world has and does disempower huge classes of people who helped pay for the invention, development and deployment of the network that distributes it worldwide.
And how this is done is easy to see.
Where the cost of living is high, as it is in the United States relative to China or India or somewhere else, the knowledge the American workers possess — even though it may be the same as those in other countries — is more costly to employ.
Therefore, the value of our knowledge in body has crashed, even though it is the same as elsewhere. It is uncompetitive not because of lack or inferiority, but because of where we live.
And this is really what Mark Zuckerberg and others like him are about. They want cheaper educated labor, always.
However, Mark Zuckerberg is not even particularly accurate in terms of the needs of the United States. He overlooks one of the giant engines of the California economy because it just doesn’t contain the kind of people who are of any consequence to his wealth or business.
Take this bit, written by ex-California Arnold Schwarzenegger, the same week:
The [state of California] produces more than half of the fruits, nuts and vegetables grown in the U.S., with an output of $43.5 billion last year. Californians don’t rely just on the food produced by the state’s farms; they rely on the revenue and the jobs too. Agriculture employs more than 1.5 million people in California.
And who are many of these people employed in the California field, many more than employed in the Silicon Valley?
Well, they’re the brown people without the legal smartypants visas meritocratic KnowledgeStan’s Mark Zuckerbergs want. And these agricultural knowledge workers do not earn top dollar. No one in powerful American giant business stands for them in the Washington Post although it is easy to find those who hate on them. But they cannot be dispensed with, like lots of other American workers with knowledge who are deemed too expensive to employ because you still need people to go into the fields and do s— while being sprayed by crop dusters.
Silicon Valley software, programming genius, social networking, the cloud, Big Data and my new favorite phrase — “the Internet of things” — can’t eliminate the need for their work in this country.
But did you know Mark Zuckerberg and his wife solved the world problem of organ donation, just over a couple glasses of posh wine?
I suggest reading Paul Krugman’s The Aged of Diminished Expectations but it was done way before he was famous.
“The problem with poverty is that it has basically exhausted the patience of the general public,??? he wrote.
That was in 1992, the book’s fifth printing, and things were lousy but not 2013 lousy. Krugman spent some time discussing inequality and the explosion in the poverty level.
“[Any] systemic initiative to raise the incomes of the poor seems unlikely for many years … The growing gap between the rich and poor was arguably the central fact about economic life in America in the 1980s. But no policy changes now under discussion seem likely to narrow the gap significantly.???
Indeed, nothing changed. Everything got worse.
There is another factor that has been at work as a kind of salve groupthink, as long as I can remember.
It’s an obvious social trope, an American shibboleth: Poverty is a condition that exists for you as a matter of moral choice, a personal deficiency. Basically — sin. You are unclean, deficient, bad, of low character, if you are poor in America.
Poverty is defined for almost half, maybe more than half the people in this country, as a personal choice, an evil one. And therefore nothing should be done about it because to do so is to aid in evil. The growth in poverty, the need for more food stamp subsidization, then, only means that more and more people are forsaking character, rectitude and natural godly American ways, mores and traditions.
Books become bestsellers, repugnant nobodies are transformed into celebrities and wisemen, politicians made into warrior kings on it.
It doesn’t matter what the statistic show. If corporate profits have risen to astronomical levels while wiping out everyone else, it is of no consequence.
Facts don’t matter, only the twisted pseudo-morality of alleged right thinking.
Hand in hand with this has been a decades long corruption of language for the express purpose of embedding the idea that wealth and poverty are personal choices. And woe to those who choose badly because all the information is out there, perhaps in career training, or advice from a column, or if you’re really lucky, a lecture from the wealthy, for you to attain great success.
To this end the Microsoft Network and Yahoo, and everyone else — run weekly pieces, paid for by career services and such, on what jobs pay the most, and which careers to avoid.
These are all about filling corporate America’s immediate term needs. Period. You read “top 5? paying jobs columns for a few weeks and they’re always the same.
There’s a reptilian and repellent nature present and one quickly comes to detest the nobody writers and editors who are responsible.
Underlying it all is the phony ethos — and ethos is not a good word, it doesn’t get at the inner poison — that one is primarily defined by one’s job, the circumstance of always having a job, and how much that jobs earns.
Which dovetails with the entrenched belief that to have a low-paying job that leaves one in poverty, again, is a personal choice.
For instance, take the reconfiguration of the old word “equity??? in America. It meansquality of being just or fair in a system. But now the usage is commonly set to what a billionaire’s stake is in whatever he owns. (Indeed, if you just use the word “equity” in Google, all that comes back is the secondary business meaning, corporate American media has so corroded it. Investopedia’s definition, of all things, is the third ranked by the search engine. You’d think the word was coined just for the billionaire class in the US.)
Two weeks ago I read one of these careers and jobs columns and the author had come up with five things the really wealthy are said to understand better than the proles.
Number one was equity.
Equity is not something one just goes out to pick up.
Yet that is what the piece indicated. Equity, it implied, was maybe something you could acquire, like an education, or experience, only with much more effort, and maybe not at all if you weren’t or aren’t smart enough.
Those not-billionaires who did not understand equity, as a consequence, could never be truly that successful.
In reality, you have to buy it, or be contracted into it, as by inheritance. And it’s millionaire/billionaire expensive.
Who do you know, in their jobs, or anything else, have ever been in a position to get equity?
So here is a deep perversion of language, made so for the benefit of an intrinsically unfair system, the exact opposite of its original meaning.
In the new American usage, but not the dictionary’s first usage, equity also equals virtue.
Equity was the very essence of the rotting heart of Mitt Romney, which he and the billionaires who supported him interpreted as virtue. Romney was born into equity.
Even though the public demonstrably didn’t see the virtue in it, this astonished the man and his family.
Equity has come to mean the ability to ruin a vast holding and everyone under the top tier involved in that holding for the sake of getting more, for attaining equal or even more equity in something else. Then rinse and repeat.
Equity is what you count on, or counted on at Facebook, to make you an instant multi-millionaire in an inflated IPO.
Equity is an essential part of the rigged economic game, something that the 1 percent has, not something large numbers of Americans have access to. Equity means nothing to people whose 401k’s have taken a beating and ruined plans for retirement.
Equity means one thing for the topmost, quite another for everyone else.
Wouldn’t we all like to have equity?!
Again, choosing again from Paul Krugman’s 1992 work, The Age of Diminished Expectations:
Why does unemployment matter? Partly because high unemployment means that potential productive workers are not being used … because high unemployment brings persistent poverty. Beyond this, however, the availability of jobs plays a key role in how our society hangs together. A society in which young people can routinely expect to get jobs on leaving school, and to remain gainfully employed except for occasional spells for their adult lives, is going to be a very different place from one in which work is a privilege that is unavailable to many people — even if the welfare state is generous to the unemployed …
And this, because it is such an unpleasant description of where we are now — America is definitely a society that no longer holds together at all — has made it attractive for many to cling to the idea that being down is a personal matter, a sinful one.
Since my graduation from Lehigh, this condition has been the norm. Recessions, business fluctuations beyond control and always diminishing job prospects. Inequality increasing, compensation decreasing, much of the time without being noticed or remarked upon except with the usual condemnations that someone has had it coming because they’ve lived high on the hog for too long and they’ll have to learn the hard way it’s time to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Last week’s job statistics showed more people just leaving the workforce, on which Barbara Ehrenreich commented on her Facebook page:
The bright side of today’s unemployment stats: The labor force participation rate is declining, meaning that fewer people are falling for the old “job” scam, you know– show up every morning, work your butt off and every couple of weeks we’ll make a contribution toward your bus fare and lunch money.
Corporate profits versus ours. Something’s burning up the charts and it’s not you.
Proven by science, or at least by the Congressional Research Office, the legislative analytical arm looks into ‘profit shifting’ by American multi-national corporations. Profit-shifting is the practice of using global tricks to declare the majority of profits in tax haven countries while investing virtually zero in hiring and infrastructure in the same places.
This is the utilization of small nothing-nations like Bermuda, Luxembourg and Switzerland, to launder profit so that tax payment to Uncle Sam are avoided. In such a way one has read news of US oil giants with central shell offices in Zug, Switzerland, or Apple routing its iTunes and iJunk store purchases through Luxembourg.
This is not new and the Congressional Research Service does not phrase it so indelicately. But it is good that the agency has analyzed the trend — which is upward — and reported the truth in “An Analysis of Where American Companies Report Profits: Indications of Profit-Shifting,” ably distributed by Steven Aftergood and his Secrecy blog here.
“The analysis appears to show that American companies report earning profits in tax haven or tax-preferred countries that, when compared to more traditional economies, appear to be disproportionate to hiring and capital investment in those countries,” reads the CRS report summary. “Profits reported by American companies also appear to be disproportionate to national output in the tax haven countries, and in some countries, these reported profits actually exceed total economic output.”
In other words, the financial structures of Bermuda, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland and others appear to have been modified and used exactly because they enable tax avoidance as international parasite nations.
Again, “An Analysis of Where American Companies Report Profits: Indications of Profit-Shifting,” at Secrecy blog here.
Cyberattacks come first. Hurricane Sandy gets second billing.
Excerpted:
Proclamation 8910 of November 30, 2012
Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience
Month, 2012
By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation
Every day, Americans across our country–from
entrepreneurs and college students to families and
community leaders–rely on critical infrastructure to
travel and communicate, work and play. The assets and
systems we depend on are essential to our way of life,
and during Critical Infrastructure Protection and
Resilience Month, we maintain our commitment to keeping
our critical infrastructure and our communities safe
and resilient.
Our Nation’s critical infrastructure is complex and
interconnected, and we must understand not only its
strengths, but also its vulnerabilities to emerging
threats. Cyber incidents can have devastating
consequences on both physical and virtual
infrastructure, which is why my Administration
continues to make cybersecurity a national security
priority. As we continue to work within existing
authorities to fortify our country against cyber risks,
comprehensive legislation remains essential to
improving infrastructure security, enhancing cyber
information sharing between government and the private
sector, and protecting the privacy and civil liberties
of the American people.
Physical threats also put our Nation’s most important
assets at risk. Destruction caused by devastating
storms and other natural disasters this year
underscored our reliance on our critical
infrastructure. Yet, these tragic events also
demonstrated once again the strength and resolve of the
American people when we work together to recover and
rebuild …
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the
United States of America, by virtue of the authority
vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the
United States, do hereby proclaim December 2012 as
Critical Infrastructure Protection and Resilience
Month. I call upon the people of the United States to
recognize the importance of protecting our Nation’s
resources and to observe this month with appropriate
events and training to enhance our national security
and resilience.
Back at the end of 2010 I enumerated a year end list — the biggest threats to the nation’s security. They were all internal and that old list is here.
All the threats still exist. But number 4 on the list — the Republican Party — has climbed to the top. And that is because since December 2010, the stakes have become higher, the disasters greater. Even less has been done.
At the time:
The Republican Party is a threat to security. And not solely because of its descent into right-wing extremism …
As the party that denies science, one that will put people in committee chairmanships overseeing science and technology issues in the House who are basically opposed to science whenever it contradicts their political views, the GOP poses a threat to America’s future.
You can’t have a forward-looking and capable nation with people in power who truly believe global warming and evolution are hoaxes.
During the past election, global warming was a third rail issue. The President would not speak of it.
In fact, about the only thing he would talk about with any connection to it was how avid a developer of fossil fuels he would be. And Mitt Romney made a joke of global warming it at the Republican National Convention.
And then came Sandy, a storm so violent it delivered notice that in the future there would be more of the same.
The nation’s lifelines — its roads, airports, railways and transit systems — are getting hammered by extreme weather beyond what their builders imagined, leaving states and cities searching for ways to brace for more catastrophes like Superstorm Sandy.
Even as they prepare for a new normal of intense rain, historic floods and record heat waves, some transportation planners find it too politically sensitive to say aloud the source of their weather worries: climate change.
Political differences are on the minds of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, whose advice on the design and maintenance of roads and bridges is closely followed by states. The association recently changed the name of its Climate Change Steering Committee to the less controversial Sustainable Transportation, Energy Infrastructure and Climate Solutions Steering Committee.
Still, there is a recognition that the association’s guidance will need to be updated to reflect the new realities of global warming.
In the immediate future, global warming is going to cost life. It means the continuing destruction of infrastructure on a national scale. We can only cope with it.
But at this time the gift of the Republican Party has made movement on the issue, except in sneaking inches by government agency, impossible. The GOP has successfully convinced almost half the nation to share in its dangerous know-nothing-ism, aided and abetted by reactionary mega-corporate interests, plutocrat money and the fossil fuel industries which choose to maintain a status quo at the expense of everyone else.
“[Several] climate scientists say sea level along New York and much of the Northeast is about a foot higher than a century ago, mostly because of man-made global warming, and that added significantly to the damage when Sandy hit,” wrote the AP.
Yet, “In conservative states, the term ‘climate change’ is often associated with left-leaning politics … Planning for weather extremes is hampered by reluctance among many officials to discuss anything labeled ‘climate change’ … The Obama administration has also shied away from talking publicly about adaptation to climate change. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s office refused to allow any department officials to be interviewed by The Associated Press …”
It is not a bipartisan issue. The Republican Party and its bankrollers are entirely responsible for paralyzing a national response to global warming and accurate assessment and preparation for catastrophic weather. Democratic politicians won’t address it because to speak of it immediately mobilizes millions of dollars against them in re-election campaigns, all furnished by the radical right.
If it were Switzerland, Luxembourg or Andorra perhaps this would not matter. But we are not those countries and it very obviously does matter.
And it should come as a source of great outrage to the American people that the Republican Party would appoint a science-denier, Lamar Smith of Texas, to chair that body’s science panel. One can look at it as purely a political step taken to help guarantee paralysis as a national response.
The paralysis also infiltrates security and mainstream pundits.
“The U.S. must meet challenges such as climate change … says Patrick Doherty,” reads the caption under a photo of wreckage.
“Climate change is already with us,” Doherty writes. “Superstorm Sandy, the Derecho, Arctic melting, and droughts in the Midwest, India, China, and Russia this past year confirm the scientifically proven trend.”
Nowhere in the piece does Doherty acknowledge the political obstacle, the Republican Party, which has made dealing with it, even in some small ways, virtually impossible.
In fact, Doherty points to a column from Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, as something which may carry good advice on meeting American challenges. His use is to imply how the US could mobilize business capital by, for example, giving a corporate tax break to America’s big multi-nationals. But the Blankfein column is more interesting for how anti-solving problems it is.
For the first time in several generations, it has become clear that abundant domestic energy resources are within our reach, and that we have the technology to responsibly and safely extract it. The government needs to work with the private sector to implement effective and far-reaching policies to develop these resources.
That’s what you call a gold-plated recommendation for expanded use and mining of fossil fuels. Call it the accelerate-and-exacerbate-global warming answer to the problem of climate change. Blankfein, of course, does not have to worry about this. When climate change turns the Manhattan neighborhood of Goldman Sachs into a skyscraper version of Stiltsville in the Biscayne Bay, he will be gone.
You also might not have noticed that we’re barreling toward a “world of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods in many regions.” Here in Washington, we’re too busy to pay attention to such trifles …
Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the legacy we pass along to future generations will be a parboiled planet.
But even Robinson can’t bring himself to write that it’s the GOP that has derailed the matter in the US.
To his credit he recommends the President do something:
And this is why President Obama should devote his next State of the Union address to climate change. He understands the science and knows the threat is real. Convincing the American people of this truth would be a great accomplishment …
The President has won re-election. There is no further political cost the GOP can extract from him. Telling the people about global warming in no uncertain terms is something he can do. Barack Obama can spell out who has blocked action, the very anti-science beliefs of the Republican Party, who supports them, and what the consequences have been at the federal and local level.
What was the Obama administration’s effort to battle climate change, or at least increase informed recognition of it, in the last year?
“Fueled by global warming, polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are now melting three times faster than they did in the 1990s, a new scientific study says,” reads a story, today, from the AP.
“Greenland is really taking off,??? National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Ted Scambos told the news agency. Scambos is a a co-author of the paper referenced by the AP and published in the peer-reviewed journal, Science.
So if many in our country think that putting a modern Republican in power is a way to move the place forward, to help it deal with the very complex global problems with which it is currently faced, they’re one with entropy, which is the falling apart of everything, from order to disorder, until there is nothing left. That’s a tragedy and we should not delude ourselves that such actions, behaviors or opinions defend anything worthwhile.
Raytheon, one of the world’s largest military contractors, opened the doors today to its newest missile factory, a state-of-the-art facility that will produce weapons for the United States and its [toadies].
According to Raytheon, the Huntsville, Ala. plant, located at the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal, will produce Standard Missile-3 and Standard Missile-6 interceptors. The first SM-6s should be delivered in early 2013, while the SM-3s should be ready a quarter later.
The facility is said to be among the most advanced missile production plants in the world, utilizing laser-guided transport vehicles for moving missile components around.
“At new Raytheon plant, America’s missiles come to life,” reads the Raytheon advertisement attached to the piece.
How many Standard missiles were fired at the enemy in anger in the last decade?
Zero.
Because al Qaeda and the Taliban have no air force or navy.
The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,??? says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,??? he says. “It’s basic economics.??? After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.
In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,??? the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.??? The study’s conclusion, however, was scarier. Many skilled workers have simply chosen to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less, and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay fast-food wages. As a result, the United States may soon have a hard time competing in the global economy …
Whenever you see some business person quoted complaining about how he or she can’t find workers with the necessary skills, ask what wage they’re offering. Almost always, it turns out that what said business person really wants is highly (and expensively) educated workers at a manual-labor wage … So what you really want to ask is why American businesses don’t feel that it’s worth their while to pay enough to attract the workers they say they need.
In reading James K. Galbraith’s The Predator State, one would call this the dominance of American manufacturing by corporate reactionary predators.
This has installed a race to the bottom in labor in a country where unions have been destroyed in the private sector and no standards for fair compensation are allowed to exist.
Noticeably, one could see it during the summer when new and tough anti-illegal immigration enforcement in red states resulted in immigrant workers leaving US southern agriculture, where profitability and cheap prices have been maintained by making wages rock bottom.
Ralph and Cheryl Broetje rely on roughly 1,000 seasonal workers every year to grow and pack over 6 million boxes of apples on their farm along the Snake River in eastern Washington. It’s a custom they’ve maintained for over two decades. Recently, though, their efforts to recruit skilled labor, mostly undocumented immigrants, have come woefully short, despite intensive recruitment efforts in an area with high rates of unemployment.
The Broetjes, and an increasing number of farmers across the country, say that a complex web of local and state anti-immigration laws account for acute labor shortages …
“The United States farmer is still the most efficient in the world, and if we want to be in charge of our food security and our economy and add favorably to our balance of payments, we need to support a [slave] labor force for agriculture,??? said some douchebag to Time magazine.
Back in 2007, Galbraith explained it as predatory business practice in which agriculture, having no need to respond to standards in labor, pressed wages to the bottom. No one, except the desperate from Mexico, regularly wishes to work stoop labor in fields, being sprayed by pesiticides, for much less than a living wage.
“Imposing standard and enforcing them, is thus the general response to the Predator State,” which is just a collision of reactionary forces within business who seek to maintain competitiveness and profitability without technological improvement, without environmental control, without attending to product or workplace safety,” writes Galbraith.
“They are the forces behind deregulation, behind tort reform, and behind the assault on unions… ”
Galbraith asks, rhetorically, “Are their example?” Yes, the countries of northern Europe which have established wage protections and more successful economies despite regulation. Germany, for example, has more generous labor and wage agreements in automobile manufacturing, standards which are enforced. However, news stories in the US media indicate that when German automotive giants set up shop in the United States, they revert to predatory US business practice and rely on plants in anti-labor “right-to-work” southern states.
Arms manufacturing in the US is a different matter. It is protected and paid for by the US taxpayer.
“In short, the populist directive is to raise American wages, create American jobs and increase the fairness and security of our economic system, especially for citizens and legal residents, but also for all who seek work within our borders,” writes Galbraith near the end of The Predator State.
“You want higher wages? Raise them. You want more and better jobs? Create them.”
Raytheon missile manufacturing, of very little intrinsic social value other than decent jobs with pay, is an example.
Corporate America relies primarily on the equation in which compensation is always compressed and subtracted. My grandfather, who raised his family in a row home in the Frankford area of Philadelphia was a machinist who worked in manufacturing. Unlike the manufacturing workers being sought in the New York Times piece, he was able to earn a decent pay.
When I saw him, that was in the Sixties and Seventies.
I’d noticed WhoisMcAfee over the weekend and decided to ignore it. However, media fascination with the life of the avuncular perv ex-king of anti-virus, John McAfee will thrust it in everyone’s face.
Many have commented here about me being used by women, or controlled by women, or the reverse – I am taking advantage of gullible, naive women. Many have commented that these women were only with me because of my money – a fact that I have to agree with. I am wealthy and living in a country of extreme poverty. Parents here “promote??? attractive daughters to men with money constantly. It helps the families through “trickle down???.
Sam, and others, can verify if they choose, that I am not foolish enough to believe that many young women could love a 67 year man. Being loved does not interest me much. Loving does. I truly love, not with a desire to possess or control, but with compassion and empathy. I care immensely, about many people. What they may or may not feel for me is their own issue.
Up front, before Sam and I became intimate, I explained to Sam that I did not expect her to love me. I only expected honesty to the degree that she could muster it. She tells me many times a day that she loves me and I smile. I take is a sweet gesture, since it is spoken with sweetness. I do not believe that anyone can ever know another’s heart.
McAfee’s comment policy, which seems wise, all things considered:
We are posting nearly everything. Comments like “please kill yourself??? and “how long have you been shagging that whore??? are sent immediately to the trash. Questions that have been asked, and answered, dozens of times likewise go to the trash. All spam goes to the trash. Everything else is posted.
I think that’s enough. Proceed at risk of your own brain damage.
I suspect my Ernest Hemingway/Hunter Thompson allusion on Sunday was correct. Add a little Peter Matthiessen crazy, too, I think.
Matthiessen is most famous for Far Tortuga, a novel of a group of sailors turtle fishing in the Caribbean. Many years ago I interviewed him briefly. He was a bit tight, which seemed a not uncommon condition.
McAfee cannot write like any of these men. But the idea that he would, maybe, like to be taken as such and sell his story as a graphic novel of intrigue, life on the run, drugs and an abundance of impoverished but libertine young poon in the Third World, is crystal clear.
Look at the artist’s portrait. Am I wrong?
Read to the foot of the blog and you will note McAfee’s aggravation at Gizmodo which he accuses of stealing his on-line diary and publishing it.
“I emailed Joel [Gizmodo reporter] and asked whether moral imperative shouldn’t dictate that he send the money he received from Gizmodo to me,” McAfee writes plaintively. “After all, it was my effort, my photos, my time, my words. Shouldn’t I get the money? He did not respond.”
John McAfee had always been good with the press. In 1992 it was that facility that catapulted the McAfee name in anti-virus into daily newspapers on the back of the Michelangelo scare.
I wrote about it for the American Journalism Review (later incorporated into the Virus Creation Labs).
Weeks after M-Day, many antiviral software vendors and some reporters still insist the coverage prevented thousands of computer users from losing data. John Schneidawind of USA Today says “everyone’s PC would have crashed” had the media not paid much attention to Michelangelo. The San Jose Mercury News credited the publicity with saving the day. One widely quoted antiviral vendor, John McAfee of McAfee Associates, says the press deserves a medal …
One vendor who played a key role was McAfee, one of the nation’s leading antiviral software manufacturers and founder and chairman of the nonprofit Computer Virus Industry Association (CVIA). It was McAfee who told many reporters that as many as 5 million computers were at risk. He says he made the projection based on a study that found the virus had infected 15 percent of computers at 600 sites. Both Reuters and the Associated Press sent the figure around the world.
McAfee says he didn’t present it the way it was reported. “I told reporters all along that estimates ranged from 50,000 to 5 million,” he says. “I said, ‘50,000 to 5 million, take your pick,’ and they did.”
While many articles failed to disclose or merely mentioned in passing the fact that McAfee’s antiviral software company has sold more than 7 million copies of its Viruscan and expects revenues of more than $20 million this year, McAfee scoffs at the idea that he or other vendors hyped the threat to generate sales. “I never contacted a single reporter, I never sent out a press release, I never wrote any articles,” he says. “I was just sitting here doing my job and people started calling.” He maintains that the coverage of Michelangelo cost him money. “It was the worst thing conceivable for our business, short-term,” he says. “We offer share-ware [where users are trusted to pay], so we got tons of calls” from non-paying customers.
“Before the media starts to crucify the antivirus community,” he continues, “they should look in the mirror and see how much [of the coverage] came from their desire to make it a good story.” But he adds quickly, “Not that I’m a press-basher.”
Schneidawind’s and AP’s efforts after March 6 to track Michelangelo found only a few thousand afflicted computers worldwide, including 2,400 erroneously reported to be at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The institute actually had only 400 computers infected with any virus; few had Michelangelo. A Philadephia Inquirer reporter got it wrong, says institute spokesman Paul Hassen, and it spread like wildfire. “That was the first time I’ve been that close to a feeding frenzy,” he says. Perhaps the most embarrassed news organization was CNN, which on March 6 staked out McAfee’s offices in Santa Clara, California, waiting for a doomsday that never came.
Soon after the clock struck midnight on March 6, many reporters seemed to suspect they’d been had. The Los Angeles Times, which had quoted McAfee’s 5 million figure on March 4, carried a Reuter story three days later that reported the “Black Death” had turned out to be more “a common cold.” AP downgraded its “mugger hiding in the closet” to a mere “electronic prank.”
AP Deputy Business Editor Rick Gladstone says the wire service quickly downplayed the story after its initial reports and included comments from the ICSA’s Rutstein, who said the threat from the virus had been exaggerated. “Our big oversight was to quote McAfee’s 5 million figure in the beginning of the coverage, but we backed off that,” Gladstone says, adding that his staff “felt somewhat vindicated” when relatively few computers were affected on March 6. “Some of us in the press were suckered,” he says.
Later, USA Today’s reporter admitted to me that John McAfee had always been helpful in talking with the press on computer virus issues. Because of that there was a feeling, the reporter said, that “we” owed him.
Who the editorial “we” meant was not precisely defined.
John McAfee was genuinely facile with the media. However, that was on the business of computer viruses. It is not at all clear that splashing a story of “love,” suspected murder, an as yet undetermined amount of prevarication, eccentricities and perversion in the Internet media will turn out favorably.
McAfee’s attitude has also undergone something of a metamorphosis.
The world press certainly has not helped. Autonomous and self-serving, the press does what it does best – sensationalize. And my character and the recent events of my life have been sensationalized to the max.
Times have changed. These things often turn out badly.
Anyway, McAfee’s anti-virus success was dictated, not on the technical merits of SCAN, but on the peg that shareware provided an in at corporate America. SCAN just had to be ubiquitous, easy to use for the standards of the time, and mostly reliable.
The home users who were anti-virus utility early adopters often worked in budding IT departments. When management inevitably realized they had people using SCAN, they figured they’d better start paying for it in site licensing and contracted support.
And McAfee’s competition in the American marketplace was not particularly strong.
Primarily, there was the Norton Anti-virus from Symantec and Central Point Anti-virus of Central Point Software. The latter came to be recognized as one of the worst anti-virus programs, ever. It wound up licensed to Microsoft which peddled a bowdler-ized version of it, now infamously known as the Microsoft Anti-virus, for old DOS and Windows PCs. Central Point eventually went out of business.
So by the late Nineties the two players with unbreakable positions in anti-virus in the US were McAfee and Symantec/Norton.
Of course, there were many other very good shareware anti-virus programs. Almost all went out of business or were bought and killed by competitors.
Over the last several years, Mr. McAfee began to put a large chunk of his [anti-virus] fortune into real estate, often in remote locations. He bought the house in New Mexico as a playground for himself and fellow aerotrekkers, people who fly unlicensed, open-cockpit planes. On a 157-acre spread, he built a general store, a 35-seat movie theater and a cafe, and he bought vintage cars for his visitors to use.
He continued to invest in financial markets, sometimes borrowing money to increase the potential returns. He typically chose his investments based on suggestions from his financial advisers. One of their recommendations was to put millions of dollars into bonds tied to Lehman Brothers.
For a while, Mr. McAfee’s good run, like that of many of the American wealthy, seemed to continue. In the wake of the dot-com crash, stocks started rising again, while house prices just continued to rise. Outside’s Go magazine and National Geographic Adventure ran articles on his New Mexico property, leading to him to believe that “this was the hottest property on the planet,??? he said.
But then things began to change.
In 2007, Mr. McAfee sold a 10,000-square-foot home in Colorado with a view of Pike’s Peak. He had spent $25 million to buy the property and build the house. He received $5.7 million for it. When Lehman collapsed last fall, its bonds became virtually worthless. Mr. McAfee’s stock investments cost him millions more.
One day, he realized, as he said, “Whoa, my cash is gone.???
His remaining net worth of about $4 million makes him vastly wealthier than most Americans, of course. But he has nonetheless found himself needing cash and desperately trying to reduce his monthly expenses.
From everywhere, allegedly John McAfee, on the drug called “bath salts”, sometime about a year ago on-line:
I think it’s the finest drug ever conceived, not just for the indescribable hypersexuality, but also for the smooth euphoria and mild comedown.
The story, in pictures, of a man in the vice of a raging sulphate addiction, apparently. Belize, where a number of white, wealthy American men go for native nubiles, do drugs, and die.
McAfee, being 67, is old and delusional enough to be influenced by both Ernest Hemingway and Hunter Thompson.
The rich aren’t like you and me. But the story of John McAfee certainly takes the cake.
Corporate profits versus ours. Something’s burning up the charts and it’s not you.
