It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were. — William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — The head of Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group says he will invite dozens of American engineers to his factories in China to learn about manufacturing.
News reports here say Terry Gou told a business meeting on Wednesday that he did not believe President Barack Obama could succeed in moving production lines back to the U.S. because Americans have outsourced those jobs for too long.
But Gou says he hopes the Americans can learn how factories are operated so they can return home to set up facilities with automated equipment to resolve the lack of skilled laborers.
Foxconn employs 1.2 million people in China to assemble products for Apple Inc. and other global firms. It has introduced more robots in China over the past two years as it faces soaring wages there.
[“I assume said training also involves advice on where to put the suicide nets…” adds Chuck in e-mail. Couldn’t resist.]
The short news piece contains an internal contradiction. Introduction of automation so as not to pay higher wages is not congruent with a lack of skilled labor.
In fact, anyone who has read the stories on iJunk manufacturing at Foxconn knows that it is hardly skilled labor.
And in the US it has been repeatedly demonstrated that unemployment is the result of lack of demand, rather than labor skills mismatching.
Paul Krugman has dealt with the issue again and again. It is one of those zombie stories used to explain away the need for doing anything about the recession, as accepting the present as the new normal.
Lazear goes through the data, and finds overwhelming evidence of inadequate demand, little if any evidence of structural problems.
I was especially struck by his data on “mismatch??? (which everyone I know calls mishmash): the extent to which there appears to be a misalignment between where the workers are and where the jobs are. In the early stages of the Lesser Depression some data seemed to suggest a sharp rise in mismatch; it was left for us demand-siders to argue that this was actually a cyclical, not structural issue, and not fundamental to the employment problem. Now Lazear informs us that sure enough, mismatch was cyclical, and has in fact come way down even though unemployment remains high …
What all this tells us is that the vast suffering still going on is gratuitous — that we could end this quickly with appropriate monetary and fiscal policies. Unfortunately, between the GOP and the Very Serious People (who love, just love, the idea that it’s structural), it won’t happen any time soon.
Timely as ever. First simple video, too, actually.
The Romney/Ryan Administration has activated the Emergency Private Sector Alert System.
This is not a test.
This alert applies to the entire Eastern Seaboard and inland Northeast.
Due to necessary and moral cuts to the National Weather Service, we were notified of an impending hurricane after it made landfall at Trump’s casino in Atlantic City.
The storm is producing rain, wind and storm surge that is in no way related to science or global warming. These things happen.
Residents are urged to climb on their rooftops and await state funding.
Better still, await assistance from:
. . . which will be arriving soon.
You can further prepare and ride out the storm by reading Ayn Rand’s Guide to Disaster Assistance and Squirrel Cuisine.
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 …
Many retailers now use sophisticated software that track the flow of customers, allowing managers to assign just enough employees to handle anticipated demand … Many employers have schedule shifts as short as two or three hours … The widening use of part-time employees has been a bane to many workers, pushing many into poverty and forcing some onto food stamps and Medicaid. And with work schedules that change week to week, workers can find it hard to arrange child care, attend college or hold a second job …
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 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.
It is replete with working citizens who cannot earn a living, the wreckage of a technology-assisted all-against-all American system in which human lives exist to be boiled down, reduced and atomized for profit.
In its anecdotal account it is a vision starkly at odds with the views of the dangerous and crazy Republican Party, our country’s Ted Nugents, with their belief that 50 percent of the people are lazy moochers and blood-suckers.
[It] is impossible to look at Mr Romney’s proposals – reductions in marginal income tax rates offset by unspecified reductions in tax expenditures – without concluding that they “would provide large tax cuts to high-income households, and increase the tax burdens on middle- and lower-income taxpayers???. In an economy with surging inequality, this would make the underlying problem worse.
The issues go far beyond economics. Divides over social and foreign policies are self-evidently profound. But the economic choices are also important. Americans have a choice between a man with modest ambitions and someone determined to double up on the fiscal and financial policies of the pre-crisis era. Mr Romney, like the Bourbons, has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
For the Financial Times, it’s a pretty good kick in the ass.
If you access it, enlarge the graphical presentation for the plot of the “growth in real after tax income.” The top 1 percent dwarf everybody, even their shoeshine army.
Sunday was a fine day in Pasadena, warm but not incinerating like most of late summer. You could feel the fall coming on as the sun set, the heat from the afternoon leaving for the sky. And so the closest thing I still have to a family member and I took one last year’s opportunity to grill chicken in the driveway, something we hadn’t done much since the death of a close friend over a year ago.
And while enjoying the day we spent a lot of time talking about what had happened to the country. How had our demographic, the white American, become so rancid and bad? And we had no answers. How could anyone be so driven mad by hate as the current standard of the Republican Party?
In Pasadena, there are stark examples of what the last four years of austerity have wrought. California has been a smaller version, ahead of things in the rest of the country. Before the presidency of Barack Obama, it had a Republican minority that made governance impossible.
Because of the legislative rule that all law having to do with taxes and the budget requires a two-thirds majority, the unimportant party paralyzed California. It ruined the political career of one its own, the celebrity governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was torn to shreds on the horns of its extremism.
And in Pasadena, something I see every day, PCC — the city college, is now virtually undone. Sure, it still has students and the buildings are there. But because of austerity and the Great Recession, there isn’t the money to teach anyone. There’s no money to pay instructors, no money for anything. One of the jewels of the California city college network, long a way for the disadvantaged to at least get some manner of education that might help in the American labor force, sits idle. You can maybe take one course a semester.
“They come in, they’re admitted, but there are no classes. They want that basic English, basic math, all that, chemistry, history courses. And it’s full,” Scott said.
Last year the system as a whole turned away 137,000 students who could not get into a single course.
“It’s sad to think that we’re looking at a group of students who are thirsty for higher education, all of which would enrich their life and enrich the economy of California, and because of a lack of state resources, we’re having to limit it,” Scott said.
Gen said those numbers don’t even include the number of students who may get one or two courses but will take much longer to reach their goals.
He said this is especially problematic when the community colleges are often relied upon for retraining and updating skills during an economic downturn.
“It’s not happening because we’re not willing, and not because there are too few students, but because we’re not able to get funding,” Gen said.
The Republican Party, which can’t get officials elected anywhere in the state that isn’t lily white in the hinterlands or near San Diego, have brought on the destruction of everything.
And this is what Mitt Romney will deliver to the rest of the nation of he inexplicably wins in the first week of November.
The party of nihilism and know-nothing will take over, people who believe in naught but maximizing theirs and squeezing and persecuting everyone else unlike them.
A party that disbelieves science.
A demographic in which reason and truth mean nothing.
And it’s frightening.
Because so many have bought into its toxic philosophies, repellent beliefs that 50 percent of the citizenry are parasites, that the Federal Reserve needs to be destroyed, that gays, women and non-white immigrants must be hounded. The astonishing burning animosity toward everyone not the same color. There is no bottom to the vat of poison it has tapped into.
[If] these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.
[It’s] their general hostility to anything that helps the 47 percent — those Americans whom they consider moochers who need to be taught self-reliance.
Before the weekend, the Associated Press ran another of those stories on the Heevahave Vote — the so-called “undecided voter,” and it’s lead subject, a white middle-aged man named Kelly Cox, was from California.
Who are these people who still can’t make up their minds? They’re undecided voters like Kelly Cox, who spends his days repairing the big rigs that haul central California’s walnuts, grapes, milk and more across America.
He doesn’t put much faith in either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. But he figures he’s got plenty of time – a little more than a week – to settle on one of them before Nov. 6. And he definitely does plan to vote.
“I’ll do some online research,” said Cox, co-owner of a Delhi, Calif., truck-repair shop. “I don’t have time to watch presidential debates because it’s a lot of garbage anyway. They’re not asking the questions that the people want to hear.”
On-line research. It’s to laugh, tossed-off horseshit.
First, the debate made [these undecided voters] want to do more research on the candidates. “I need to research some of these facts,??? one skeptical sounding woman said.
And they’ll research us into total failure, given their way.
Cox, said to be from Delhi, is from the other part of California, the great dusty wasteland, in this case somewhere between Modesto and Merced, that votes Republican but will have no impact due to the electoral college. (Don’t believe me? May you be stuck there some summer, driving the highway north and south.)
In this itself, the AP story was a joke. It’s banner undecided voter was someone whose vote is irrelevant next week.
Stay home, skip the on-line research, Mr. Kelly Cox.
Nationally, the state is going for Obama. His vote won’t matter at the national level. Neither candidate has bothered to campaign in the nation’s largest state.
However, at the local level it has been quite another thing. Because it’s the small extremist white minority in California that has managed to strangle the place, a lesson for the rest of the country.
Other pro-growth reforms would increase government tax revenues needed for these programs by stimulating the economy. One would be to adopt, yes, a flat tax. It would go a long way in achieving the prosperity that Mr. Obama never achieved with his monstrous spending. A flat tax would reduce taxes for many people …
Returning to a gold standard is another much-overlooked reform. Most people today, including most politicians, fail to appreciate how our current system of fluctuating currency values is a drag on the economy.
Frontline’s special on how a few groups in the far right Republican Party made the fact of global warming a no-go in the United States is here.
This has made the country into a redoubt of know-nothing-ism and anti-science.
“They think of themselves as rebels,” Frontline’s John Hockenberry says at the start.
Rebels — a bunch of overweight white men with no scientific credentials and a few run-out-of-town ex-scientist pariahs in the Republican Party. But how they know how to work closed media.
Scientists go on to explain how these groups — specifically entities like the Heartland and Cato Institute’s purposely misread the data and harass those publishing on the science with FOIA requests for their e-mail in fishing expeditions in hopes that handfuls of messages, presented out of context, can be used to damage reputations.
From yesterday, William L. Shirer — in 1959 — on the results of totalitarians:
It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.
Make no mistake, a great deal of responsibility lies with the supine Democratic Party, too. John Kerry explains it vacated the issue because of attacks from the right.
Bob Inglis, a Republican who was primaried out of office from the right, believed human causation of climate change. And he relates how he was taken down by Tea Party attacks and talk radio, lumped in with the scientists assumed to be “godless liberals.”
“Tennessee passed a law to allowing the views of climate change skeptics to be taught in schools,” informs Frontline.
For half the country, science has been turned into a dungeon by the Republican Party.
“The [Heartland Institute’s climate change denial] campaign of alternative scientific studies, opinion pieces, books, and charts has been been building for years,” informs Frontline. It was bankrolled by big oil.
“Advocacy groups were enlisted to confuse the issue,” it continues.
“Exxon’s millions for skeptic’s groups made it a public target which would eventually be a problem for a publicly-traded company,” says Hockenberry.
“New leadership” at Exxon decided to review its anti-science strategy in 2006. Funding for its anti-science initiatives was suspended.
However, the damage had been done. Other deep pockets, like the Koch brothers, have stepped in to continue the financing of global warming denial. Even more money has been funneled through anonymous funding in the guise of a black hole agency located in Alexandria, Virginia, called Donors Trust.
“The [climate] scientists pushing this have a Marxist agenda,” says one of the climate denial quacks, a man funded by unknown business tycoons, right at the end.
One last point: we still keep hearing the “structural??? argument, that we have to expect prolonged high unemployment because it takes time to turn construction workers into manufacturing workers or whatever. One answer is that this portrait of the economy is factually wrong: job losses have not been concentrated in a few sectors or professions, they have been broadly spread across the economy. But there’s also a conceptual answer: if shifting workers across sectors requires mass unemployment, how come the bubble years — when we were moving out of manufacturing into housing — weren’t high-unemployment years? Why does moving into the bubble sectors mean more jobs, but moving out into other sectors mean fewer jobs? I’ve never heard a coherent answer.
DONALD BARLETT, Co-Author, “The Betrayal of the American Dream”: The “Advertising Age” has written off the middle class in this country. They say the age of mass affluence is over. And now you’re going to have to learn to cater to the super rich and the affluent in other countries, because the middle class in China, Brazil, India, that’s the source of the coming wealth, not the U.S. middle class …
DONALD BARLETT: On the surface it sounds great, open trading, other countries. What’s to be against? The problem is, when the theory was developed back in the early 1800s, it was envisioned as countries operating comparably.
The incomes of the United States and China are so disparate that it would never work. It’s always going to be cheaper to go over to China to build what you want to build.
PAUL SOLMAN: As manufacturing jobs migrated aboard, Barlett and Steele point out, the Middle American standard of living sank steadily.
JAMES STEELE: If you’re going to get the smart jobs in this country, the brain power, and it is not working out as everybody said it would, because now many of those jobs are starting to go offshore faster than the old manufacturing jobs did.
PAUL SOLMAN: The job drain, especially to China, has become a staple of both presidential campaigns.
NARRATOR: Under Obama, we have lost over half-a-million manufacturing jobs. And for the first time, China is beating us.
NARRATOR: Romney’s never stood up to China. All he’s done is send them our jobs.
DONALD BARLETT: The real bottom-line question is, what kind of a society do we want? Do we want a society built on the principle that the only thing that matters is the lowest possible price or a society built on the principle that everyone should have a living wage?
And those are going to be two very different societies. And this goes back again so what we’re talking about. The people up here, they don’t want everyone to have a living wage.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, you actually think we could have an economy in this country in which lots of Americans would simply be not part of the economy at all?
DONALD BARLETT: Irrelevant.
JAMES STEELE: You know, they will have jobs, but these are going to be jobs that don’t pay much.
JAMES STEELE: Maybe things will have to get a lot worse before people realize that there are some things, some positive things that government can do. These things didn’t use to be so partisan in this country. We used to be able to get together and do things for the benefit of everybody. And we hope one of these days we’re back to that. We’re definitely not there now.
Finally, most of the US citizenry gets this.
However, Mitt Romney built his expanded fortune on shipping jobs to China and destroying middle class livelihoods. This fact has allowed the Democrats, and the President in last night’s debate, to tag him as an “outsourcing pioneer.”
He is, in other words, the vulture mega-businessman who most Americans should be running away from as fast as they can.
Romney: “They hack into our computers.” Yes, definitely, that’s why all the jobs went there.
Barlett and Steele are essentially arguing that you can’t have an economy for most Americans where the only stuff made is artisan goods for the very wealthy and portions of emerging upper middle classes in other countries. It’s a point I’ve made numerous times under the Made in China tab.
Mechanical Turk, and others like it, allow corporate America to get around the minimum wage by making more and more work — which is all service and task oriented — free-lance labor where people are paid pennies.
In this smartphone applications are used make life worse by speeding up the leveraged destruction of the ability of average people in the street to make a living.
When Fernando Navales lost his job last June, things looked pretty grim.
His efforts to find gainful employment proved futile until he downloaded an app called Gigwalk, where companies offer small amounts of money for small tasks that take little time. (Users simply swipe to “accept” the task and complete it within a set time period.) Within days, he was earning more than he had in his previous position.
Navales threw himself into the work, taking between 30 and 40 “gigs” per day (often photographing restaurants for Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine). Over the past year, he has completed about 750 gigs – and this new kind of employment has changed his perceptions of the working world.
“It’s a large part of my life,” he said. “I actually turned my brother onto it. He’s in Ohio, but we flew out to New York together and we basically took a working trip to NY taking pictures of restaurants.”
Not included: The part where the journalist asks the man and his brother how much they actually netted after deducting living expenses and two round trip air tickets from Ohio to NYC.
While there have been businesses catering to this audience for some time, it was the advent of the smart phone that allowed them to take off.
“But as these services now get pushed to your phone … it’s more convenient for the task consumers to receive the jobs when they’re out already,” said Henry Mason, head of research and analysis at TrendWatching.com.
Beyond Gigwalk, there are a few leaders in the business-to-consumer tasksumer space, including TaskRabbit and Mechanical Turk, a division of Amazon (AMZN) …
“What you’re starting to see is a higher degree of comfort with the concept,” said Ariel Seidman, CEO and co-founder of Gigwalk. “Where [it] really shines is when you get to places that are hard get to, like Kalamazoo, MI or Kodiak, AK. Those types of places, you can all of a sudden reach into them with the same efficiency and speed in which you can reach into a Chicago or LA …”
Other firms bring people together in a different way. PleaseBringMe acts as a handshake service between travelers who can volunteer to bring things like hard to find items to someone at their destination.
“My wife is pregnant and craving In-n-Out,” wrote one user. “We used to live in CA but are now in the NYC area. If anybody would be willing to buy 4 Animal Style cheeseburgers and bring them on a plane to me in NYC, that would be awesome.”
Another user, from Brazil, is on the hunt for a drink that’s only sold in Greece. “I want Mythos beer!!!!,” he pleads.
It’s difficult to get past the brainlessly towering odiousness of a request for fast food cheeseburgers to be flighted, in passenger, from soCal to NYC, which — of course — has no cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers.
One begins to wonder if it’s even real or just another among millions of Internet trolls and pranksters posting something vile to see how many people are crushed and stupid enough to jump at it.
Most people with sense instantly recognize things like Mechanical
Turk as mechanisms for an economy mediated by vultures and predators, using trivial mass computing applications and bad economic conditions to slice more flesh off a shrinking active labor force with few ways to protect itself.
One comment, chosen from many — all of them pretty supercilious — on the GigWalking brothers:
If their total income from this is under $400, they wont [sic] need to report it as self-employment income.
