Here’s what always happens when a big corporate shibboleth has really bad publicity.
About a week later a couple reporters from the ruling class will publish something contradictory. It was all a product of crappy reporting, they’ll indicate. And this will be used to stir the pot, get lots of eyeballs, and work toward guaranteeing that once again nothing can be done about the deeply immoral in corporate America.
Today it was the Huffpost, posting “the truth about ge’s taxes.”
The New York Times had it all wrong, said the reporters — Jeff Gerth (who used to be a top investigative reporter at the New York Times but who was now publishing this through the much lesser auspices of ProPublica) and Allen Sloan of Fortune.
Here are the best lines:
Why should you care about this? Because we all have a stake in how this plays out. Thanks to the uproar over GE, we now risk ending up with legislation that targets GE but produces all sorts of unintended consequences. Public rage can make for bad law.
Public rage can make for bad law. Savor the hypocrisy of it. Public rage is perfectly OK in the guise of the Tea Party and the November elections sweeping into power extremists who are now in full on war against the working class. But public rage against GE is bad. Public rage over layoffs (front page headline in today’s LA Times: Teacher hiring hard because of layoffs) and deprivation for everyone but corporate America, which deserves more bribing, is bad.
Read the entire thing — I’m not providing a link, it’s easy enough to find through Google — and you have the case of reporters who were also working the story and are now doing their best to grab their pieces of glory.
Except it won’t move the down marker. I’ve found that after a promising launch, ProPublica sucks. It’s a place where famous reporters who’ve been encouraged to move on or jumped a sinking ship go to die.
Anyway, even with Huffington Post’s eyeballs, the venue doesn’t have the muscle to change the argument.
Plus, it’s a bad pairing. You can’t be the front for the intellectual hoity-toity wealthy liberal and then expect some relatively brief piece defending General Electric to make people wince.
The rage over General Electric, from where I stand, can’t hurt.
Realistically, nothing much moves the corporate masters of universe of the US, anyway, not even tens of thousands of people, say, protesting in Madison, Wisconsin.
They know they can just shovel more money into political opposition work and lobbying and wait people out.
For example, Jeff Immelt isn’t going to leave Obama’s economy and jobs advisory board over any amount of shame heaped on him by current events. Forced to show up in the news, he tells people the equivalent of “Let them eat cake.”
And the President isn’t going to do anything unless it becomes so hot he’s forced to act. Jeff Immelt will need a solid boot in the pants and a firm “Good riddance!” to guarantee he’s put out the door. I won’t be surprised if our President never dumps him.
From ImmeltMustGo today:
It’s wrong for GE C.E.O. Jeffrey Immelt to get a 100 percent raise while asking middle-class workers to take major pay cuts — and all while leading President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Because we united on this issue, ABC and NBC did national television news reports on our push to boot Immelt. Mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post, The Nation, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Reuters syndication wrote stories. Insider Washington publications, like Politico, National Journal, Roll Call, and The Hill, reported on it, too.
Immelt himself was even forced to respond to us in an interview.
To get this much attention in corporate media over an issue of corporate influence in politics is a big moral victory by itself. But we’re not going for a moral victory. We’re going for an actual victory …
[The 200,000 who signed the ImmeltMustGo petition] got us a bunch of attention. But to get a victory, we’re going to need even more.
Surprisingly, over the weekend a much larger number of people than expected tuned into “GE and Jeff (Taxavoidination).”
Click the “watch on YouTube” button to see the view count.
The masters of corporate America shipped all non-military domestic manufacturing overseas. The only middle class making-stuff jobs remaining are those in artisan work for the plutocracy and the corporate socialism of arms manufacturing, still being underwritten by the people who’s jobs and livelihoods are being destroyed.
As for the rest of America’s work, the Internet has destroyed or grossly undervalued much of it.
However, readers will have noticed by now that the Internet’s work of crushing record companies, video production, newspapers, magazines and what not did not spark an alternative revolution in which the jobs and opportunity just transferred to others more intellectually lively.
What has actually happened is a great condensation. The wonderful magic of Google and social networking didn’t actually empower lots and lots of little guys. It just empowered the same old giants who dominate the top of search engines or who attract the most celebrity groupies on Twitter. Occasionally there has been room made for newcomers, just like the old-comers, except cheaper — like Huffington Post.
The winners, or the biggest, get the majority of the spoil ever more efficiently thanks to Google and the habits of human beings which predicate anything past results halfway down the first returned search page don’t count. Alternatively, whoever has the most followers or friends, just like back in high school, wins everything.
Tom Tomorrow made a comment on this last week on his shift of position to the DailyKos.
Too many papers have decided that they no longer have any use for this art form which grew in their stead, adapting itself entirely to their rhythms, and as that market contracts, there’s been no simultaneous expansion online. The niche that editorial cartoons filled in newspapers is almost entirely occupied by Daily Show clips online. Why do so few political sites feature political cartoons? Why did the Huffington Post, with verticals devoted to almost any topic you can imagine, never launch a comics section?
I’ve got a chance to help counter that trend, in some small way..
The biggest names, in this case he has to mean Jon Stewart, get all the spoil from a landscape that should have supported a lot more.
Jon Stewart was great two years ago. Now that you don’t even need a tv to see him several times a day — that it’s impossible to miss him for even a couple hours while randomly browsing — he’s sickening.
Boy it’s great that Jon Stewart’s omnipresence has shoved everyone else into the dumper, isn’t it? It’s just right and proper that one person in a country of 300 million should get absolutely all the spoil in his niche.
Anyway, back to the news story on all the businesses to leave — everything — because it’s all dying here:
Most of the industries share common reasons for their bleak prospects, including damage from advances in technology, industry stagnation and external competition, he says.
Because labor costs and regulations are high domestically, many manufacturers send their production to foreign countries. Downward price pressure from domestic wholesalers, retailers and consumers forces U.S. producers to cut costs to offer a competitive price. Many firms that cannot outsource have a difficult time competing …
Video post-production is another industry done in by the do-it-yourself opportunities presented by new technology. Once requiring specialized expertise, many of these tasks can be done on even an average home computer.
Companies such as Technicolor have suffered as a result. Industrywide, revenues have fallen 25% in the past decade to just north of $4 billion, with another 11% decrease predicted by 2016.
In terms of video post-production, here’s how technology worked. Exactly the same as it did for making music.
The software for doing it got into everyone’s hands. Every residence can make its own videos.
Like “Taxavoidination,” done here in Pasadena on the desktop.
In the old days, I would never have been available to afford video production for DD & the Highway Kings. That was for people with major record label contracts. But those contracts and businesses supported jobs.
Even if you cursed the structure and whims of the recording industry, it still furnished middle class work. Lots of upper class, too.
Now everyone, like me, can make a video and upload it to YouTube.
But “everyone” still can’t make any money from that.
A very smaller number of people, still associated with very big entertainment business, can. And people at YouTube, because they work for a company that provides the only pipe through which everything flows, can make money, not only from the eyes added from everyone who can’t make money on it, but also from the smaller number of very big players from the old industry. Those who’ve survived the great culling.
Case in point, YouTube pimping dogshit ‘promoted’ video at the tops of your vid’s ‘suggestions’ column. With “Taxavoidination” it’s been “What’s ‘Lemonade Mouth’?” by one of the old giants, Disney.
It’s enraging.
So there has been a drastic net loss in jobs and a concentration of riches in a smaller number of players, some of them only slightly different, thanks to the Internet and “technological” revolutions.
“Let’s say you set up business as a consultant or a contractor, something a lot of people have been doing these days. And, to make this a challenge on the tax front, let’s say you do well and take in about $150,000 in your first year.”
How to pay no income tax if you earn six figures, one of the most popular stories on the web, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal here
“Who says GE has all the fun?” concludes the piece’s columnist, Brett Arends.
So I sent him a copy of the official DD Taxavoidination vid, “GE and Jeff” along with a polite note.
Wrong venue, obviously.
“People get to think what they think,” said GE’s Jeff Immelt in the news on Monday or Tuesday. Why did he not go with the more elegant, “Let them eat cake”?
By empirical evidence, it’s impossible to shame sociopaths.
You throw up your hands.
One nagging idea is to find someone to run a challenge against Barack Obama for the Dem nomination in 2012. We all thought he had something and were subsequently taken as fools.
Matt Taibbi recently said something to this effect at Roling Stone. While only rumint, Taibbi indicated he’d heard Elizabeth Warren was one possibility, and that item is here.
Hit this up on YouTube. It won’t kill ya. A few of the criminals should get to see it, anyway, don’t you think?
On the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, the loss of American manufacturing is explained. It’s entirely the fault of the government, sucking away new workers who want its teat because they’re weak and afraid.
This was startling to me since many of the things I write about have to do with preservation of manufacturing jobs in the US arms industry. And these private sector jobs are solely because of the US government, its politicians, and the taxpayer. And no one ever wants to eliminate them, not corporate America and certainly not conservatives.
Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t even enter into the WSJ discussion by pundit Stephen Moore, who mixes the usual business antagonisms toward local government workers with the national picture.
Again, it’s the rotten teachers’ fault because they can’t be fired. And everyone is apparently clamoring for the private sector to take over firefighting and police work.
One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.
Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.
“Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government,” the man writes. “Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring …”
Everyone’s going for the security. They don’t want to work for the private sector where they can be fired because it’s cheaper to use foreign labor — except for security work or weapons manufacturing.
In any case, we ran this economist’s graph on hiring by the government a number of weeks ago:
For the past eleven years the vast majority of federal government hiring has been in homeland security.
The WSJ piece, which I suppose you should read, does not make any mention that American big business — like GE — is fine with making weapons with US workers, because the government and, by extension the taxpayer, pays for it. There’s no talk of firing ‘underperformers’.
However, manufacturing of non-military goods by the same company? That’s another matter entirely.
“Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles,” concludes Moore. It’s their cowardliness, he implies. They don’t want to work for the private sector, which isn’t hiring anyone except those who are willing to work at jobs that don’t earn a middle class living, because they might get fired.
It’s an unusual argument. But it fits with the Ayn Rand-ian thing that you’re a weakling if you can’t make it as a millionaire or billionaire in corporate America. Ted Nugent spouts it all the time. The fired, the underemployed, government workers, unionized teachers — every manjack of them inferior.
In perhaps another indication that the national intelligence apparatus is still busticated in the US, Steven Aftergood of Secrecy blog informs that a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has been ordered to address what the loss of the country’s manufacturing base means.
The U.S. intelligence community will prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on the implications of the continuing decline in U.S. manufacturing capacity, said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) citing recent news reports.
“Last month Forbes reported that the continued erosion of the U.S. manufacturing base has gotten so serious that the Director of National Intelligence has begun preparation of a National Intelligence Estimate… to assess the security implications of the decline of American manufacturing,??? said Rep. Schakowsky, a member of the House Intelligence Committee.
“Our growing reliance on imports and lack of industrial infrastructure has become a national security concern …???
On one hand, it’s welcome news. Finally, a lightbulb has gone on over someone’s head. The question is invited in: How do we retain world leadership if the manufacturing shops for stuff we actually invented during the great WWII/Cold War surge are all tossed?
To the Chinese and etc.
On the other hand, it has been an obvious problem, one waiting to be addressed for so long, the suspicion arises that like so many other things, the concern is either purely cosmetic or evidence of the flailing of some removed boob from the ruling class nagged by the idea that when the servant idly comments that everything bought in town for the mansion is foreign-made, the process of ‘modernizing to the global economy’ has gone a bit too far.
Readers here know you could devote a book to the issues. And many probably are.
But it is not just that non-military domestic manufacturing has been thrown away. The thorny issue of what actually is protected manufacturing in this country must be addressed. And for the latter, the very obvious answer is arms manufacturing.
The argument, then, is not just a security and social issue. It is also a moral one which asks people to seriously consider two questions which are easy to pose:
Why has it been considered the proper way of things for corporate America to throw away domestic non-military manufacturing because the labor is ten times more expensive than sweat shop labor overseas?
And why, if such is the case, is corporate America allowed to preserve only arms-manufacturing jobs, the funding for which is totally shifted to the same middle class that has seen its jobs eliminated by the same businesses in non-military manufacturing?
Answering these with anything resembling continuing the status quo indicates an entrenched immorality, a corporate sociopathic quality concerned only with extending the bottom line at everyone else’s expense.
It means you have a country where quite a lot of decent people who believe we once stood for something might not want to live.
The result, so far, has been a cruel and profoundly unfair trick on workers.
If they’re in non-military production they’ve been deemed not cost effective, too expensive. So the nation has created a system were we have workers who have to engage in a kind of musical chairs game to vie for the smaller number of jobs in arms manufacturing because the same corporations can rely on taxpayer defense funding to answer all costs. They are necessary labor only insofar as they serve corporate America on especially enriching projects.
And if they cannot get those jobs, or do not have an arms manufacturing facility within commuting distance to apply at, they are thrown into the wind.
General Electric, in the news repeatedly, is a great example of a company that behaves in a way totally at odds with American security. And it is also, among many things, an arms manufacturer.
It pays no tax and under its last CEOs shipped non-military manufacturing overseas, abandoning many jobs. But it rallies its lobbyists to continue fighting for Department of Defense money for a redundant engine, canceled, for the Joint Strike Fighter.
It has two tiers of workers and manufacturing. Protected military manufacturing jobs, to be preserved because they’re necessary for rich contracts from the US government. And domestic non-military manufacturing jobs, which are be taken advantage of, continually pressed for wage and benefit concessions or eliminated altogether.
Neither of these conditions jive with the national interest. They’re features of a corporation that’s a sociopath.
“[We] need to work to rebuild the American manufacturing sector, creating jobs at home. And instead of approving FTAs (free trade agreements) that will offshore more American jobs, we need to establish a trade policy that benefits American workers and the entire American economy,??? she said.
[A Congressional Research Service (pdf)] cited a study which concluded that overall changes in aggregate U.S. employment attributable to the [recent] US-Korea [trade] agreement “would be negligible given the much larger size of the U.S. economy compared to the South Korean economy. However, while some sectors, such as livestock producers, would experience increases in employment, others such as textile, wearing apparel, and electronic equipment manufacturers would be expected to experience declines in employment.??? Accordingly, the “U.S. beef sector??? supports the agreement, while some labor unions oppose it.
The “growing reliance” on imports is indeed of concern, not just for the sake of national security. And it is not just a “growing reliance.”
The class that shops in malls, supermarkets and stores like Wal-Mart and Target for everyday material things necessary for American life know there’s no “growing reliance.” It’s a total reliance.
That this would be addressed as only a national security concern shows real myopia. That it would trigger a National Ingelligence Estimate may be an indication that it is now too little and too late.
Aftergood writes that the record for releasing NIE’s into the public so that they might effect change is not good. Nuances are lost and the legislative process is not “effectively served.”
It can only be hoped that this will not be the case.
