01.04.11
Made In China: Rubbish gifts from the Guggenheim
Over Xmas DD was visiting a friend’s house for dinner, drinks and conviviality. Sitting on the coffee table were various gifts sent in from around the country.
One was a photo mobile proudly advertised as of the Guggenheim Museum. You can see it here in the Guggenheim Foundation gift shop.
What the store doesn’t show was the rather obvious “Made in China” sticker on the box.
Many people my age remember making photo mobiles out of wire hangers and string or fishing line when they were in grade school art class.
The idea that even the manufacture of “photo mobiles” has to be outsourced to China is astonishing. It’s also a deadeningly obvious part of life.
Everything made for the consumer society, except stuff for the wealthy, was outsourced to China, so to speak. So everyone knows what happened to the US economy just by going into stores in their hometown. Not even a need to order from Guggenheim.
It emphasizes our dreadful history of decline.
Wall Street, shareholders, big business and government policy, all worked together to compress US middle class pay and increase business value. Part of the plan included downsizing manufacturing industry which employed American workers who had to be paid too much for the most potent bottom line. So they needed eliminating.
To compensate, it was convenient to extend easy credit and ship all manufacturing to China so that prices for consumer products could be depressed.
This worked only to a point and now everyone recognizes the poisoned fruit of it.
There is one industry not outsourced to China. It’s an industry where labor’s wages don’t need elimination or compression for the bottom line. Because the shareholders and CEOs know price isn’t an object that interferes with major profit.
On January 1, a fatuous opinion piece in the New York Times accidentally touched upon it in “China’s Naval Ambitions.”
It read:
The Pentagon has a long history of hyping the Chinese threat to justify expensive weapons purchases, and sinking well-defended ships with ballistic missiles is notoriously hard. But what should rightly concern American military planners is not so much the missile but the new Chinese naval strategy behind it.
China seems increasingly intent on challenging United States naval supremacy in the Western Pacific. At the same time it is aggressively pressing its claims to
some worthlessdisputed offshore islands in the East and South China Seas. Washington must respond, carefully but firmly.
The Pentagon needed to move fast to counter Chinese naval developments by:
Cutting back purchases of the Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer (with its deficient missile defense system) was a first step. A bigger one would be to reduce the Navy’s reliance on short-range manned strike aircraft like the F-18 and the F-35, in favor of the carrier-launched N-UCAS, a longer-range unmanned strike aircraft.
The upshot here is that middle class jobs are worthless EXCEPT if they’re the small part of the American demographic for making robot weapons.
Specifically, as it pertains to the China opinion piece, jobs at the arms manufacturer Northrop Grumman, the firm that sells the UCAS.
In September, I posted on deindustrialization. In the US, it’s everything out except for arms manufacturing — killer robots — various items for the plutonomy — $180 dollar harmonicas, 3-D manufactured houses, $30,000 over-engineered high-tech crankshafts for pro racing cars and elaborate boutique model airplanes, for instance.
Robot assassins don’t build roads, they don’t improve the infrastructure, they don’t do anything for universal healthcare, they don’t fight disease, they don’t coach high-school wrestling teams, they don’t spread goodwill overseas. And it’s not an industry that is theoretically open to everyone for a good living regionally, like Detroit in its heyday.
Weapons and pricey ridiculous things, yes! Everything else, no!
Good news, lads! Good news! Most popular DD video/tune with the over 45 male and unemployed audience, ever.
Karl C said,
January 5, 2011 at 5:38 pm
But why beat on these guys for making ’boutique’ stuff? Personally, if I was a skilled machinist I’d rather be making models or high-tech crankshafts than working in an appliance factory or something like that.
Apart from that, when the US had all its domestic industry, all we used to hear was how miserable and soul destroying it was to spend your life in a steel mill or assembly plant.
George Smith said,
January 6, 2011 at 10:55 am
No we didn’t.
I got my education at Lehigh smack dab in the heart of steel town. And I had friends who’s families and fortunes were built on employment in the mills. I didn’t hear about how “miserable” or “soul-destroying” it was. Quite the contrary. Everyone wanted to work there because it guaranteed a solidly middle class living, enabling the purchase of homes and the sending of the kids to college.
The point I’d add, which I might have in the post, was that — specifically for the crankshaft and model businesses, both in southern California — they hardly employ anybody. You can’t aspire to work in such businesses. They’re examples of artisanry of marginal utility and as such examples, they’re no future you can continue to build a country as big as the US upon.
The steel mills, by contrast, didn’t just make shit for high end pro auto-racing in the US or elaborate models to mount in the foyer of some corporate edifice overseas.
Karl C said,
January 6, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Yes, I understand that. It just seems like you can’t blame the artisans themselves for not being part of a large industry. They’re presumably doing what they want and making a success of it. If they’re being held up as some sort of future hope of a nation of cottage industries it’s not really their fault.
George Smith said,
January 6, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Very much agree. These stories are part of the urge to report good news and it leads to the phenomenon of the enterprises being represented as things that they’re not.
Of course, if you can make a living using 3-D to prototype and manufacture $180 dollar harmonicas, do so. If there are a few people willing to buy such things, enough to sustain a small business, fine!
However, it’s not the same as restoration of the old Ingersoll plant in Rockfield, Illinois. I’ve used the examples just to represent how twisted out of shape we’ve become as a nation.