03.07.11
Made In China: Guitar Center Catalog, crap stories about military gains
The US press continues to massage stories on China’s alleged rising military and how it poses an imagined regional threat to the biggest armed force in history — ours.
They are repellent pieces, flying in the face of common sense and evidence as plain as the nose on your face and now hanging in US stores everywhere.
Here’s Associated Press, today, delivering the customary script:
When China launched threatening war games off Taiwan 15 years ago on the eve of an election on the self-governing island, the U.S. deployed two aircraft carriers, and China quickly backed down.
Things don’t seem so one-sided any more.
China’s military has been on a spending spree at a time that the debt-ridden U.S. government is looking to cut defense costs. On Friday, China announced a 12.7 percent hike for this year, the latest in a string of double-digit increases.
That trend has triggered worries in Congress and among security analysts about whether the United States can maintain its decades-long military predominance in the economically crucial Asia-Pacific.
While the U.S. military has been drained by 10 years of costly conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, China has developed air, naval and missile capabilities that could undercut U.S. superiority in China’s backyard.
There are two places where things are one-sided. Like the growth of the missile, tank and jet aircraft factories of the United States.
And all the stores the middle and lower classes shop in where the durable goods are exclusively made in China or some other east Asian nation with equivalently cheap labor..
Which brings us to Guitar Center, a repeat easy example of China’s alleged excellence in factory production of stuff once invented and made here.
Almost two years ago DD went to Guitar Center to buy a Line 6 Pocket POD, a cheap palm-sized computer that produces virtually studio ready guitar amplifier tones. Line 6 is a US company. However, all its kit — like anything having to do with computers — is made in China.
The first two Pocket PODs were dead right out of the box, one with an obviously defective display, the other with a non-functioning power source. Guitar Center had to eat both of them before the third box I opened had an actual working model in it.
That’s Chinese quality control. You can count on rubbish and the sub-standard. Most Americans will have already noted that doesn’t mean so much in consumer goods when there are no other options. Sub-standard is the new standard.
However, it’s not exactly ready for prime-time in any modern big military, which — most people have also noticed, are highly digital and networked in their command and control functions.
Two out of three advanced fighter aircraft with parts of their innards dead even before action are OK when it’s all just for show and making news. However, when it’s time to meet the enemy for real … better hope you don’t have to go into action anytime in the next twenty years.
The new Guitar Center catalog shows the hollowing out which has occurred in the customer base. There are two tiers of goods. Pricey made-in-America guitar custom-shopped for the wealthy. And everything else, made in China for the US underclass.
Anecdotally from the pages of the catalog, it looks like a 90/10 percent, a split coincidentally something of a mirror image of US inequality.
The gross weight of goods in the store is taken up mostly by Chinese-made stuff. But the riches and high net value lies all in the top ten percent. If you buy anything made-in-China, it devalues to virtually nothing the minute you walk out the door, as a trip to any pawnshop in Pasadena will attest. If you buy the custom shop American-made goods, they are “investments.”
It’s a depressing experience, rock hard proof there’s no way to fix the American economy so that it’s more egalitarian or fair to the middle class short of radical government intervention, the re-establishment of union membership in the private sector and across the board increases in wages.
The people who work at the counters at Guitar Center do not really earn a good living. And while the prices for Chinese made rock ‘n’ roll paraphernalia are very low, the premium goods are priced well out of the reach of employees. Unless they wish to go deep into hock for the sake of a piece of something reserved for musicians with increasingly rare major label deals or members of the plutocracy.
For the plutocrats, in this edition:
Fender Custom Shop Heavy Relic 1962 Stratocaster: $3699.
Gibson Custom Shop ’60 Aged Les Paul: $4999
Paul Reed Smith JA-15 Spruce Top Hollowbody: $4041
A ‘real’ Chinese-made Epiphone Les Paul Std: $ 399
That’s an insurmountable order of magnitude difference.
Good news, lads! Good news! Chinese military kit is really made in China!