The Apple juggernaut crushes all in its path, might makes right, the end justifies the means, those jobs aren’t coming back, no wire hangers, I want a glass screen in six weeks, put that thing in your mouth!
Inspiration: Frank Zappa & the Mothers’ “We’re Only In It for the Money”
Key gear: harmonica — Mojo Hand/Conqueror Root — made in China, Jay Turser Stratocaster funk guitar — made in China. The Deutschlandlied. How’d that get in there?
Boycott American goods!
Oh wait, you can’t. Nothing to avoid at the store.
Known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.
[Nothing] like Foxconn City exists in the United States.
The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.
Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.
Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.
“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”
Steve Jobs died poorly, exuding contempt for everything not his way or the highway until the bitter end as a withered but still mean husk, delivering the blunt message to President Obama that iKit manufacturing was never coming back to the US.
For the Times, that message is drawn out to indicate the same holds for much domestic manufacturing.
Corporate America de-industrialized the US. Now the infrastructure and everything else needed to be competitive is completely gone.
It exists in China and other countries and there is no way to rival it.
Weeks ago reader Chuck brought this up in the comments section of an earlier post. With the exception of arms the US can’t do manufacturing anymore.
The New York Times deals with the high end of manufacturing, describing the power Chinese industry can bring to bear on complicated things like iKit.
It goes without saying Steve Jobs was reprehensible when it came to labor. iKit is built under conditions which create despair, in a system which cannot be done in the US precisely because it’s the pinnacle of capitalist sweatshopping, government support and mass material resources.
We can rival despair. It’s the super-factories, resources and will to protect industry that’s gone for good.
There is much talk about the employment of Chinese “engineers” in the superfactories. But these “engineers” only have a bit more than a high school education. Certainly, Americans are capable of the same jobs. But the structure is gone, recreated much better there.
There’s one industry that didn’t fall to the great removal. You know it. Arms production.
In the US, it’s protected. Arms production doesn’t have to be efficient like the making of iKit.
Making Predator drones and their follow-ons is not subject to the fast turnarounds and tyrannical equipment modification demands of the consumer electronics industry. Arms manufacturers can do whatever they want and their employees don’t have Steve Jobs to worry about. They just have to worry about making sure Congress doesn’t slash the
budget too much.
There’s a short comedy movie in showing an alternative near future where an aggrandizing asshole scornful of everyone not like him, someone like Steve Jobs, insists all drones and guided missiles be insanely great at arms trade shows. He’s subsequently put in charge of defense procurement. And promptly sends it all to China, much to the delight of wealthy shareholders and petty toadies in the shit nations we sell the stuff to.
Might as well do the entire middle class on the spit. Why stop at just non-military?
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” economist Jared Bernstein told the newspaper. “If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
Made five or six years ago, this video, embedded last week, makes a joke about America not knowing how to “pull pipe.”
However, the middle class knows all about being forced to suck it.
General Electric, the largest US industrial group by market capitalisation, reported a 3 per cent rise in earnings per share from continuing operations in the fourth quarter, thanks to another strong performance at GE Capital, its finance division …
Jeff Immelt, the chief executive, warned of “continued volatility in 2012”, but said the company was preparing for it by investing in new products and technology, expanding in emerging economies and strengthening risk management.
He said GE Capital, which provided 46 per cent of last year’s post-tax earnings from continuing operations, was “safe and secure and rebounding sharply”, and the group overall was “positioned for a strong 2012”.
GE has been widely criticised for its low corporate tax rate, which has benefited from writing off losses at GE Capital, its finance division. The tax rate is rising as those losses are exhausted …
Earlier this week, the President praised his jobs council for their recommendations on how to improve employment in the US.
About the opposite of the populist stance the President has been taking since starting his re-election campaign. Perhaps coincidentally, later in the week the President gave an initial thumbs down on the Keystone Canadian oil sands pipeline project, one that was billed as an allegedly big jobs creator.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, also a member of the jobs council, avoided the meeting at which it handed in its report this week.
Instead, he wrote a dissent, part of which is excerpted here:
Perhaps most profoundly, the [jobs council report] does not ask the critical question: why is our country suffering a manufacturing crisis, complete with massive job loss and a structural trade deficit, when countries with higher overall taxes, higher wages, and more robust health, safety and environmental regulations are enjoying trade surpluses?
The answer lies in the view that we share with so many of our fellow Americans: that our country has become dominated by the interests of the wealthiest 1% at the expense of the remaining 99%. It turns out that a country run in the interests of the wealthiest 1% systematically underinvests in public goods; systematically silences, disempowers, and underinvests in its workers; and in the end is less competitive and creates fewer jobs than a country that focuses on the interests of the 99%.
GE & Jeff, best corporate song and advert, ever. Not like the one where the fake cancer patient wants to thank the token employees who bolted the GE CAT scan machine together.
GE over the land, they made a real good plan
Pay no taxes to the man, no cash money for Uncle Sam.
Fire all that labor now, they’re all just real fat cows
Gonna implement a real good plan, no money to the man
But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation …
Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.
But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed …
America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now — and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.
“America is not, in fact, a corporation.” A remarkable sentence to have run in the New York Times since the ideology that it is is held by many more than Mitt Romney. America has, in fact, been run like a predatory corporation for the benefit of those running the world’s other predatory corporations for the last decade, at least.
And the corporate motto, as ably shown in this old video, has been: Go fuck yourself.
Guitar Player magazine has bowed to the inevitable. The issue now on newsstands features a cover story on affordable guitars for the rock n roller. With one exception, they are all made in China or Indonesia. The outlier is manufactured in Canada and is on the high end of the price range the story dictates, instruments under $500.
All the guitars are either licensed American designs, copies of US designs, or fundamentally based on old US models. Many of them are made under American brand names, companies which now manufacture more in China than they do domestically, where production is relegated to high end custom pieces for the artisan (read wealthy snob) economy.
The magazine is a bit tortured by the turn of events, as evidenced by loud assertions in the introductory ‘graphs on how every guitar was rigorously tested for quality in workmanship by its reviewers. But its editors now well know that the buying power of a great deal of its readership, being American, is either destroyed or seriously impaired. (No link — GP magazine does not put publish its features on the web.)
And the only instruments average readers can afford are those made in China.
There is a bit of delicious irony here. The Chamber of Commerce being a trade lobbying group which represents so many of the large multi-national corporations which have mercilessly downsized American jobs, for the sake of cheap labor in China.
The hacking story is not novel. There is nothing new here, just the usual revelation that Chinese spying operations are aimed at everything.
Although true, most of the quotes — taken from the usual officials — take on a laughable quality, considering how much has already been either carted off to China, or ceded to that country, simply for a corporate shareholder’s grasping benefit.
“I don’t think the Chamber of Commerce has anything worth stealing, but it’s part of a pattern of the Chinese stealing of everything they can, and that’s worrying,” Clarke said.
“You stack all of that up and I think there’s a case to be made that this may be the greatest transfer of wealth through theft and piracy in the history of the world and we are on the losing end of it,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
“This is a national, long-term strategic threat to the United States of America. This is an issue where a failure is not an option,” said Robert Bryant at the National Counterintelligence Executive.
National long-term strategic threat. The greatest transfer of wealth in history. The sound you can’t hear in cyberspace is DD’s loud horselaugh when reading the pompous piffle of miscellaneous hypocrites and shoeshine boys.
Nice drink, not made in China. I heard about it from the famous cyberwar plutocrat.
Systemic features of the US American economic model have destroyed any concept of “awesome possibilities” for most of even the most wishful thinkers not in the 1 percent.
This week’s issue of the Financial Times focuses on the American employment picture. It’s unremittingly grim.
It touches on issues that have been discussed before on the blog.
1. Big corporate America’s dislike of American labor. The result, except for taxpayer-funded weapons production, was the shipping of everything to Chinese plants. The destruction of jobs became paramount and remains that way.
2. The work that cannot be outsourced is not enough to sustain a country as large as the United States. This means a gradual slide into the irrelevance of a banana republic with the world’s largest military. (Like a patient just diagnosed with incurable cancer, the slope of decline is gradual but inexorable and sure. However, it is expected in all cases that at some point the cancer load, in this case US economic dysfunction, becomes too great and the rate of decline accelerates into fatal catastrophe.)
3. Primary non-military/security growth jobs are all in parts of the economy which produce nothing and, except for moving money and creating money products, pay very little. They’re either in finance, food service preparation, sales of retail goods (all made in China) or the old DD blog pejorative — bedpan technicianry — workers who will be needed in the warehouse industry for the elderly and sick.
America used to be exceptional. Postwar, it maintained lower unemployment than the Europeans and a higher rate of jobs turnover … No longer. Today, somewhat remarkably, US joblessness is higher than in much of Europe.
[In decades past jobs] might be lost rapidly in a downturn but were swiftly reallocated to more productive sectors when economic growth resumed. That is not now the case.
“I know companies that employ senior engineers whose only job is to find ways to reduce the headcount,” says Carl Camden, chief executive of Kelly Services, a booming staffing agency based in Michigan. “The name of the game everywhere is to reduce permanent headcount and we are still only at the early stages of this trend.”
This is hardly a novel observation. — DD
… America is employing a decreasing proportion of its people.
Manufacturing is nowhere in the top 20, and such jobs cannot replace the pay and conditions once typical of that sector. “The food preparation industry cannot sustain a middle class …”
Some have moved from claiming unemployment benefits to disability benefits, and have thus permanently dropped out of the labour force. Others have fallen back on the charity of relatives. Others still have ended up in prison. In 1982 there were just over 500,000 in jail; today there are 2.5m.
There are no solutions in sight. Great inequality is intertwined with the inability of the country to mobilize its human capital. And the lack of interest and ability to maximize is human resources, historically, leads to decline and the inability to rise to any and all future challenges.
This is very much about class war, one conducted, since the Eighties, by a corporate monarchy imposed on the rest of the population, for the sole benefit of itself. There is no social compact.
The FT acknowledges this has made the 2012 election one about class warfare.
“This should be both welcomed and feared,” writes one columnist. “Welcomed because America needs an election focused on the economy.”
Finally, more of the obvious. Still, it is worth repeating:
Mr. Obama is not a class warrior. But he has not yet found a compelling way to address what lies behind America’s deepening inequities. The Republicans are even further from a solution. Let us hope class warfare marks only the starting point for a conversation.
The only thing missing is a detailed discussion of another big factor which accelerated the dysfunction of the American economy since 2000: The hardening of the state’s condition into one justifying a permanent war footing.
The permanent war footing separates one entire class of American workers — those who work for arms manufacturing and in the large homeland/natsecurity support role of finding and identifying enemies to use them on — from the ills affecting all other portions of the 99 percent.
The best song DD wrote in 2011. It should be on your critic’s list.
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary; we all get there,
eventually.
We lock up the poor for all the rich; and we do it right, without no hitch.
Welcome to the United States of Greed; it’s the only country you’ll ever need.
If you’re into frauds and useless devices — Uncle Sam, the best of choices!
The biggest danger, however, and the one most likely to go on for years, is the determination of China’s Communist dictators to dominate not only Asia and the Pacific but also, recalling the ambitions of Hitler and the Japanese imperialists, the world.
This danger takes several forms. One is the chance — unlikely but an acknowledged element in Beijing’s war plans — of a Pearl Harbor-like sneak attack on North American cities with nuclear-tipped missiles. Another is China’s stepping up economic pressures on capitalist countries — or taking over enough natural resources, particularly Canada’s oilsands, to change economic balances. Perhaps the greatest threat — but in the long run a welcome development — is the collapse of Communist China due to inflation, corruption and widespread popular protests. This might well ignite the fuses of an economic assault on the rest of the world, or a last-ditch nuclear attack. It would surely create chaos within China.
China to attack it’s primary dry goods customers with nuclear missiles, eh?
The middle class sees all US stores run out of stock of sundries. Wal-Mart, Target (and every giant box store like them), BestBiuy, all hardware stores, all consumer electronic stores, Bed/Bath & Beyond, sporting goods shops — all crash and go bankrupt. Salvation Army outlets become the sole garment distribution centers for the entire country.
Unemployment becomes massive and all-encompassing; a new recession to make the Great Recession look small ensues. People watch video of our bombers methodically destroying China’s military for a month. In fact, the military is the only place where employment is stable. After two months, television watching stops too as cable is disconnected for non-payment.
Fender Musical Instruments and Gibson guitars are put out of business when all their factories in China are cut off. The value of old, even mostly crap, instruments skyrockets. Old classic rockers enjoy revival as they are one of the only groups of musicians who can still go out and entertain locally.
In the next election, every incumbent — from top to bottom — is voted out of office.
With the flow of exports to the US and everywhere else cut off, China is also engulfed in a tidal wave of unemployment. Caught between the US military and rioting in the streets, the Chinese government destabilizes. All its new and fine military hardware is destroyed in detail. This takes four to six weeks.
The war ends. The world is dragged into a great depression, having lost what’s left of the buying power of the US and almost all its sundries and electronics manufacturing in the short term.
Happily, Apple goes out of business as manufacturing for all its iKit ceases and demand subsequently plummets for what’s left because of indigence in the US working class.
“David Van Praagh, a journalist who has covered many countries, is the author of The Greater Game: India’s Race with Destiny and China,” reads the tagline.
Paradoxically, the sports garment industry in this country was destroyed and moved to China. Which is where all the real stuff (and its counterfeits) come from now.
So Americans saw their jobs making such garments go bye-bye. And now, some Americans — trying to make a living selling counterfeits from the same place their jobs went, get to have their domains seized, too.
An investigation by Channel 2’s Jim Strickland revealed fake chips have been discovered at a Georgia military base and at a Roswell military supplier.
Technicians repairing an F-15 flight computer at Robins Air Force Base in 2008 said they discovered that four replacement microchips were fake just in time.
“Our job is to ensure that those who want to counterfeit parts, that we don’t allow them into the supply chain. It’s a battle every day,” said base commander Maj. Gen. Robert McMahon.
McMahon is battling back-alley operations like ones in Shenzhen, China. Video of laborers there revealed an operation in which workers peel chips off old circuit boards, Strickland reported. Some are reconditioned and relabeled as military grade …
“Anyone who has legacy-type products is forced to go into the independent world of electronics distribution, and that world can be a scary place,” said Dan Ellsworth, CEO of World Micro in Roswell. His company is a global components dealer. Ellsworth infiltrated the Shenzhen facility himself.
