A good deal of this blog has been devoted to the Economic Treason and Empire’s Dog Feces tags over the past twelve months. Both deal with the only area where American manufacturing jobs are protected: arms manufacturing.
The rest of the country has been allowed to wither. The primary US export to the world is weapons. The country now leads in very little except minor innovations in the fields of smart bombs and unmanned flying killing machines which are of no benefit to anyone except the CEOs of the companies that make the things.
Imagine! The nation that invented rock ‘n’ roll and the electric guitar shipped all that stuff away and fired most everyone involved in making the equipment for it.
But the M1 tank, the F-16, the MRAPS, all the flying drones and idiotic robots and pathetic ray gun test systems — all that stuff is protected labor for which any price will be paid.
If [the weapons shops] were disbanded, the economy would be crippled by soaring unemployment, plant closures, and bankruptcies.
Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power, writes:
Most politicians understand … that weapons production is currently the number one industrial export product of the US. They know that major industrial job creation is largely coming from the Pentagon. Thus most politicians, from both parties, want to continue to support the military industrial complex gravy train for their communities.
I’m considering starting a new blog category. Permanent Fail has filled up quickly. Now we’re into the Decline and Fall stage. It needs its own category.
I’ve started discussing the complete disconnection of the military and national security aims with anything remotely of interest or value to the welfare of the middle class.
For want of a better tag on the blog, I’m using “Bombing Paupers” to describe the goal. It is directly connected to only a certain slice of wealthy interests in this country and, from the outside, it now always looks like the haves attacking the have-nots.
The defending freedoms in the homeland (or any variation on it) shit just doesn’t work anymore. In fact, it’s as risible a statement as the assertion that Fox News is “fair and balanced.”
It is easy to be against war because there are no real winners.
Whether one wins or loses the loss of life and treasure cripple both victor and vanquished, devastate economies and engender hatreds that last for generations.
America has seemed to have brought losing wars by a thousand cuts to an art form, articulating goals for military action that it is either unable or unwilling to achieve, and then going through a series of stop gap measures to preserve national pride in the face of inept leadership.
There are no strategic goals, that I have heard, for any of these current wars. Preserving democracy and freedom is a wonderful sentiment that has absolutely zero strategic implications. It is touchy feely. But there is absolutely no sense in what we hope to achieve strategically in either Afghanistan or Iraq. With Libya I can see two, the preservation of the Arab Spring, and the preservation of American power in the Middle East.
The structural thing, at Newsweek, increasingly used as a rationalization to stop worrying about massive unemployment. It’s all the fault of stupid workers with atrophied, obsolete skills.
There are plenty of jobs and employers can’t fill them fast enough:
[One] survey for the National Association of Manufacturers in 2009, near the recession’s nadir, found that a third of companies still faced shortages. These were largest for engineers and scientists and among aerospace, defense and biotechnology firms.
Arms manufacturing and bombing others in our detached wars is bully.
Newsweek allows a little doubt to creep in at the end. Won’t corporate America take a chance? Brother, could you spare a dollar?
There is no instant cure for today’s job mismatch, but it might ease if America’s largest companies were a little bolder. Surely many of them — enjoying strong profits — could make a small gamble that, by providing more training for workers, they might actually do themselves and the country some good.
We know the answer to that.
Readers will remember that last week Jeff Immelt of GE, he of the Prez’s job council, recommended pushing tourism — America’s a great place to visit (!) — and community college.
Anyway, where are the dependable jobs of good wage?
Obvious, really, if you read the New York Times. Border patrol and building more robots to bomb the have-nots of the world.
The US government and Pentagon successfully removed the citizenry for the equation for war. That has made the market stable.
Now the national security apparatus is involved, practically speaking, mostly in money-making and plinking off a wide variety of paupers it finds around the globe. And only very stupid people believe that killing scruffs in AfPak or Yemen or Libya, no matter how bad some of the individuals may be, does anything to defend basic freedoms and promote American value. (Yes, dronifying the pantywaists really has done the trick.)
The mightiest military in the world is for wealth-generation as well as plutocracy and toady protection schemes, from which no fruits are generally shared. While it’s out picking off bad guys and civilians too close to the action, the stuff at home worth defending blows slowly away in the wind.
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.
The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones …
There’s the official designated expert cheerleader on drones, Peter W. Singer — Brookings man, to vouchsafe something meant to sound clever and wonderful:
The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies” equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,” a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.”
Had to throw the “victims in rubble” part in to make the technology sound a little like it’s making the world a better place.
If you’re structurally unemployed and not able to get into arms manufacturing, perhaps you aren’t leveraging your iKit and cyberpersona enough.
At Mashable, no link, a consultant tells what you must do:
1. Leverage Your Social Graph
2. Use Augmented Reality and Job Search Apps
And don’t don’t don’t be short on Klout —
In today’s world, not only do you need strong hard and soft skills, but you need to develop online influence.
Online influence is measured in how many connections you have, who those connections are (and how influential they are), who and how many people are sharing your content and backlinking to your website and more. Klout.com, a site that measures online influence and gives you a “Klout score” … [Klout, incidentally, seems to be nothing more than an elaborate parasite economy app for digging into your life on Facebook or Twitter. If you don't consent to logging onto it through these accounts, you can't use it.]
5. Turn Yourself Into an Advertisement
Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0 and the founder of Millennial Branding, a full-service personal branding agency. He’s spoken about personal branding at Google …
Eleventy-thousand three hundred six and a buck two eighty “like” it on Facebook.
Taylors are high end acoustic and electric guitars. The company was always artisan. Now it’s a perfect fit for the new economy, high end instruments — like the Fender and Gibson custom shops — for old classic rockers, Nashville artists and the servants of the upper class who acquire them to fiddle about with in their spare time.
At Taylor’s 200,000-square-foot El Cajon factory, which is open for public tours, the company’s mixture of delicate hand craftsmanship and cutting edge technology is on display. One example of the latter is a robotic painting machine, built by Pinnacle Technologies Inc. of Italy for $250,000, which uses an electrical charge to increase the amount of spray paint that adheres to the instrument …
A roster of Taylor guitar owners reads like a guest list from the Grammys: Katy Perry, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, Taylor Swift, Prince, John Mayer, Jackson Browne, Sting, Paul Simon, Stanley Clarke, Bryan Adams and many others …
Scientist Joyce Jones, administrator at the Vaccine Research Institute of San Diego, owns two Taylors and is contemplating a third. She recently strummed an eight-string baritone at the company’s factory store that she said was “divinely inspired. I am basking in its glory.”
Taylor’s least expensive guitars — those costing around $300 to $1,300 — are made in a 300-worker factory in Tecate, Mexico. But the bulk of the company’s revenue comes from guitars that range from $1,900 to $10,000, and to as much as $20,000 for specialty jobs. Those are made by the 400 employees in El Cajon.
Pretty much all jump-on-the-grenade material for anything over 40 seconds.
This one has the added bonus of a strong Taliban-like religious message: Women should shut up in church, or something.
Dad punk rock and death metal isn’t any better than Dad classic rock.
All worship church bands are virtually be definition, Dad rock. This one tries to ameliorate the stain by putting motorcycles on the stage of the superchurch tabernacle. Or something like that. Couldn’t get much past the Life in the Fast Lane parts.
My dad rocks harder than your dad, says the description. Aiming low. I like that.
This is accidentally decent. And short. Sadly, it’s the kid who messes it up with enough overenthusiasm to make your neck sweat. If you’re the Dad.
If there was a button to push …
The zenith of Dad rock — rock fantasy camp with Slash.
Dad rock to the max: Playing a Kiss song with Paul Stanley. Dig Dad, looking a little like Bruce Ivins, on the keys.
Sadly, some women lack the usual female wisdom and cleverness which steers them clear of the shoals of Dad rock fantasy camp.
It was a toss-up between what was the more unintentionally hilarious thing on Yahoo this morning, the headline and the hapless editors at the place or the piece on a man named “Allinvain” who’d just had all his Bitcoins — half a million USD’s worth — swiped by malware.
2602 Facebook recommendations, the world arbiter of all that is worth a circle jerk good.
Representative Sander Levin, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee, has been one of strongest proponents of using the trade agreement as a carrot to encourage Colombia to make additional labor reforms.
Under the plan, Colombia committed to hiring 480 new labor inspectors, including 100 this year.
It also pledged a number of actions by June 15, including enacting laws to establish criminal penalties for employers who undermine the right to organize and bargain collectively.
Other actions due by then included publication of regulations prohibiting the misuse of worker cooperatives to circumvent labor rights; the start of an outreach program to inform workers of available remedies in labor rights cases as well as criminal penalties for employers who violate the law; and a series of inspections to ensure employers are not using temporary services agencies to thwart unions from forming and exercising their labor rights.
The Los Angeles Times tried to catch up to DD on the arms manufacturing beat on its front page today. In the process, the reporter misses the obvious — how the rest of the middle class not involved in arms manufacturing and the economy is shit in a can.
Instead, many intelligence-insulting facts and quotes are delivered.
Everyone wants US arms. And most of them go to pantywaist militaries.
There are two types of pantywaist militaries in the world.
Type 1: Our “allies” in NATO. That would be Little Tommy Atkins (Britain), Norway, Denmark, Canada, Australia — all the nations engaged in Bombing Moe. Currently, they’re in the process of making Lockheed and Raytheon CEOs happy because they must keep up the orders for smart bombs, cruise missiles and what not.
Type 2: Tyrannical nations in the Middle East, all uniformly detested by their civilian populations. That would be Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the little US toadies on the south side of Persian Gulf, and — of course — the biggest and most troublesome pantywaist of all, Pakistan.
Technically, there’s a small third class, too. Really small countries — think a few golf courses for wealthy people, maybe a zoo and high rises in a place the square mileage of Manhattan — with lots and lots of money and absolutely no reason to have massive US arms shipments except as shiny trinkets. That’d be Singapore, the famous wart on the tip of Malaya.
The largest-ever U.S. foreign arms deal was announced last October, when Saudi Arabia ordered $60 billion in military hardware in a multiyear pact. The Saudis’ laundry list of weaponry included Raytheon Co.’s 2,000-pound bunker-busting bombs, Boeing’s F-15 fighter jets and Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.’s Black Hawk helicopters.
Orders are also in from Morocco, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates.
Egypt is one of the largest customers for U.S. arms. But questions about its purchases were raised by critics in recent months when a column of American-made Abrams tanks rolled into Tahrir Square as protesters rallied against President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. [Ya think?]
The Obama administration has embarked on an initiative to reform export control that will roll back many of the restrictions on the way weapons are sold to foreign countries. Northrop, which specializes in systems such as drones and cyber security, is supporting the change, saying it will help U.S. companies win contracts.
“We have been so focused on protecting our technological edge that we have actually done severe and unnecessary damage to our defense industrial base,” Northrop Chief Executive Wesley G. Bush said at a recent conference in London.
The last statement is eye-opening, primarily because it’s a bald-faced brazen lie. Secondarily, because no one at the newspaper thought to blink or even attempt to frame it in the real world of the floundering US economy.
The only industry that has been protected in the US is the arms manufacturing and exporting base.
Everyone else has been sent to Hell, C.O.D.
Post note: There was a feeble attempt to interview someone in Washington from an arms control agency. However, even that was a pointless gesture. Arms control was thrown out the window a decade ago. Even the people still involved in it essentially gave up in the face of the onslaught.
The ongoing movement of jobs to countries where labor is cheaper, plus the development of new technologies, may mean fewer opportunities for some well-paid positions in the U.S. over the next decade, said Larry Katz, an economist at Harvard University.
“Employment growth has stopped, or even declined, among many middle-class jobs that are high wage” and don’t require a college degree, Katz said.
“A lot of traditional middle-class, upper-middle-class jobs have been disappearing … .
Workers making about $40,000 to $80,000 a year constitute the bulk of labor costs for many companies, and these workers may be on the chopping block, said Jeffrey Joerres, chief executive of ManpowerGroup, a Milwaukee-based staffing services firm.
“That’s your middle class,” Joerres said
If you had a push button that would have administered a short, sharp electric shock to the editors at the Los Angeles Times today, you would have used it.
When incapable of the significant, take another page from the GOP playbook. Wave your arms and make a big noise about how you’re stamping out trivial stuff that costs the taxpayer pennies when compared to the money being blown out the exhaust pipe for endless war.
In a message on the White House website entitled, “There’s a New Sheriff in Town,” Biden addressed potential cuts to spending.
“And I bet you didn’t know that your tax dollars pay for a website dedicated to the Desert Tortoise. I’m sure it’s a wonderful species, but we can’t afford to have a standalone site devoted to every member of the animal kingdom,” Biden wrote in the message also sent via email to supporters. “It’s just one of hundreds of government websites that should be consolidated or eliminated.”
