01.27.11
Posted in Cyberterrorism, Stumble and Fail at 12:00 pm by George Smith
An opinion piece that was solicited by Federal Computer Week back in December:
They’re everywhere — employed by government, the military and corporate America. And because we have come to the point that the United States is considered by some to be a bad global actor — whether you share that point of view or not — the government is faced with a problem it cannot solve. Its exposure is thought by many to be deserved.
In this new reality, as in nature, a vacuum is abhorred. The mainstream media no longer fulfills the role of speaking truth to power. It opened the door for [Julian Assange] and WikiLeaks.
The rest in “Get Used to the WikiLeaks mindset” is here. Including an amusing pic of yours truly.
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01.26.11
Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 12:06 pm by George Smith
The idea that American big business can relied upon as some manner of trusted partner in setting the nation right now seems laughable. And it’s why it’s annoying to see the president’s continued attempts to assuage corporate ire, as if it will make a difference.
Note this story on CEO whining in the Wall Street Journal. US regulations are onerous. The environment is uncertain. Et cetera.
In continuation of the coverage of various US shortfalls, most recently in production of strategic materials, it is illuminating to look at the recent history of the Mountain Pass rare earth mining operation, once owned by Chevron, the energy giant with the new slogan — human energy.
By 2002, rare earth mining in the US was finished. Chevron owned Mountain Pass and had stopped operation.
However, by 2007 the company was making a big noise about starting it up.
“[Chevron wants] to be part of the rare earth mining industry once again … ” reads the press release.
In review, this appears to have been gold-plated bullshit, an attempt to feather-bed the operation for a future sale.
A local newspaper continues from 2007:
[A Chevron rep] said the mine, which has one of the world’s largest deposits of the element Neodynium, was last used in 2002. Neodynium is needed to create powerful magnets used in miniature electronics such as MP3 players and hybrid-vehicle engines, demand for which is rapidly growing, Knoepfle-Thorne said.
The price of the product was (once) very, very low. It just wasn’t economical to mine, she said.
Currently the company is extracting the rare elements out of a supply of previously stored ore at the site. Mining operations of new deposits of the elements could begin in the coming months and years, Knoepfle-Thorne said.
The military is also a major user of the elements for everything from jet engines to Patriot missiles, she said.
All bathwater. By 2008 Chevron had sold the mine to a consortium which included — surprise — Goldman Sachs. The consortium was renamed Molycorp.
A notice reads:
Chevron Mining Inc. today announced that it has entered into an agreement to sell its Mountain Pass rare earth mining operations to Rare Earth Acquisitions LLC. The transaction is expected to close in late September, 2008.
REA is a special purpose company owned by Resource Capital Funds, Pegasus Partners IV, LP, The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Traxys North America LLC and Carint Group LLC. Included in the acquisition is the Molycorp name and upon closing, the company will be renamed Molycorp Minerals LLC.
If readers can see any visible corporate interests dovetailing with US national interest in clean energy innovation and/or restoring an American position in materials mining vis-a-vis the rest of the world, they’re better than I am.
However, if you’re only interested in short term profits based on cannibalization, offshoring, sales to Wall St. speculators and everything-must-go strategies …
Here’s a statement from the company’s page on its mining operations in the US:
Chevron also operates a molybdenum mine in Questa, N.M. Molybdenum is primarily used as an alloying agent in steel. We have scaled back development and production plans at Questa due to the dramatic price drop in the molybdenum market.
We continue to build on our record of safety. The Questa Mine was honored with the 2009 Underground Metal/Nonmetal Safe Operator of the Year Award and the 2009 Safety Innovator of the Year Award from the New Mexico Mining Association in cooperation with the New Mexico Bureau of Mine Safety.
Scaled back. Not profitable enough.
“Molybdenum production is concentrated in a relatively few countries, with China, the USA and Chile accounting for 80 percent of total world production in 2009,” reads this informative report.
“US production historically dominated world molybdenum production but as it declined Chilean output increased. Chinese molybdenum production was the largest in the world from 2002 to 2004 but declined in 2005 due to government-enforced mine closure. It then more than doubled between 2005 and 2008, to again become the largest in the world. US production, the second largest, rose steeply in 2004 and 2005, but is estimated to have fallen sharply in 2009.”
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Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 9:08 am by George Smith
mentafacturing: A pompous term for bullshitting, especially the variety associated with flacking for your offshored business, the innovative quality of cellphone applications, Facebook and/or American exceptionalism.
Usage: Mentafacturing replaced manufacturing as the primary export of American business resulting in a startling trade deficit disaster as well as mass unemployment.
— updated from the Joseph K Guide to US Tech Terminology
On SOTU — we got our Sputnik moment.
When Sputnik went up Bethlehem Steel still existed in Pennsylvania. There was a garment industry in Schuylkill County, where DD was born. And my father worked at the biggest aluminum extrusion facility in the world at the time, located in Cressona, PA.
Almost all of that is gone.
The United States was uniquely poised to take on the Soviet Union in 1957.
It is not in the same condition now. For one, the threat facing the country, as described so nebulously in the SOTU speech, is not an external one. The threat is of our own making.
The President did not address such challenges — the dilemma presented by American big business with no interest in American labor. Or the fact that US corporate goals no longer coincide with the goals of national renewal or providing security and a fruitful environment for the middle class.
Obama talked about investment in the future while announcing a freeze on domestic spending.
He talked about producing more science and math teachers without mentioning who would pay for them. Or what we would do with them given the fact that, even with science and math teachers, the subjects just can’t be taught in any realistic sense in US schools, as they stand now. And that a high school education that includes science is currently of no interest to the US job market.
One does not need any science education to assist in warehousing retirees, clean up unsanitary conditions, or be a cashier in retail selling goods all made in China. There is no demand for science and math in these growth “professions.”
Seriously. Science and math education in high school presumes there is serious desire and capability to move students into a college education career track that will build upon it, an educational trajectory that takes a long time and a lot of money. Unless I’ve gone completely out of my mind, that’s not the US in 2011.
Obama spoke of NASA and the space program, which was underwritten by the taxpayer — government spending (!) — without mentioning any idea of similar application for the present.
Here’s one.
Given the posts in this blog on the loss of capability in production and mining of strategic materials in this country. And their role in the development of clean energy futures globally, the President might have said the US will get back into the business of rare earth materials mining in a big way.
The President might have said he was setting up a government agency to take over the Mountain Pass mine from the private sector and to move ahead immediately in opening others like it.
The government would remain in the business, as with the developing space program after Sputnik, in order to guarantee use, demand and market for these strategic materials.
It would behave like China in this matter, aiming to eventually compete directly with that country, even to the point of subsidizing the production of the materials, knowing that in the very long term, the resulting jobs, technology and — ahem — innovation, might indeed have a big payoff.
That’s one example. But nothing like it was heard.
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01.24.11
Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 12:49 pm by George Smith
Krugman today:
Still, you might say that talk of competitiveness helps Mr. Obama quiet claims that he’s anti-business. That’s fine, as long as he realizes that the interests of nominally “American” corporations and the
interests of the nation, which were never the same, are now less aligned than ever before.
Take the case of General Electric, whose chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has just been appointed to head that renamed advisory board. I have nothing against either G.E. or Mr. Immelt. But with fewer than half its workers based in the United States and less than half its revenues coming from U.S. operations, G.E.’s fortunes have very little to do with U.S. prosperity.
By the way, some have praised Mr. Immelt’s appointment on the grounds that at least he represents a company that actually makes things, rather than being yet another financial wheeler-dealer. Sorry to burst this bubble, but these days G.E. derives more revenue from its financial operations than it does from manufacturing — indeed, GE Capital, which received a government guarantee for its debt, was a major beneficiary of the Wall Street bailout.
More graphical data taken from the US Department of Energy’s Critical Materials Strategy, which DD wrote of here:
US production of critical materials, which in many cases is effectively zero, the market left to China and, to a lesser extent, Chile.
The DoE report graphs potential supply and demand trajectories for strategic materials used in clean energy manufacturing and production, using current trends. This one, for neodymium oxide, used in magnets, is a standard example from the document. It shows that under current conditions, the US is showing virtually no interest in clean energy applications compared to what the rest of the world will be by 2025. This is shown in the pie chart at right. US clean energy rare earth demand is dark blue. The rest of the world’s clean energy neodymium oxide demand is green. Global non-clean energy demand is light blue.
The DoE report on critical materials contains much information to digest. What it does show is that US corporations have virtually no interest in US labor and domestic production, only in putting stuff together bought from somebody else. In this case, China.
Which is what has landed the country in a strategic predicament. What is good for multi-nationals is — here — demonstrably not at all good for the country.
This problem, one of many, will not be easily solved by a SOTU pep talk on innovation and competitiveness.
More drone rib-ticklers
Quote from USAF pitch on accelerating drone procurement:
Continental US estimated drone base expansion, 2008-2013.
Drones and base expansion, yes! Strategic materials use in domestic production of green technologies and energy, no!
What’s the difference?
Drones and base expansion, materials and labor underwritten by taxpayer.
Mining of strategic materials, US labor and overhead too expensive, easier to pay off China.
The USAF presentation on drones, from 2009, is here — at Cryptome.
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01.22.11
Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 10:44 am by George Smith
Jeffrey Immelt, Obama’s new advisor, in the Washington Post:
In the past two years, GE has created about 6,000 manufacturing jobs in the States, many resulting from investments in innovations such as advanced batteries, which we will make at our 100-year-old plant in Schenectady, N.Y.
Wow. Six thousand whole jobs. About ten times the extras used the in the latest GE commercials.
Paul Krugman, dismissing Immelt’s op-ed as “vacuous.”
So for when we get to all the talk about Sputnik moments and renewed competitiveness on the 25th, more edifying charts:
Top line = China. Checkmark = US. Source: Dept. of Commerce.
Cratering of US strategic materials/rare earth mining, ceding market to China because US production and labor ‘too expensive.’
Growth of US budget for unmanned killer drones. Expense and labor costs no object.
Growth in homeland security workers versus all other government regulatory jobs.
Steel, strategic materials — stuff for making things, destroyed almost beyond repair.
Alleged ‘innovation: General Atomics and killer drones.
Job creation: Anything having to do with national security.
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01.21.11
Posted in Stumble and Fail at 1:41 pm by George Smith
On the Sputnik moment — that point where your brain has stopped working, you can no longer tell the truth, and you’ve turned it all over to being a pleasing sounding hack, alleged to be coming in the State of the Union address:
“The great majority of the speech,” says press secretary Robert Gibbs, “will be on the steps … that we need to take in the short term that relate to jobs, and steps that we need to take in the medium and the long term to put our fiscal house in order, and to increase our competitiveness and our innovation that allows us to create the jobs of tomorrow.”
The president has been testing themes for his State of the Union speech for months. In December in North Carolina, he compared today’s economic challenge to 1957, when the Soviet Union sent a satellite called Sputnik into orbit, causing the United States to wake up and boost its investments in science and technology.
He has the opportunity in this speech to continue to be the president of all the people, which has been at the heart of his political appeal since he burst on the scene in 2004.
- Bill Galston, former Clinton White House aide
“So, 50 years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back …”
Or, from Howard Fineman, reprinted everywhere:
Expect the president on Tuesday to hearken back to that time, and to say we face another “Sputnik moment” — an economic one. The Soviet Union and the Cold War are gone. In its place are China and a more benign but still as crucial struggle for primacy.
Instead of threatening to blow each other to kingdom come, the United States and China are striving to out-produce and out-consume each other.
And the U.S. is falling behind.
In December:
Without detailing specific new proposals, the president told community college teachers and students it was time for an American “Sputnik moment” — referring to the 1957 Soviet satellite launch that jolted the U.S. into jump-starting its own space and science programs.
“We need a commitment to innovation we haven’t seen since President Kennedy challenged us to go to the moon,” Obama said.
The speech was a preview of Obama’s State of the Union address early next year and his 2011 agenda as he grapples with a divided Congress over the next two years, aides said.
“Right now the hard truth is this,” Obama said. “In the race for the future, America is in danger of falling behind. That’s just the truth. And if you hear a politician say it’s not, they’re just not paying attention.”
When Sputnik went up the US was poised to make a big muscle and move forward.
Now, the evidence is everywhere that a deadly atrophy is deeply rooted in the land.
Preparing to cheer us all on with a zinc-plated cliche which stupid people can smile and clap their hands to seems to be just more evidence of it.
Sputnik moment and DD’s law:
The appearance of the word Sputnik or any reference to a Sputnik kind of moment in any argument signals the person who dropped it needs a pie in the face.
Related rubbish: Invocation of the need for a new Manhattan Project or ‘if we can put a man on the moon’ …
Any suggestions? “We will build a new Hoover Dam of job creation, innovation and renewal …”
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Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 1:18 pm by George Smith
He appears onstage, makes his statement:
Our job is to do everything we can to ensure that businesses can take root, and folks can find good jobs,” the president said.
“We’re going to build stuff, and invent stuff,” said Obama, emphasizing the need to boost American exports to countries around the world, an issue that was a focus during the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao to the White House this week.
“That’s where the customers are. It’s that simple,” Obama said.
His choice of Immelt to head the competitiveness panel won applause from the Chamber of Commerce, which called it a “promising step” toward creating jobs and enhancing U.S. competitiveness. But the Alliance for American Manufacturing condemned the choice, dismissing Immelt as “an outsourcing CEO” whose appointment would “alienate working class voters.”
On GE and outsourcing, from various places over the last few years:
US industrial giant General Electric (GE) plans to outsource jobs to Bangladesh for the first time, presenting a huge opportunity in the outsourcing business.
GE, which employs around 40,000 people in India alone — mainly in the outsourcing sector — will initially provide jobs to a company founded by Bangladeshi expatriates in the US.
Mi3 Inc, based in the US, will invest around $300 million in Bangladesh initially to set up facilities to receive work orders from GE, said company officials at a function in Dhaka on Wednesday. — 2009, here.
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There is a buzz at the ground-floor cafeteria of Gecis, the back-office operation of General Electric just outside Delhi. About a dozen people are gathered round a corner, and more are forming a queue. “Have you got your free drink?” a woman in a green sari asks a colleague, lifting a can of Red Bull in her hand. The energy-drink maker is giving free samples of a new flavor. It’s nearly 4 p.m. in India, the beginning of the workday for many at Gecis, and they can use the energy boost. By the time their U.S. colleagues clock in, they will have done a fair amount of tasks for GE worldwide, from underwriting insurance and collecting delinquent accounts for its finance businesses, to performing cost analysis and tracking inventory for its industrial operations.
This is the world of offshore business-process outsourcing (BPO), where corporations farm out routine office functions to developing countries to take advantage of lower labor costs and higher productivity. — here.
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In the past, I have made blog entries on this issue of mainstay American corporations — like General Electric (GE) — benefiting from U.S. tax subsidies and the loyalty of American consumers who buy their products generation after generation to the tune of billions upon billions of profitability. BUT now these companies, solely in the name of corporate profitability, reciprocate neither their loyalty, nor duty to Americans to be good corporate citizens. Here we have a case in point about GE methodically shipping their entire energy efficient lighting manufacturing operation out of Ohio to China with the primary reason being given as lower labor costs. — from here.
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The road to Calcutta… Jack Welch scoffed at outsourcing as the culprit behind America’s anemic jobs growth. General Electric (nyse: GE – news – people ) garrulous ex-chief executive proclaimed the notion merely political, noting snidely that “it is election time.” He declared to a confab of the World Business Forum in New York that “It is the dumbest argument ever put out.” The legendary CEO warned leaders that to “stop two jobs from going abroad” would “kill 20 here.” Welch–once nicknamed “Neutron Jack” for his stance on vast layoffs–saw GE lead the vanguard in outsourcing to low-wage nations, such as ever-teeming India. — from here.
Go to the CEO of the company that made outsourcing to India a major business model on how to rebuild American jobs.
Genius. Would have never thought of that, really.
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01.20.11
Posted in Made in China, Stumble and Fail at 1:47 pm by George Smith
A quick note on comments: If you don’t see it at once it hasn’t been moderated, it’s probably in the spam folder. When I see false positives, and I see false postives with frequency, I send them through.
From AP, today:
Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest grocer, says it will reformulate thousands of products to make them healthier and push its suppliers to do the same, joining first lady Michelle Obama’s effort to combat childhood obesity.
The first lady accompanied Wal-Mart executives Thursday as they announced the effort in Washington. The company plans to reduce sodium and added sugars in some items, build stores in poor areas that don’t already have grocery stores, reduce prices on produce and develop a logo for healthier items.
“No family should have to choose between food that is healthier for them and food they can afford,” said Bill Simon, president and CEO of Wal-Mart’s U.S. division.
At a time of hardship, with use of food stamps at an all-time high, this is a laudable goal.
However, when one is dealing with Wal-Mart, everyone knows the company stands for merciless price-cutting by shoving everything it can into production in China.
Which has a disastrous contribution to the American business of making things.
A PBS Frontline special explained it in this manner:
Even as Wal-Mart was pushing its U.S. suppliers to be more efficient and promoting its “Buy American” program through the ’80s, the company bought more and more from Asia, according to Jay Moates, a former accountant with Wal-Mart’s overseas buying operation.
But to please American consumers concerned about the Asian threat, the retailer played down its buying operations in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and the rest of Asia. Following the brutal suppression of Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 by the Chinese Communist leadership, Walton feared a consumer backlash if Wal-Mart were seen as operating in China. He was also disturbed by charges of human rights abuses in his Asian suppliers’ factories.
To continue growing in Asia, Wal-Mart needed a buffer — a middleman or a buying agency that would purchase Asian products without showing Wal-Mart’s hand. According to the retired Hong Kong senior executive, Walton told Bill Fields, Wal-Mart’s head buyer, that he wanted to “get out” of direct involvement in Asia. “The decision was to go to an exclusive buying agency,” the buyer said. “The main reason for going into [the deal] was not to be exposed as going into Communist China.”
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By lining its shelves with its own in-house brands, Wal-Mart began competing directly, on its own shelves, with its national, household brand-name suppliers. “It makes them more efficient,” argues Ray Bracy, Wal-Mart’s vice president of international corporate affairs. “I suppose you could suggest that they would like to not have that competition. But it makes them better.”
The development of Wal-Mart’s house brands proved to be a watershed. Consumer surveys had established that Americans cared less and less about buying national brands: Low price trumped brand loyalty. In the period following Sam Walton’s death, when Wal-Mart’s sales slowed and its stock price began to stagnate, this consumer trend freed the company to ramp up the production of its house brands through unbranded suppliers in China, who now had privileged access to Wal-Mart’s 3,500 stores across America. The result was that Wal-Mart became its own de facto manufacturer, developing and designing products according to the taste of its customers, as analyzed by Wal-Mart’s supercomputer. Profits soared.
Privately, long-time U.S. suppliers expressed dismay. “They invaded our core business model,” said one apparel maker, requesting that his name be withheld. “Wal-Mart seems intent on managing the total product life cycle.” If the competitive pressures of Wal-Mart’s store brands continue, he said he would close his American factories, abandon his own brand, and try to solicit Wal-Mart’s private label business in China. “We call it ‘the race to the bottom,’” he asserted. “It’s sad because I see that productivity increases [in America] are still possible through automation. There’s room for improved efficiency. But it’s impossible [to stay here] with retailers going for cheap Chinese labor.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Every other US business in competition with Wal-Mart was forced to go to China, making themselves over as front brand names for goods made there.
For example, DD’s Hanes socks, those which develop holes after a couple washes, bought at Ralphs/Krogers in Pasadena. Made in China.
And although Pasadena does not have a Wal-Mart, it has a Target. Which one might think of as a poor man’s Wal-Mart, virtually indistinguishable. Everything in it made in China.
Which bleeds into this year’s developments.
Faced with a middle class of diminished buying power, even for Chinese made goods, Target diversified into grocery. The obvious logic is that people still absolutely must buy food.
And the problem which follows on from that is the same Wal-Mart-style application of price cutting.
With food stuffs, there is probably a great deal of room for having lots of it made in China.
Or to preferentially select for American businesses that cut costs by ignoring regulations (on the idea that no one will ever catch them or if they do, that the consequences can be dealt with as overhead) or which turn into fronts for pushing Chinese ingredients into the food chain, cheaper to get there than to make or harvest here.
In this way Wal-Mart became a conduit for melamine in pet food in 2007.
It is a short term shake-the-trees for whatever fruit can be persuaded to fall out strategy.
A longer term strategy would be a national leadership look at what has so diminished the buying power of the middle class that one must either lobby for more cheaply made food or increase allotments of food stamps. In terms of a national short term strategy, increasing food stamp allowances and budgets would even be a better solution than a corporate feel-good alliance with Wal-Mart.
News at the end of the year reports Wal-Mart profits off in the US because of the bad economy, and so moving to enlarge its operations in emerging markets.
It’s a vulture business model — loot what’s left and look to potentially greener pastures.
“Wal-Mart said it would reduce prices on fruits and vegetables by $1 billion a year by attempting to cut unnecessary costs from the supply chain,” reported AP.
This is toxic news dressed up in fancy packaging — a healthy and cheaper foods initiative associated with the First Lady.
The recent history of consumables in the US is that big American agribusiness often can’t be trusted with keeping health in mind when the press is on to reduce the price and raise the bottom line. And that the populace only finds this out well after the damage is done by the Dickensian characters who, inevitably, all attest to the great jobs they have created.
If readers get cable TV they’ll have doubtless noticed the current blitz of feel-good Wal-Mart advertising attempting to cast the impression the place is a great place to work. Even though it’s the swirling toilet vortex that sucked all American dry goods into the sewer and spat back made-in-China.
This also raised the question: “How do you make presumably healthy foods like heads of lettuce, carrots, sunflower seeds, various greens — for example, everything on the left side of Ralphs on Lake that’s not in frou-frou plastic bags — cheaper? Force illegals to work for even less? Totally eliminate the minimum wage?
Nicht verstehen.
Maybe I do. Walmart would like to be able to say that they’re offering a ‘healthier’ version of Hormel canned chili, or spam, or slightly less salty Lay’s Potato Chips — perhaps put some different minerals in them, less salt in store brand Worcestershire sauce, and so on.
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01.14.11
Posted in Stumble and Fail at 6:03 pm by George Smith
And get what you pay for.
The next item is too flabbergasting. You can’t make up better satire.
The idea that candy can’t be made in America — too expensive (!) — so it must be done overseas, like in Pakistan — our best international pal in the whole wide world. So it can be made with lead because regulation doesn’t add to the bottom line there.
And the name of the candy. Well, just read …
The FDA announced that Candy Dynamics is recalling some of its Toxic Waste brand candy. Toxic Waste in Nuclear Sludge, made in Pakistan, has been found to contain elevated levels of lead that poses a threat of poisoning, especially for children. Toxic Waster is made by Candy Dynamics and under the Circle City Marketing and Distributing of Indianapolis, Specific Toxic Waste candies recalled include:
Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Cherry Chew Bar (UPC 0 89894 81430 6), Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Sour Apple Chew Bar (UPC 0 10684 81410 7), and Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Blue Raspberry Chew Bar (UPC 0 89894 81420 7). Each chew bar has a net weight of 0.7 ounces (20 grams).
To date no injuries or illness have been reported in connection with Toxic Waste candy. Toxic Waste tested with
dangerous lead levels of .24 parts per million. The FDA allowable lead content is .1 ppm. No other candy from Candy Dynamics or Toxic Waste brand is affected by the recall. Impact Candy requests that consumers not eat purchased candy and contact Eileen O’Neal, of Candy Dynamics at (317) 228-5012
Candy Dynamics specializes the production of extremely sour candy. Sour Candy Drums are designed to look like toxic waste oozing from a nuclear waste drum. Toxic waste comes in candy spray, soft chews, High Voltage and Short Circuit super sour gum. Other brands of very tart, luridly colored candy include Impact Confections, makers of Warheads. Often these kinds of candies are made in China or another Asian country. The concern with foreign made candy, particularly candy made in third world nations, is that the production standards may not be on par with FDA approved levels.
I am sometimes persuaded there’s absolutely no way to fix a country as scrambled and screwed up as the United States.
From the FDA:
Circle City Marketing and Distributing doing business as Candy Dynamics, Indianapolis, IN, is issuing a voluntary recall of all Toxic Waste® brand Nuclear Sludge® Chew Bars, all flavors, Net wt. 0.7 oz (20 g) package. The product is imported from Pakistan.
A recent test performed by the California Department of Public Health has indicated that a lot (#8288A) of the cherry flavor of the above-listed product contains elevated levels of lead (0.24 parts per million; the U.S. FDA tolerance is 0.1 ppm) that potentially could cause health problems, particularly for infants, small children, and pregnant women.
The bad news is that Candy Dynamics won’t be destroyed by the scandal. They’ll just ride the storm out.
In a related matter, DD did postdoctoral work at the Penn State School of Medicine in Hershey, PA.
Yes, the famous Hershey. And — uh-huh– you could smell the chocolate in the air. And on many afternoons, you could smell peanuts being processed at the Reese’s/Hershey factory in the west part of town.
Between the medical school and Hershey chocolate, the middle class could earn a decent living in the place.
By now you know where this is going.
It was too expensive to make Hershey chocolate, the chocolate made in America, in America. So Hershey moved a lot of it overseas.
From a relatively recent news item, on the outsourcing of something as basic as ‘American’ candy-making:
The next time you buy a package of Hershey’s candy kisses, take a good look at where they’re made before you put your money down.
Chances are, the answer is Mexico, not Hershey, Pennsylvania.
That’s because the iconic candy company closed its historic Hershey’s East plant in its namesake Pennsylvania town, idling some 600 Bakery Workers (BCTGM) members. There’s still another Hershey’s plant there, BCTGM researcher Matthew Clark, who tracks the candy company, told Press Associates.
“But the exodus from Hershey has been going on for a long time,” he adds.
Hershey’s departure from Hershey – a company town dominated by the candy firm and Hershey Park – is a symbol of the increasing trend of the outsourcing and offshoring of U.S. factory jobs. That trend has been increasing in the last decade, according to a new report, Outsourced: Sending America’s Jobs Overseas, published last month by Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.
“They want to outsource, build plants in Mexico, shut down American factories and move stuff around,” Chocolate Workers Local 464 Business Manager Dennis Bomberger told a British newspaper, quoted in the report.
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01.10.11
Posted in Census, Stumble and Fail at 9:55 am by George Smith
UPDATED
Last week I mentioned once again that doing census work allowed one to see the truly radical poverty in Pasadena.
This in connection with Ted Nugent’s voicing of the usual far right cant that poor people are so because they are unproductive and lazy. It is an argument that seeks to reset any discussion on poverty and inequality by equating it with flaws in character.
Canvasing the downtown apartment complexes and housing developments off Colorado showed the wealthy and the very poor in Pasadena living side by side.
Here, as in many other places I would imagine, it is easy to overlook the bottom. In Pasadena much of it is hidden away in apartment complexes in fairly nice neighborhoods. Or stowed out of sight and mind in what look like nice big houses from the Forties and Fifties.
A step inside, however, always showed owners had subdivided these into tiny claustrophobic rooms, turning them into flophouses for the servant class.
None of this happened overnight. It is a consequence of the economic system that’s been in place in the United States over at least the last decade. In Pasadena, inequality and poverty collide with some of the highest rents and property values in the country.
The wealthy — the haves — had radically pushed up the value of land in Pasadena as part of the conversion of the city to as a go-to place (think Old Town on weeknights and weekends) in southern California and the expansion of the mansion district around the Rose Bowl. During the last five years, princely condo projects were started and completed along Colorado and Lake — actually almost everywhere — in bids to attract the young and upper middle class.
Much of the condo space around Hudson and Locust just on the south side of the 210 freeway, for example, is living space owned or administered by Oakwood Corporate Housing.
Oakwood is a vast empire, started by Howard Ruby. Some eyewash at National Public Radio is here where he’s touted as an environmentalist and photographer.
The Oakwood properties I canvased furnished temporary housing to a upper and upper middle corporate servant class. For lack of a better classification I thought of them as a fancy-pants type of migrant worker.
Many did not respond to their census questionnaires because they viewed themselves as temporary residents. For example, they spent most of their days flying here and there across the country. Think George Clooney in “Up In the Air.”
If one questioned a neighbor in an effort to gain information about their address, for instance, a common response was that such people were not home much because of ‘travel.’
Or the corporate migrant worker could be one who had been sent to southern California to do some semi-long term function by their masters.
And what they considered to be their permanent home — and place where the rest of the family lived — was elsewhere.
In any case, the census was required to categorize these addresses. And we had different line descriptions for varieties of temporary residence and procedures for enumerating their inhabitants.
These were the people who had not been hit quite as hard by the Great Recession. They appeared to still be working while those in the local service class hunkering in the dingier complexes or the flophouses that had once been fine Pasadena middle class homes had been really taking it in the shorts for some time.
“Would it surprise you to learn that Pasadena is the most unequal city in California?” is the question opening a recent 2007 article from the Pasadena Weekly.
“That’s one of the interesting facts now available from the recent release of 2006 data by the US Census Bureau.”
An interesting fact? Radical inequality is an “interesting fact”? [Shakes head.]
Keep in mind this was from 2007, a consequence of 2006 data. In fairness, things may still have seemed almost peachy. The Great Recession had not yet arrived.
I worked the 2010 Decennial census. And things aren’t better as a result of the Great Recession. In fact, they are much worse.
The weekly newspaper broke out some statistics from 2006:
In Pasadena, the richest one-fifth of Pasadena households — those with incomes over $123,641 — has over half (54.2 percent) of the income earned by city residents. The wealthiest 5 percent — those with household incomes above $255,106 — have over one-quarter (25.1 percent) of the income. Pasadena has a higher concentration of income among the richest five percent than the United States and California (both 22.1 percent) and Los Angeles County (23.6 percent).
In contrast, the poorest one-fifth of Pasadena households — those with incomes below $21,277 — combined have only 2.8 percent of residents’ income. Those in the next poorest one-fifth — those with household incomes between $21,277 and $46,375 — bring home only 7.6 percent of Pasadena’s incomes.
If we looked at wealth (stocks, bonds and other holdings) instead of income, the concentration at the top of the economic pyramid would be even more skewed.
Rising inequality and a skewed economy that only benefits the very wealthy leads to inefficiency and unpleasant death spirals. In Pasadena it’s obvious to everyone that the working people who provide the finery in the city’s restaurants, nice hotels and play places cannot afford to live here.
As a consequence they must either drive in from some much cheaper place of urban squalor or try to carve out a place to sleep with a bunch of roommates. Or rent a big closet-sized room rented out for still way too much in one of the previously referred to flophouses.
Reported the PWeekly:
Gentrification may be good for a handful of developers, but it isn’t good for most residents or for the city’s business climate. As the new census data suggest, Pasadena housing costs are skyrocketing beyond what most working families — including schoolteachers, nurses and nurses’ aides, bus drivers, security guards, secretaries, janitors, child care providers, retail clerks, computer programmers, lab assistants and others — can afford.
Rising rents and home prices are undermining our city’s economic, social and civic fabric. Our public schools are losing children. Many religious congregations are losing members. Youth soccer and baseball leagues, and other community initiatives, are losing volunteers.
Keep in mind, again, it’s census data from 2006.
Rising rents and home prices did undermine the city’s economic fabric and this has been compounded by the Great Recession. As a consequence lots of small businesses failed in Pasadena. And there is now no shortage of empty office space, rooms or housing. By example, one ritzy condo complex on Lake near the OneWest Bank has been conspicuously empty for the last two years.
If one has been at all observant over the last couple of years when walking or driving the city’s streets, one saw the evidence in cratered businesses, must-sell-everything signs, and turnover in store-fronts.
Paradoxically, prices still remain too high. Which has led to the phenomenon of owners who are care-taking, waiting around for things to tick upward again.
Previously, on the census in Pasadena — here. (Also see the tab at right.)
There is some irony in the fact that only an English news agency – not a local American one — was interested in a first-hand story from it.
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