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Krugman today:
It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort.
Art for all the songs I’ve put on YouTube, done months ago.
Depression or Great Depression, minor details to those stuck in it.
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“CareerBuilder,” one of the many odious American job hunting sites published a handy guide to the stealing of labor in the US.
It’s called “a quick guide to minimum wage.”
Readers can see how penurious all the red states are, either below the national minimum wage or with no minimum wage law at all. The federal minimum wage is a big $7.25. In Georgia, they pay $5.15. And in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, there is no minimum wage law at all. How surprising. (They may have lost the Civil War but …)
“Today, people still debate what should be considered an acceptable hourly wage, how changes to it might affect businesses and how much the government should be involved in the issue,” writes some minor minion of the devil.
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Redone after a couple years. Faster, harder, niftier guitar.
It’s OK for you to laugh. C’mon, don’t be a sourpuss, at 2 measly minutes, it’s funny.
Short version: The biggest business in Postville, Iowa, was a kosher meat-packing plant that employed illegals and abused them. The Feds swept in a couple years ago, ended it, while arresting and jailing the company owner on criminal counts.
Since Postville’s economy was primarily based on slave labor, even now — with the company under new ownership and operating legally — it has been unable to recover.
It’s a pattern that is everywhere throughout the US system, an economic model built upon stealing labor. And it does not seem surprising that after decades of relying on such a thing, any place that loses it by force remains unable to cope and rebuild.
Today, the meatpacking plant, under new ownership, uses the federal e-verify system to check workers’ immigration status. The hourly wage on the poultry line is higher than it was before the raid, but few Iowan-born locals work there. Ridding this small community of its illegal workforce, far from freeing up jobs for American-born citizens, has resulted in closed businesses and fewer opportunities. Even nearly four years later, many homes still remain empty, and taxable retail sales are about 40 percent lower than they were in 2008 …
One reason immigrant turnover in the town is higher than before the 2008 raid may be that legal immigrants have more employment options than the mostly undocumented Guatemalans and Mexicans who used to work at the meatpacking plant. They are also less vulnerable to abuse.
“The only good thing I see about this raid is at least it brought to the front page that our food is cheap in part because immigrants are exploited and are victimized,” said Sonia Parras-Konrad, a Des Moines immigration lawyer who represented, pro bono, dozens of the Postville detainees. Undocumented people are often afraid to report labor abuses and crimes for fear of being deported, she says.
Parras-Konrad and Brackett, the Lutheran pastor, both told Yahoo News that the undocumented population is on the rise in the town and speculated that the plant may be hiring illegal immigrants again.
It’s a terrible story with no morals and no happy endings. It shows only
that when one of the foundations of an economic system reliant on abusing people is torn out most of what was built on top of it comes down, too.
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This afternoon, another salesman using December 7th, this one to peddle his books on the peril of China.
Excerpt, after dispensing with the smokescreen of introductory paragraphs on Pearl Harbor:
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?
I wrote about what a war with China would look like, at Globalsecurity, with tongue firmly in cheek:
What happens, other than the military actions?
All goods from China cease.
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.
China Toilet Blooz done ala Captain Beefheart.
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Mythbusters, the popular TV program of minor science, engineering and explosive parlor tricks for the answering of trivial questions no one with sense gives a shit about, had a bit of a problem yesterday:
A “MythBusters” experiment went awry Tuesday, sending a cannonball blasting through a home, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said.
Sheriff’s spokesman J.D. Nelson told NBCBayArea.com that a projectile from an Alameda County firing range in Dublin missed its intended target and hit a home near Tassajara Road and Somerset Lane — going through one wall and exiting through another.
The Sheriff’s Office said it was a cannonball fired by a “MythBusters” crew that “took a few unfortunate bounces.” It was not known what the experiment entailed.
The zany team on the Discovery Channel TV series attempts to verify or debunk urban legends, popularly held beliefs and movie scenes by conducting experiments — repeatedly warning young viewers not to try them at home or without a parent.
“MythBusters has examined whether a collision with a bug can kill a biker (debunked), whether it is possible to shoot the hat off a person’s head without harming the wearer (debunked) …” reads the story, explaining the show’s durable appeal for a mass audience of miscellaneous dummies and very young children.
“The MythBusters’ Twitter account retweeted a post from one of the show’s cast, Grant Imahara, stating the team was to be working with artillery,” the news piece concludes.
Along with Ghostbusters, the SyFy channel show in which a crew of white trash morons employ lots of cheap electronic kit and night vision goggles in the pursuit of cold drafts, heat spots, thumps and creaking noises in empty houses, Mythbusters is the very pinnacle of exploratory entertainments for curious and inquiring but somewhat enfeebled minds.
When I was in the Boy Scouts of America for a blessedly brief period of time back in Pine Grove, PA, we had one senior scout who was the very epitome of the type Mythbusters appeals to — the stupid person who cannot be told anything but dangerously believes he has a talent for empiricism.
So he had done a bit of trivial reading about white phosphorus and convinced a science teacher in the school district to give him a bit of it as part of an exciting chemistry experiment he wished to show the troop in its weekly meeting at a church. Of course, this was back when school labs still were allowed to have interesting and potentially dangerous elements and compounds as part of science education.
The splinter of phosporus was brought in under water and the fellow explained how it would burn when exposed to air. He had a C02 fire extinguisher and I raised my hand to explain that white phosphorus would indeed catch fire. And then it would generate a choking smoke in the small room where we were and that carbon dioxide would only put it out briefly. When the fire extinguisher was turned off or had run out of CO2, the white phosphorus would again burn.
“Shut up, Smith,” he said.
As predicted, the white phosphorus caught fire and begin throwing off a good cloud of choking smoke. The CO2 fire extinguisher was employed, fruitlessly. Smoke filled the room, coughing broke out, and the church was evacuated. Someone eventually extinguished the burning phosphorus — a lot of it had been consumed — by covering it with sand or a non-flammable powder of some kind.
Perfect for Mythbusters, forty years too early.
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From the New York Post, one ninny uses December 7th to take the absurd and indefensible position that the US is militarily weaker now than it was then.
President Obama reassured Asian heads of state in Hawaii last month, “We’re here to stay??? — which is supposed to intimidate China into playing nice. Plus, we’re sending troops to Australia to show a “more broadly distributed military presence??? in Asia, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton terms it. Our Navy will step up operations there, too.
Yet that Navy is even smaller than in 1933, with up to 60 more ships destined for retirement with few replacements in sight. And our troops in Australia will number less than 2,500 — just enough to be provocative, but far too small to do anything effective.
Meanwhile, our troops in South Korea and ships and airbases in Japan are more vulnerable than anyone likes to admit. China’s generals and admirals have spent the last decade building the means for Assassin’s Mace, an all-out Pearl Harbor-style preemptive strike, from anti-ship and anti-satellite missiles to a tsunami of cyber attacks that would leave our forces blind and mute around the globe — and render our military presence in Asia a smoldering ruin.
Yes, no doubt about it. The US Navy is in worse shape than the years before the Japanese sneak attacked at Pearl Harbor.
This comes from someone parked at the American Enterprise Institute, the center of neo-conservatism. Which brought us alleged WMDs in Iraq and that subsequent fine never-ending adventure. Today its frontpage also recommends denial of global warming.
The American Enterprise Institute is a valuable part of new America. It’s a top manufacturer of our always noticeable and significant non-durable goods exports to the world: really bad ideas, frank lies and the white assholes needed to deliver them.
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UPDATED
Cryptome has posted a New Yorker profile of Peter Thiel, one of the crew that includes Elon Musk, the people who made a billion by creating PayPal. And then was one of the first investors in the Z-man of Facebook. (Related: Elon Musk — from the archives.)
Worth quite a lot and convinced of his mastery of everything, Thiel aspired to be one of the financial gurus of the universe. Subsequently, his hedge fund was crushed in 2008.
You have probably read many profiles like his. The characters are always the same, towering figures of wealth and intellect, convinced of their personal talent and magnetic abilities for collaboration with others of the same superiority.
It’s a pity the Silicon Valley hasn’t developed faster-than-light travel.
If it would such people could just get in starships and leave the rest of us models of sloppy thinking behind.
Some quotes are worth excerpting, if only for the capacity to deaden any further interest:
The topics of conversation included evolutionary theory, libertarian philosophy and the anthropic principle … “He [Thiel] would demolish your arguments in five minutes … He would ask questions like, ‘Should there even be a market for nuclear weapons?'”
He sees death as a problem to be solved, the sooner the better.
[Someone Thiel has funded] shows a slide that listed his hobbies and interests: cryonics, in case all else fails; dodgeball, self-improvement, personal digital archivization, super intelligence through a.i. or uploading.
The next stop, in an industrial park, a few miles away, was a company whose goal is to cure all viral diseases, by engineering liquid computers … It consisted of three men and women in their twenties, who were eating sandwiches and grapes … They were rebels from grad school …
Hsu would get a Thiel Fellowship. So would the Stanford sophomore from Minnesota, who had been obsessed with energy and water scarcity, since the age of nine when he tried to build the first every perpetual motion machine. “After two years of being unsuccessful, I realized that even if I solved perpetual motion we wouldn’t use it if it was too expensive”…
Thiel himself, perhaps out of sheer contrarianism, is uncertain about Darwinian evolution. “I think it’s true,” he said, “but it’s also possible it’s missing a lot of things, and it’s possible it’s not the most important thing.” Global warming is also “probably true” …
He is spending his time “building the machinery of freedom …”
Guaranteed pleasant dining company. I read it so you don’t have to.
For a publication that prides itself on being ever so smart, New Yorker editors must surely know how repetitive many of the inane idiosyncrasies found in the profile of Peter Thiel are.
It’s very Alvin Tofflerian and all the bad things that suggests.
There’s the usual obsession with living forever, seemingly always entertained by people who either have never seen someone dieing of cancer or some other singularly unpleasant or disfiguring disease up close (or who simply turn away from it).
You also find the standard yearning for one’s own no-rules-but-yours private principality — either offshore or perhaps on some orbital platform, free of taxation and the sight of the rest of the shit-stained world outside the environs of Palo Alto.
(It’s a requirement for such types. The founder of American Eagle, the small publishing house for computer virus books — as well as mine — was staunchly libertarian and keen on the idea of an island micro-nation. This could not be easily managed so he left the tyranny of the United States for Belize.)
Returning to living forever, one can gobble pills like Ray Kurzweil and embrace the Eighties-Nineties sci-fi annoying computer geek beliefs that advances in molecular science will eliminate all disease and that superhuman intelligence rendering one omnipotent will eventually arise through massive ubiquitous computing.
If you’re one of these computing masters the evening news must be an endlessly irritating experience. And so it is with Peter Thiel, according to the New Yorker’s piece.
The rest of the world outside the Silicon Valley, the US in particular, is so stubbornly unable to advance to technological heaven despite all the wonderful commercials on the power of smart-phones and the million or so apps one can have on them. Perhaps the bankrolling of rebel young people who brainstorm perpetual motion machinery or storing themselves cryonically when they are no longer fit enough to play dodgeball will help.
Paradoxically, the transforming achievement of the man “building the machinery of freedom” — PayPal — well, that agency, eight years after he sold it was one of the first to ban donations to WikiLeaks. How’s that for the machinery of freedom?
A fairly random selection of articles on Thiel (relying only on Google Instant, honest) — all show a startling number of ways to be repugnant.
The Akismet spam filter has been more aggressive with comment denial than usual. If you posted something and don’t see it, try again.
A long time ago I had a book by John Dvorak. It was on shareware telecomms programs and was about 800 pages. If if I hit you in the face with it, it would have broken your jaw.
Dvorak was a legend in computer trade publishing and, in my mind, not in a good way. He was one of a common breed, someone who turned out trade books eiither written by machine or a small number of office
flunkies.
Anyway, today Dvorak’s name rose to the top of the Google pile for a PC Mag piece he authored on the set-yer-HP-laser-printer-on-fire story.
Many have covered that news responsibly so I won’t get into the details here.
However, there’s one bit from Dvorak, worth pulling out, just to show things never change. He’s an empty machine who phones it in.
And here’s the proof, from a piece of comment on the HP printer flaw:
This reminded me of the other recent hack whereby a hacker got some code into a power plant or some such thing. The hacker began to turn the pumps on and off so fast that the mechanisms overheated and either stopped working or caught on fire.
John C. Dvorak — today’s example of someone so spent, fat, lazy and full of himself he can’t do the most elementary checking. This made worse by copy editors at PC Mag too cowed to do their job and save the man from himself.
Dvorak’s brief Wikipedia entry makes little mention of his work as a producer of computer books as really big paperweights .
However, it is refreshingly negative:
He has also gained some notoriety for making predictions that have turned out to be spectacularly off-target …
Dvorak is a skilled BBQ and grilling enthusiast, noted collector of Bordeaux wines and has been a tasting judge at various international events. He started his career as a wine writer.
You can tell all that.
Fuglemen and women for the arms manufacturers are common on news casts. And they will become moreso as the pleas to stave off defense cuts rise to the heaven. It will cost many thousands of jobs, they have said and will say.
This short video explains how their function is in the realm of duplicity. Arms manufacturing spending isn’t jobs rich when compared with equivalent dollars spent on non-military domestic needs, like teaching or infrastructure.
The private sector companies pushing defense spending invest in high end hardware, not people.
This is easy to see in 2011 because direct spending on people has produced a system in which a noticeable number of soldiers need food stamp assistance. Defense contractors, uh-uh.
This is the plutocracy manufacturing model, more for the small percentage of wealthy, nothing or very little for everyone else. It is the same as General Electric’s domestic manufacturing of giant jet engines and high end whole body medical imaging machines. (Both of which the company is currently pushing in a public relations tv ad campaign.)
These items cost a lot but the making of them, relatively speaking, doesn’t employ that many people. Which is why investing in teachers or infrastructure repair produces so many more hires.
In addition, when you hear that arms manufacturers, or companies like Boeing or GE or Northrop Grumman want the government to invest in scholarship money and training for more engineers and science people, it’s for the development of big ticket items and expensive weapons applications. In this we are talking really small numbers in the national big picture, a few thousand to ten thousand or so, as contrasted with the many millions out of work or chronically underemployed.
In the description to the above YouTube-posted video:
“Now that the deficit committee failed, war profiteer CEOs are launching an all-out propaganda campaign to protect their profit margins. They and their allies in Washington are working to protect the massive, corruption-filled war budget by slashing social safety nets that help create jobs. This would be a disaster for our economy.”
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