Brown said he believed the will to tighten regulation was weakening in the face of lobbying by the financial sector.
“I do believe we’re going back to a race to the bottom,” he warned.
“There should be an international agreement, otherwise you’ll just have banks threatening to move from one country to another,” continued Brown.
“Britain was under relentless pressure from the City (Britain’s financial centre) that we were over-regulating. All through the 10 to 15 years, the battle was not that we regulated too little, but that we regulated too much,” he added.
Despite the backing of Nobel laureate economists, Barack Obama has never had any stomach for justice or equilibrium.
It would be great to read an honest third person account of him in college and grad school. Was he always a good-looking milchtoast masquerading as an intellectual?
Obama’s toady, David Plouffe made the morning rounds of the news shows explaining how last week’s debacle was a victory for the President. His face a fixed smile, Plouffe repeated “win the future,” “come together,” “act like grownups” and “for the American people” so many times. robotic or ‘on message’ didn’t do it justice. He was the very essence of trafficking in BAD.
You come to the conclusion that to work for the President you have to be a sociopath.
Take a look at this video of White House spokesman Jay Carney evading questions about Jeff Immelt of GE and you’ll see what I mean. It’s the same type of person, young and glabrous, whose job it is to lie professionally. A well-balanced person, if asked to do this, would have regular nightmares and a nervous breakdown after a couple weeks of it.
The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.
Echo’d by Krugman:
It’s one thing for Obama to decide that it was better to give in to Republican hostage-taking than draw a line in the sand; it’s another for him to celebrate the result. Yet that’s just what he did.
The judgment was apparently that it was OK to move policy in the wrong direction, because the economy was strong enough to weather the shock, and that it was more important to look centrist than to defend good policy.
Of course, that didn’t work out too well last year, did it?
Earlier in the week, Matt Taibbi derided Paul Ryan with a particularly savage characterization.
“All of these smug little jerks look alike to me [insert three or four Republican star names including Ryan’s]… they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups … They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.”
While their political views are radically different, down deep in the genes there’s very little difference between the David Plouffes and Paul Ryans.
I can’t take any more defeats fake gift-wrapped as wins or behavior as transparently reptilian as it gets.
The answer has always been obvious to me. But through inaction we are living the wrong one.
This post comes out of simple inspiration from a trip to Guitar Center yesterday.
The US invented rock and roll. It had Leo Fender, the inventor of the first widely used electric guitar, the Telecaster. And the founder of Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing, subsequently Fender Musical Instruments, the quintessentially American company founded on innovation in affordable products that gave joy to everyone.
And then you have General Dynamics Lands Systems.
The fundamentally American mega-corporate ogre, a company that makes the M1 Abrams tank and other armored fighting vehicles, most definitely not for giving joy to anyone except the mentally ill who get erections over military gear and the CEO of, well, GDLS.
Unlike the guitar, for use in endless war, selling to tyrannical regimes in the Middle East acting as toadies, and for continuing the rigged exercise of big corporate socialism.
Anyway, most of the merchandise, by weight, in the Guitar Center showroom in Pasadena is make in China although it conspicuously stills carries the names of famous American brands.
My friend needed a small 2-speaker PA system and power amplifier for his studio. And so we went into the live sound showroom at GC to look at PA speakers and power amps. After a number of minutes he’d narrowed his choices to Yamaha and Peavey merchandise.
He wanted to know where they were made. So I suggested turning them over and looking at the base plates where the speaker cables plug in.
The Yamaha was offshored from Japan to sweat shop labor in Indonesia. The Peavey — a famous American brand — was offshored to China.
“Which is better,” he asked me. He knows “China Toilet Blooz” by heart now.
I laughed and shrugged. So he picked the Yamaha because it looked better.
Peavey was a company founded in Meridian, Mississippi by Hartley Peavey. Peavey had worked for Fender and when it was bought by CBS and expanded to some detriment of its still very much American-made product line in the early Seventies, he left to form his own company and successfully exploited the perceived drop in quality.
In the years after Peavey established its name as a solid substitute of American-made guitars and amplifiers.
Now this is all gone.
The American manufacturers of rock and roll equipment have all offshored to China.
What remains in the US is essentially custom shop business. The American-made items are ten times or more the expense of the same models made in China. And the former are reserved largely for people with major label music contracts and that part of the upper middle and plutocrat class which dabbles in guitar playing. For them, the expensive American made guitar is a status symbol for a gilded age.
All down the line in the Guitar Center showroom, all the famous American-made guitar lines are now produced in China. Gretsch, like Fender, divided into two tiers. The famous big semi-hollow body guitars popularized in Nashville and Memphis, played by the inventors of rock and roll — the guys in the bands backing Elvis and Gene Vincent — are made in China. If you want to pay ten times or more for one, the premium models are still made here.
The Epiphone Casino, popularized by John Lennon and pictured here — now made offshore.
The middle class jobs and factories that produced those instruments which made the sound that went worldwide are gone. And this country, and the rest of the world, isn’t better for it. It was profit driven decision-making in a race to the bottom. And it destroyed tradition and a proud legacy in something the made the whole world a brighter place. You could be proud of working in a factory that made guitars and amplifiers for everybody in the USA.
And what jobs have we protected at all costs? You know the answer.
Tanks, rockets, missiles, bombs, jet aircraft, mines, tear gas rounds, and fighting ships.
All guaranteed by the US taxpaying middle class and inviolable.
U.S. ships delivered the 87th of 140 planned Abrams tanks to the Iraqi Army’s 9th Division earlier this month. The delivery is part of a $2.16 billion deal to ship the tanks and necessary logistics support vehicles to Iraq.
Built by General Dynamics Land Systems, the first M1A1s arrived in September. The deliveries are scheduled to be completed by the end of this year, when U.S. forces finish their pullout in December, [LTG Robert] Cone [USF-I] said in February before he returned to Fort Hood, Texas.
——-
The necessary parts have arrived in Iraq, but the country’s rudimentary logistics system cannot deliver the parts to military units yet. Iraq’s Army warehouses in Taji remain stocked, but the parts rarely reach the units. One Iraqi mechanic said he only receives parts for his Humvees twice a year.
“They have to figure this out, or we’re just going to end up with a bunch of 60-ton paperweights sitting out here,” [LTC David] Beachman [senior advisor] said.
Protect the manufacturing jobs for premium tanks for an army of Iraqi stumblebums. Yeah!
But protect the manufacturing jobs for non-military things — an everyman’s musical instrument — that arguably had a much larger and finer impact on the world? Fuhgeddaboudit!
Leo Fender died in 1991. If he were alive today he’d turn white.
The idea that the country of guitars and rock and roll would devolve into the country of computer-networked armored fighting vehicles and smart bombs is as disgusting as it is astonishing. Think about the state of affairs and you don’t know whether to shit or go blind.
With regards to tank sales to Iraq, J. at Armchair delivers a thought puckishly delivered as if pinched from a recent Dale Carnegie correspondence course: “But hey, if this model works for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, why stop now? What a great way to win friends and influence enemies.”
One could put it a different way. We influenced people worldwide and much more to the nation’s credit with the electric guitar than the M1 Abrams tank. The former, not the latter, is one of the reasons people liked us.
Paul Krugman’s recent blog posts take the pitchfork to Paul Ryan. He’s the man for the job, about the only one, considering how many times the latter has been called brave and courageous this week. (Click the links. The only good part is that the sarcastic articles have floated to the top of Google’s first page pile of excrement.)
Since Krugman’s blog is often the warm-up box for his twice weekly column, expect him to rip Ryan’s head off and crap down his throat — but in his uniquely gentlemanly way — on Friday.
Excerpt:
This isn’t a serious proposal; it’s a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking. — here
And:
This is ridiculous; it’s megalomaniacal. If Obama tried to claim that his policies would achieve anything like this, he’d be laughed out of office. — here
In any other western civilized nation but the US, having your work condemned by an economic Nobel laureate of Krugman’s stature would destroy a Paul Ryan. Not here.
And none of this will explain why the President will probably play ball with the guy.
Here’s what always happens when a big corporate shibboleth has really bad publicity.
About a week later a couple reporters from the ruling class will publish something contradictory. It was all a product of crappy reporting, they’ll indicate. And this will be used to stir the pot, get lots of eyeballs, and work toward guaranteeing that once again nothing can be done about the deeply immoral in corporate America.
Today it was the Huffpost, posting “the truth about ge’s taxes.”
The New York Times had it all wrong, said the reporters — Jeff Gerth (who used to be a top investigative reporter at the New York Times but who was now publishing this through the much lesser auspices of ProPublica) and Allen Sloan of Fortune.
Here are the best lines:
Why should you care about this? Because we all have a stake in how this plays out. Thanks to the uproar over GE, we now risk ending up with legislation that targets GE but produces all sorts of unintended consequences. Public rage can make for bad law.
Public rage can make for bad law. Savor the hypocrisy of it. Public rage is perfectly OK in the guise of the Tea Party and the November elections sweeping into power extremists who are now in full on war against the working class. But public rage against GE is bad. Public rage over layoffs (front page headline in today’s LA Times: Teacher hiring hard because of layoffs) and deprivation for everyone but corporate America, which deserves more bribing, is bad.
Read the entire thing — I’m not providing a link, it’s easy enough to find through Google — and you have the case of reporters who were also working the story and are now doing their best to grab their pieces of glory.
Except it won’t move the down marker. I’ve found that after a promising launch, ProPublica sucks. It’s a place where famous reporters who’ve been encouraged to move on or jumped a sinking ship go to die.
Anyway, even with Huffington Post’s eyeballs, the venue doesn’t have the muscle to change the argument.
Plus, it’s a bad pairing. You can’t be the front for the intellectual hoity-toity wealthy liberal and then expect some relatively brief piece defending General Electric to make people wince.
The rage over General Electric, from where I stand, can’t hurt.
Realistically, nothing much moves the corporate masters of universe of the US, anyway, not even tens of thousands of people, say, protesting in Madison, Wisconsin.
They know they can just shovel more money into political opposition work and lobbying and wait people out.
For example, Jeff Immelt isn’t going to leave Obama’s economy and jobs advisory board over any amount of shame heaped on him by current events. Forced to show up in the news, he tells people the equivalent of “Let them eat cake.”
And the President isn’t going to do anything unless it becomes so hot he’s forced to act. Jeff Immelt will need a solid boot in the pants and a firm “Good riddance!” to guarantee he’s put out the door. I won’t be surprised if our President never dumps him.
From ImmeltMustGo today:
It’s wrong for GE C.E.O. Jeffrey Immelt to get a 100 percent raise while asking middle-class workers to take major pay cuts — and all while leading President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Because we united on this issue, ABC and NBC did national television news reports on our push to boot Immelt. Mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post, The Nation, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Reuters syndication wrote stories. Insider Washington publications, like Politico, National Journal, Roll Call, and The Hill, reported on it, too.
Immelt himself was even forced to respond to us in an interview.
To get this much attention in corporate media over an issue of corporate influence in politics is a big moral victory by itself. But we’re not going for a moral victory. We’re going for an actual victory …
[The 200,000 who signed the ImmeltMustGo petition] got us a bunch of attention. But to get a victory, we’re going to need even more.
Surprisingly, over the weekend a much larger number of people than expected tuned into “GE and Jeff (Taxavoidination).”
Click the “watch on YouTube” button to see the view count.
The masters of corporate America shipped all non-military domestic manufacturing overseas. The only middle class making-stuff jobs remaining are those in artisan work for the plutocracy and the corporate socialism of arms manufacturing, still being underwritten by the people who’s jobs and livelihoods are being destroyed.
As for the rest of America’s work, the Internet has destroyed or grossly undervalued much of it.
However, readers will have noticed by now that the Internet’s work of crushing record companies, video production, newspapers, magazines and what not did not spark an alternative revolution in which the jobs and opportunity just transferred to others more intellectually lively.
What has actually happened is a great condensation. The wonderful magic of Google and social networking didn’t actually empower lots and lots of little guys. It just empowered the same old giants who dominate the top of search engines or who attract the most celebrity groupies on Twitter. Occasionally there has been room made for newcomers, just like the old-comers, except cheaper — like Huffington Post.
The winners, or the biggest, get the majority of the spoil ever more efficiently thanks to Google and the habits of human beings which predicate anything past results halfway down the first returned search page don’t count. Alternatively, whoever has the most followers or friends, just like back in high school, wins everything.
Tom Tomorrow made a comment on this last week on his shift of position to the DailyKos.
Too many papers have decided that they no longer have any use for this art form which grew in their stead, adapting itself entirely to their rhythms, and as that market contracts, there’s been no simultaneous expansion online. The niche that editorial cartoons filled in newspapers is almost entirely occupied by Daily Show clips online. Why do so few political sites feature political cartoons? Why did the Huffington Post, with verticals devoted to almost any topic you can imagine, never launch a comics section?
I’ve got a chance to help counter that trend, in some small way..
The biggest names, in this case he has to mean Jon Stewart, get all the spoil from a landscape that should have supported a lot more.
Jon Stewart was great two years ago. Now that you don’t even need a tv to see him several times a day — that it’s impossible to miss him for even a couple hours while randomly browsing — he’s sickening.
Boy it’s great that Jon Stewart’s omnipresence has shoved everyone else into the dumper, isn’t it? It’s just right and proper that one person in a country of 300 million should get absolutely all the spoil in his niche.
Anyway, back to the news story on all the businesses to leave — everything — because it’s all dying here:
Most of the industries share common reasons for their bleak prospects, including damage from advances in technology, industry stagnation and external competition, he says.
Because labor costs and regulations are high domestically, many manufacturers send their production to foreign countries. Downward price pressure from domestic wholesalers, retailers and consumers forces U.S. producers to cut costs to offer a competitive price. Many firms that cannot outsource have a difficult time competing …
Video post-production is another industry done in by the do-it-yourself opportunities presented by new technology. Once requiring specialized expertise, many of these tasks can be done on even an average home computer.
Companies such as Technicolor have suffered as a result. Industrywide, revenues have fallen 25% in the past decade to just north of $4 billion, with another 11% decrease predicted by 2016.
In terms of video post-production, here’s how technology worked. Exactly the same as it did for making music.
The software for doing it got into everyone’s hands. Every residence can make its own videos.
Like “Taxavoidination,” done here in Pasadena on the desktop.
In the old days, I would never have been available to afford video production for DD & the Highway Kings. That was for people with major record label contracts. But those contracts and businesses supported jobs.
Even if you cursed the structure and whims of the recording industry, it still furnished middle class work. Lots of upper class, too.
Now everyone, like me, can make a video and upload it to YouTube.
But “everyone” still can’t make any money from that.
A very smaller number of people, still associated with very big entertainment business, can. And people at YouTube, because they work for a company that provides the only pipe through which everything flows, can make money, not only from the eyes added from everyone who can’t make money on it, but also from the smaller number of very big players from the old industry. Those who’ve survived the great culling.
Case in point, YouTube pimping dogshit ‘promoted’ video at the tops of your vid’s ‘suggestions’ column. With “Taxavoidination” it’s been “What’s ‘Lemonade Mouth’?” by one of the old giants, Disney.
It’s enraging.
So there has been a drastic net loss in jobs and a concentration of riches in a smaller number of players, some of them only slightly different, thanks to the Internet and “technological” revolutions.
“Let’s say you set up business as a consultant or a contractor, something a lot of people have been doing these days. And, to make this a challenge on the tax front, let’s say you do well and take in about $150,000 in your first year.”
How to pay no income tax if you earn six figures, one of the most popular stories on the web, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal here
“Who says GE has all the fun?” concludes the piece’s columnist, Brett Arends.
So I sent him a copy of the official DD Taxavoidination vid, “GE and Jeff” along with a polite note.
Wrong venue, obviously.
“People get to think what they think,” said GE’s Jeff Immelt in the news on Monday or Tuesday. Why did he not go with the more elegant, “Let them eat cake”?
By empirical evidence, it’s impossible to shame sociopaths.
You throw up your hands.
One nagging idea is to find someone to run a challenge against Barack Obama for the Dem nomination in 2012. We all thought he had something and were subsequently taken as fools.
Matt Taibbi recently said something to this effect at Roling Stone. While only rumint, Taibbi indicated he’d heard Elizabeth Warren was one possibility, and that item is here.
Hit this up on YouTube. It won’t kill ya. A few of the criminals should get to see it, anyway, don’t you think?
On the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal, the loss of American manufacturing is explained. It’s entirely the fault of the government, sucking away new workers who want its teat because they’re weak and afraid.
This was startling to me since many of the things I write about have to do with preservation of manufacturing jobs in the US arms industry. And these private sector jobs are solely because of the US government, its politicians, and the taxpayer. And no one ever wants to eliminate them, not corporate America and certainly not conservatives.
Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t even enter into the WSJ discussion by pundit Stephen Moore, who mixes the usual business antagonisms toward local government workers with the national picture.
Again, it’s the rotten teachers’ fault because they can’t be fired. And everyone is apparently clamoring for the private sector to take over firefighting and police work.
One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.
Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.
“Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government,” the man writes. “Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring …”
Everyone’s going for the security. They don’t want to work for the private sector where they can be fired because it’s cheaper to use foreign labor — except for security work or weapons manufacturing.
In any case, we ran this economist’s graph on hiring by the government a number of weeks ago:
For the past eleven years the vast majority of federal government hiring has been in homeland security.
The WSJ piece, which I suppose you should read, does not make any mention that American big business — like GE — is fine with making weapons with US workers, because the government and, by extension the taxpayer, pays for it. There’s no talk of firing ‘underperformers’.
However, manufacturing of non-military goods by the same company? That’s another matter entirely.
“Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles,” concludes Moore. It’s their cowardliness, he implies. They don’t want to work for the private sector, which isn’t hiring anyone except those who are willing to work at jobs that don’t earn a middle class living, because they might get fired.
It’s an unusual argument. But it fits with the Ayn Rand-ian thing that you’re a weakling if you can’t make it as a millionaire or billionaire in corporate America. Ted Nugent spouts it all the time. The fired, the underemployed, government workers, unionized teachers — every manjack of them inferior.
The World Trade Organization has ruled that Boeing Co. received at least $5.3 billion in illegal U.S. subsidies to develop and build new planes, according to a finding of a report first issued in January but made public on Thursday.
The WTO trade panel’s report came in response to EU complaints, which had alleged that Boeing received almost $24 in illegal state subsidies between 1989 and 2006.
The public release of the ruling Thursday is the latest development in a six-year contest and will likely next go to a WTO appeals panel.
WTO say in its ruling that the EU has demonstrated the U.S. gave Boeing “export subsidies that are prohibited” and recommends the U.S. either withdraw them or “take steps to remove the adverse affects.”
The report details findings, which were first issued in private to the EU and U.S. in January. It says Boeing received illegal subsidies such as grants and free use of technology, from NASA, the Department of Defense, and the states of Illinois, Kansas and Washington.
These include $2.6 billion in NASA research and development programs, $2.2 billion in foreign sales corporation export subsidies, and various tax breaks and other incentives from several states and cities. The Defense Department also gave Boeing an illegal subsidy, the ruling says, but “the amount of the subsidy … is unclear.”
Finally, US government bribes routinely paid get the international stink-eye.
Subsidies for the biggest players in corporate America .. and the arms trade.
Cuts and the bottom of the barrel for everyone else.
I hope they’ve enough cases of heartburn and nausea to go around at Boeing today.
The austerians’ lunatics’ plan, if my reading comprehension is still good: (1) Public sector workers, like school teachers, fed workers, firemen, have to be downsized and the release of newly unemployed will force wages downward for everyone else so when that happen US business will hire more people for much less, and (2) contraction is the new expansion — no explanation necessary — because it’s self-evident.
Why? Because the only way the economy can avoid taking a hit from government cuts is if private spending rises to fill the gap — and although you rarely hear the austerians admitting this, the only way that can happen is if people take on more debt. So we have the spectacle of a government that inveighs against the evils of debt pinning all its hopes on an assumption that over-indebted households will dig their hole even deeper.
All in all, it’s quite a spectacle. It would be funny, except that millions of people will suffer the cost of this folly.
So if done in the US, the idea would be to cut things like food stamps so the people on food stamps, who may still have room on their credit cards, go into more high interest debt to the likes of Jamie Dimon/Chase so as to continue eating and preserve the lighting at night.
Even the most specious arguments are granted legitimacy simply for having been made. Every opinion, however uninformed, is seen as inherently valuable. No argument is too preposterous or dishonest to share …
It’s how so-called conservatives can insist that the Wall Street bankers who crashed the economy should keep their astronomical bonuses, but unionized public employees should give up their hard-won pensions. It’s how President Obama can tap General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to help “reform??? the corporate tax structure, even as the New York Times reveals that GE – with worldwide profits of $14.2 billion last year – paid zero U.S. taxes.
Abject illogic is a good way to describe the legal tax cheating practiced by GE and the president’s appointing of Immelt as an economic advisor.
GE and Jeffrey — with a borrowed Alan Jackson — here.
“Jeff Immelt — he understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy. And I am so proud and pleased to chair this panel, my council on jobs and competitiveness, because we think GE has something to teach businesses all across America.” — the President
One now assumes that such advice on competition means giving more of a green light to looting and offshoring labor.
