Here today, a story from the Wall Street Journal on US manufacturing work.
Baby-boomer retirement, a minor fall in the dollar and slight upticks in demand after the bottom year of the Great Recession have caused slight growth in manufacturing hiring. What the article also does not say is that many of the jobs are also dependent on arms manufacturing spending.
These jobs pay well, as readers of this blog know, but they’re still not anywhere near significant in terms of the entire US employment picture.
In fact, they’re a constant reminder of the two-tiered rigged nature of the US economic system, one in which manufacturing jobs for non-military production were all thrown away while weapons-making was preserved.
Manufacturers say the U.S. education system doesn’t produce enough students strong in math, science and engineering. About 5% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the U.S. are in engineering, compared with an average of about 20% in Asia, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation. In the most recent comparison of math and science test scores of 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American students trailed far behind those from China, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Germany.
While community colleges and technical schools struggle to keep up with demand for skilled workers, some prisons are trying to help. At California’s San Quentin prison, the machine shop offers training to prepare prisoners to pass exams demonstrating skills in such areas as operating computer-controlled lathes and mills. Some inmates get classes in calculus and trigonometry to help them work with machinery.
Swift-Cor Aerospace, a maker of airplane parts, has hired several former prisoners for its plants near Los Angeles and Wichita, Kan., and is happy with their work, says Cecilia Mauricio, human-resources manager.
As a graduate of Lehigh University when its sports teams were still called “The Engineers,” as opposed to the more modern, “Mountain Hawks,” I always look askance at claims that the US doesn’t produce enough people adept in science, math and engineering.
My experience was the opposite. During my years in advanced education this country produced more than enough. And they didn’t go away.
It was US business that just wasn’t particularly interested in hiring them.
Everyone wanted experience. And very few wanted young people who didn’t already have an in through acquaintance hiring, much less spending time — like a mere couple months — training people for the jobs.
What makes this story even more odious is the insinuation that prison is a good place to learn such skills, or that training programs there somehow produce workers who might be better than those you might deign to try out and train from high school.
What you’re probably not being told is there is some manner of systemic bribe in action here — a kickback from state or federal government given to firms that hire cons.
The other pernicious thing floated in this story, and others like it, is that it’s hard to train people to do the kind of work described.
It’s not.
It just takes will, some patience and the desire to remove the usual human resource impediments to hiring that dismiss everyone who doesn’t look like a pure tabula rasa lily-white gift to American business.
And it’s worth saying again: Prison-training for employment in some minor area like specialty aerospace manufacturing is more of an indicator of the odious quality of American business and hiring practices rather than of some place where precious skills are nurtured and maintained.
The common element is prison labor as a potential cheap exploitable resource for arms-manufacturing firms. You see, they don’t have to train the people. It’s done on the taxpayer’s dime while enjoying the hospitality of the authorities (or her majesty, as the usage was coined in England).
When DD has seen stories in the alleged loss of math, science and engineering skill in this country, they have almost never been linked to concerns over loss of general innovation or a true middle class national edge.
In the boardroom, it’s as if the Great Recession never happened. CEOs at the nation’s largest companies were paid better last year than they were in 2007, when the economy was booming, the stock market set a record high and unemployment was roughly half what it is today.
….
Companies analyzed by AP granted their CEOs about $1.3 billion in stock in 2010, up about $300 million from the year before. They awarded stock options worth $702 million, or about $27 million more than the year before.
….
Meanwhile, pay for workers grew 3 percent in 2010, to an average of about $40,500. The percentage increase was twice the rate of inflation, but the average wage was less than one-half of one percent of what the typical CEO in the AP analysis made.
….
Some companies are doing what they can to prevent [embarrassment]. Last month, General Electric revised the terms on 2 million stock options granted to CEO Jeff Immelt in 2010. The changes came after GE was criticized by ISS.
Under the original terms of the grant, Immelt, 55, simply had to stay at GE until 2013 to get half the stock options and until 2015 to get the other half.
Now, he can’t exercise any of the options until 2015, and they depend on performance targets.
Immelt, of course, is the boss at the US’s best corporate tax cheat and chairman of Obama’s infamous jobs and economy advisory council. The one nobody can get him kicked out of.
Keen observer’s will have noticed GE is spending lots of money of TV advertising, trying to spruce up its image, mostly as a maker of medical widgets.
I’d post the obvious video. But at this juncture, why bother? The masters of the universe are back on top.
From the Associated Press today, on Wal-Mart, the infamous mega-business that led the charge to undersell all American dry goods and have everything shipped to China:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. remains atop the Fortune 500 list even as it struggled to keep its U.S. customers coming in the door.
The world’s largest retailer held onto the top spot for the second year in a row thanks to gains at its international stores.
Fortune Magazine, which ranked companies based on revenue for 2010, released its annual list on Thursday. It was filled with examples of how rising fuel prices are affecting the economy. Wal-Mart was followed by the three largest American oil companies: Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips.
Fortune said that America’s top companies profited by boosting productivity and cutting jobs.
They helped tank the economy and destroy middle class earning power. Now let’s cheer for them to do it everywhere else.
If you live outside California you probably haven’t heard the tale of fail concerning the state’s new driver license.
It’s been going on in slow motion for months.
And it has resulted in massive backlogs of unfulfilled license renewals, people driving without valid licenses because they have no other choice, and the boondoggle of using a company — L-1 Identity Solutions — that’s cornered the market on US production of passports and driver licenses (it has 85 percent of the market for the latter.)
It is yet another example of the opposite of a free market. It is rather, a more standard story of a US company that has inexplicably soaked up all the business in a certain area, become a single source, and — as a result — left everyone greatly inconvenienced and without recourse while providing inferior service.
Since late last year L-1 Identity Solutions has had a series of failures, poorly described in the press, in manufacturing California’s new license.
The failures were so profound that at one point 80 percent of entire lots of license production were deemed defective.
The CA Department of Motor Vehicles processes 40,000 licenses a day.
So any screw up in the pipeline in a state this large immediately cascaded into a problem affecting everyone. As the renewals piled up, an awesome barrier of delay and inadequacy was created.
By February, the Sacramento Bee had reported a backlog of 850,000 waiting to receive new licenses. At that point, the state instituted an e-mail point on the DMV page so drivers could inquire as to the status of their renewal. The volume of queries crashed the system.
A friend of mine waited about a quarter of a year for her new license.
At one point she had to apply for a temporary through the DMV, a process that was also, naturally, backlogged.
As for myself, I’ve been waiting for almost three months for the new license. My current license expired almost two months ago. In the meantime, the state began issuing automatic temporaries to fill the gap. They are valid for ninety days. My temporary arrived this week.
However, as with everyone caught in this high-tech trap, there was a window in which I had no valid driver license.
Since almost all Californians over the age of twenty depend on their auto-transportation, this presented a huge number of drivers who, if pulled over, would have no valid paper. As a response, the state informed police officers to run such drivers, when they were stopped, through their computer system. If it returned information that the renewal fee had been sent in that acted as verification of license.
But this is now also the time of the TSA and needing a valid photo ID — like a license — to get on an airplane.
I’ve seen no statistics on people who just abandoned the idea of flying if caught by the license “outage,” so to speak.
However, I was one of them. My mother died in Pennsylvania when I had no valid photo driver’s license and no temporary. Flying to PA was out. So I missed the funeral. (In full disclosure, we weren’t close. But it would have been nice to have had the option to consider, not something unilaterally removed because of a screw-up at one of America’s taxpayer-funded homeland security companies.)
And I am also sure many other people, for any variety of reasons, just gave up on the idea of flying because of the license fiasco.
This is no accident. That’s how corporate America, at its best, works. It takes some effort to get past walls of obfuscation and even the mandarins of Google can’t fix it.
L-1 came into being after 9/11 and expanded explosively.
Most of us remember where we were and what we were doing on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
For Robert LaPenta, president, chairman and chief executive officer of Stamford-based L-1 Identity Solutions, that day’s terrorist attacks led to an epiphany about U.S. defense, and a company aimed at filling the huge, suddenly apparent, gaps.
“I watched the towers come down from my offices on 600 Third Ave.,” said LaPenta, who was president of a company he co-founded, L-3 Communications, at the time.
“It was that event that really was the genesis, the starting point of me beginning to think about a new business that ultimately spawned L-1,” he said in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Newspapers.
“I realized on that day that we spent $600 billion a year on aerospace, defense, ships, planes and weaponry, you name it,” LaPenta said. “None of those things really mattered when it came to what transpired on 9/11, where 20 terrorists with basically false driver’s licenses and a $25,000 budget were able to inflict the biggest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.”
……..
Homeland Security Today magazine named L-1 among its Rising 10 of 2009, a list of companies that promise to grow quickly in coming years because of either recent contracts or their overall positioning within expanding areas of homeland security.
Homeland security issues will fuel much of L-1’s future growth, LaPenta said, adding that about 80 percent to 90 percent of L-1’s business comes from public sector customers such as federal, state, local and foreign governments.
“Over the next three to four years, governments will still be bulk of the growth,” he said.
We were in Iraq and our products are now being deployed in Afghanistan,” LaPenta said. “They include jump kits that take biometric information and do matching to identify people in the field.”
“We are a prime provider of intelligence gathering, mission planning, mission analysis, cyber-security and imagery analysis and we do a lot of counterterrorism work for the agencies, which I cannot go into too much detail with,” he added.
LaPenta said the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the unsuccessful “Christmas bomber,” who tried to light a plastic explosive with a syringe sewn into his underwear on Northwest Flight 253 near Detroit, will ensure future demand from government customers.
It’s worth noting puckishly that L-1 Identity’s current mishandling of CA driver licenses would have certainly slowed any 9/11 bombers’ desires to quickly acquire them.
The 9/11 attackers’ strategy was procedural and based on system exploitation, not on high-tech stuff embedded in newfangled documents.
Just as the California license imbroglio was warming up late last year, this article on more of L-1’s gadgets hit Wired on-line, part of the Empire’s Dog Feces beat (aka security tech news to give the nerdy-boy crowd erections):
In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops use handheld devices to take iris scans and thumb prints off of detainees and put them in vast databases to distinguish insurgents from civilians. Now your local cops are getting in on the action.
L-1 Identity Solutions, a four-year-old company, makes the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection System (HIIDE), a mobile device that digitally records someone’s iris, fingerprint and facial characteristics “to create a comprehensive database on the enrolled subject.??? The tool, which has earned high marks in Iraq and Afghanistan, is marketed to cops, as a way to avoid taking suspects to booking stations,
In California, we’d still like our driver licenses.
DMV Director George Valverde said the vendor, L-1 Identity Solutions, has struggled with color accuracy, the raised lettering and the positioning of images of California icons, including El Capitan in Yosemite and the Golden Gate Bridge. L-1 was the only bidder on the five-year, $63-million job, Valverde said.
The DMV issues more than 8.25 million driver’s licenses and ID cards annually. Some days the agency strives to distribute as many as 40,000 cards.
But when production on the new cards began, 80% of the cards in some daily batches contained errors. In such cases, Valverde said, the agency would return the entire batch to the vendor. Complicating matters, some days the vendor delivered no cards, and the agency quickly fell behind its usual pace.
…..
“Color [in the license] seems to be the biggest challenge,” Valverde said … Lisa Cradit, a spokeswoman for L-1, said the company’s policy was not to comment on issues related to customers.
Of course they wouldn’t. People here still want their licenses, though. And they’d probably wish ill on the firm if they knew who was responsible. Now they just know the thing has been a major pain-in-the-ass.
Thanks to one national security infrastructure company of scumbags.
Here are a couple of videos of economist Dean Baker explaining things recently. Think of him as one of the few other guys like Paul Krugman, or vice versa.
In the first segment, near the end he discusses one remedy for the trade imbalance with China. The dollar is over-valued, he informs. If you remedy that, then the trade imbalance has a chance to shift. It doesn’t fix the abandonment of non-military manufacturing and how that would have to be reconstituted but it’s a lot better than idiotic suggestions to impose tariffs after the horse has been out of the barn for years.
In other matters some pundits and Dems think it means something for the President that at town hall meetings, in a place like Hazleton, PA, older people have gotten up to call out their GOP rep crazies.
Pennsylvania, freshman Lou Barletta was rebuked by a 64-year-old woman who wanted to know why he backed “a plan that will destroy Medicare.” (“I won’t destroy Medicare,” Barletta responded. “Medicare is going to be destroyed by itself.”)
Setting aside the fact for a moment that Democrats have never shown any facility for sustaining an argument against extreme right GOP policies with regards to the old white voter demographic, this is still the hinterland of Pennsylvania, fer cryin’ out loud.
Except in Dauphin County, where African Americans live, and State College — where the lib’ral perfessors and students live — nobody’s going to be voting for Obama in 2012. The GOP mostly thinks he’s not an American and yesterday will make no difference. Except for Philly, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Hershey and State College, it’s finished there.
Following continued attacks by anti-hunting groups to ban traditional ammunition (ammunition containing lead-core components) under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) of 1976, Representative Lou Barletta (R-Pennsylvania-11) became an original co-sponsor of bipartisan legislation (H.R. 1558) to clarify the longstanding exemption of ammunition and ammunition components under the act. The Hunting, Fishing and Recreational Shooting Sports Protection Act is being championed by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) – the trade association for the firearms, ammunition, hunting and shooting sports industry. The act also calls for lead fishing tackle, similarly under attack from anti-hunting groups, to be exempt from the TSCA.
“We applaud and thank Rep. Barletta for co-sponsoring this common-sense measure,” said NSSF President and CEO Stephen L. Sanetti. “This bill will continue to ensure that America’s hunters and shooters can choose for themselves the best ammunition to use, instead of unnecessarily mandating the universal use of expensive alternatives.”
“The economic growth of America’s firearms and ammunition industry continues to be a bright spot in our country’s still ailing economy,” continued Keane. “Passing this important legislation will help to ensure that our industry, which is responsible for more than 183,000 well-paying jobs and has an economic impact of more than $27.8 billion annually, continues to shine.”
The argument was to ban old lead shotgun pellets because of hunters who don’t collect their kills because they’re too stumblebum. The kill is then carrion and when it gets eaten by scavengers, the lead pellets also take down the animals that eat it. Two for the price of one, so to speak.
What we have seen, he said, is “a massive shift in capability from the U.S. to China. What we have done is traded jobs for profit. The jobs have moved to China. The capability erodes in the U.S. and grows in China. That’s very destructive. That is a big reason why the U.S. is becoming more and more polarized between a small, very rich class and an eroding middle class. The people who get the profits are very different from the people who lost the wages.”
That’s very destructive. Ya don’t say!
Recommendation: Instead of sending drones to Libya, bomb GE.
The Empire’s Dog Feces — section, “America’s best-est places to work!”
Not long ago, Kyle Maxwell had a bright idea. The 25-year-old effects artist thought DreamWorks Animation needed a panini machine in its cafeteria, so he e-mailed CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, a legendary Hollywood mogul whose credits include Shrek, Kung-Fu Panda, and Megamind. At the next company-wide meeting, Katzenberg publicly thanked Maxwell for his suggestion and ordered that it be done.
Within the week, DreamWorkers were chowing down on bespoke paninis, and Maxwell had acquired a mover-and-shaker rep to go with his computer-animation chops. “Now I get all kinds of weird e-mail from people at DreamWorks,” says Maxwell. “They’re like, ‘Hey, can you get us a new staircase?'”
Bespoke paninis. If you had a button you could push to destroy the person who came up with that expression, you’d use it without a moment’s hesitation.
Zappos, Las Vegas:
The online apparel and footwear retailer famously includes “Create fun and a little weirdness” on its list of core values. Applicants are carefully screened to make sure they can cut it in a corporate culture where rules are few, professional titles include “cruise director,” and colleagues frequently stage spontaneous parades down cubicle row.
This quirky zeitgeist appears to have survived Amazon.com’s 2009 acquisition of Zappos. Job interviews still take place in rooms with zany themes, including Cher’s Dressing Room and an Oprah-style talk show set where candidates sit on a couch next to their HR host. Standard interview questions include “On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird would you say you are?”
There’s no right answer to that question, says recruiting manager Christa Foley, 37. “We’re looking for people who don’t take themselves too seriously,” she adds. “Somebody who gets into an argument with us about the definition of ‘weird’ will probably not be able to handle a parade with cowbells.”
Perks include free lunches, 25¢ vending machines (all proceeds go to charity), and a full-time life coach on staff. And customer service is a religion at Zappos: All new hires are required to work in a call center during their first month on staff, even if their jobs don’t involve customer interaction.
If you patronizes these people you not only hasten the decline but also encourage morons.
Over the past months, we’ve seen a fascinating phenomenon. The public mood has detached from the economic cycle. In normal times, economic recoveries produce psychological recoveries. At least at the moment, that seems not to be happening.
Public opinion is not behaving the way it did after other recent recessions.
The left hand column shows federal spending on unemployment, food stamps and social security, the huge bulge in social safety net spending because of the broken economy.
“At some point something is going to happen to topple the political platform — maybe a debt crisis, maybe when China passes the United States as the world’s largest economy, perhaps as early as 2016,” writes Brooks in today’s column. “At that point, we could see changes that are unimaginable today.”
Perhaps we should wish for the GOP to suicidally push the country into default and bring about that crisis, if only for a chance to be rid of David Brookses.
What he’s trying to say but is too timid to go for is the country is ripening for revolt but except for Wisconsin, can’t quite get it together like they have in the Middle East yet. It’s clearly not getting done through elections.
The horizontal axis starts at 1991. The vertical axis tops out at just below three hundred billion dollars for 2010, the number that results after you subtract US exports to China from the stuff we buy from that country.
As far as the US middle class is concerned, this country makes virtually nothing non-military but cars, SUVs, wine, beer, prostitutes and high end goods for the plutocracy. Everything that was made here was shipped off by US multi-nationals to China. And that business took off during the Bush administration, slowing only momentarily in 2001 as a consequence of 9/11.
Readers will note it stumbled again in 2008-09 as a consequence of the Great Recession. Wall Street blew up the world economy and demand plummeted on main street in the face of mass layoffs.
If you stare at the graph long enough (a larger version is here), you must virtually arrive at the conclusion that it’s not fixable.
The bottom has been ripped out of the US boat. Full stop. And our leaders and businessmen, through a combination of greed, inaction and malfeasance did the job on us. China was just the enabler.
Look at the slope on the line. There’s no coming back from this level of disaster in our lifetime. What this means for the middle class is obvious.
The President and the ruling class’s pundits, as well as the apologists for the plutocracy, continually make assertions that the US must be retrained for manufacturing jobs of the future.
This is all bullshit. No one in China hired by US multi-nationals needs retraining in any plants making stuff for Apple, Boeing, or Fender and Gibson guitars.
It is, rather, a fob argument used to place the blame for economic evisceration on the alleged failings of the general populace.
The graph makes clear that the US sells minimally to China. Statistically, its insignificant in terms of the larger picture, so any additional arguments on opening up their markets, or the Chinese government allowing its currency to float freely, seem pretty much more bullshit aimed at covering up the underlying calamity.
We sell China some cars and SUVs, one supposes, perhaps meat, booze and some novelty candies.
The graph does not show US arms manufacturing. Outside of cars and jet engines, which are going away fast too as Boeing and GE continue to outsource overseas, weapons (as an exercise in socialism for the benefit of the corporate sector), are the only things this country now gives the world in terms of material goods.
This graph, however, published last year by the New York Times, does make a nice bookend to mine.
This was the “reprise” to China Toilet Blooz on US of Fail. Fashioned as a Captain Beefheart-like tune, the video is of Tom Friedman getting hit with a cream pie, overlain with his standard miscellaneous hogwash on the imagined virtues of China, other than cheap labor. In this particular case, as if it’s participating in some green revolution centered around plastics, to fight global warming.
The quotes were taken from a column in which he dug up one US businessman, who operated “plastic mines” in China, the poor man lamenting on how much he’d like to have jobs here but the US guvmint and people just won’t support him.
Lyrics:
I bought a new toilet
It was made in China
That’s were all the jobs went
Nothing could be finer
You buy that toilet
It was made in China
Crap in a hole!
Crap in a hole!
Crap in a hole!
Buy a bag of lime
They still make that here
This is what makes Donald Trump’s recent claims about fixing jobs lost to China so laughable.
Trump proposes adding a 25 percent tariff to Chinese goods. Since China makes everything the middle class uses as daily sundries, there are no options to “buy American” left here.
Such a step would immediately be felt as a big price hike aimed straight at the US middle class. It would be debilitating and would probably cause an immediate decrease in demand, putting even more people out of work. Of course, the economic contraction caused by this would also cause layoffs in China in the manufacturing sector.
But it would almost assuredly again tank the US economy, or the part of it still based on middle class consumer demand and not Wall Street financial products.
So, how about the jobs left, those in retail, selling all the Chinese-made goods we used to make.
“Suppose an alternative history in which big-box stores, Wal-Mart and others, were unionized,??? he says. “You could easily imagine that you could have a large number of service-sector workers who were, if not like autoworkers, like manufacturing-sector union workers in the golden age of private-sector unions.???
But that’s impossible now. It doesn’t fit with the plutocracy.
No surprise, anymore, the GOP is just about kicking down the disadvantaged, in their eyes, defending the wealthy from parasites –everyone else.
Nothing from the bunch startles. You expect regular bursts of crazy angry cruelty from the politicians swept into power as a consequence of despondence and Obama’s do-nothing political malfeasance in 2010.
Under a new budget proposal from State Sen. Bruce Casswell, children in the state’s foster care system would be allowed to purchase clothing only in used clothing stores.
Casswell, a Republican representing Branch, Hillsdale, Lenawee and St. Joseph counties, made the proposal this week, reports Michigan Public Radio.
His explanation?
“I never had anything new,??? Caswell says. “I got all the hand-me-downs. And my dad, he did a lot of shopping at the Salvation Army, and his comment was — and quite frankly it’s true — once you’re out of the store and you walk down the street, nobody knows where you bought your clothes.???
Under his plan, foster children would receive gift cards that could only be used at places like the Salvation Army, Goodwill and other second hand clothing stores.
The plan was knocked by the Michigan League for Human Services. Gilda Jacobs, executive director of the group, had this to say:
“Honestly, I was flabbergasted,??? Jacobs says. “I really couldn’t believe this. Because I think, gosh, is this where we’ve gone in this state? I think that there’s the whole issue of dignity. You’re saying to somebody, you don’t deserve to go in and buy a new pair of gym shoes. You know, for a lot of foster kids, they already have so much stacked against them.???
Casswell says the plan will save the state money, though it isn’t clear how much the state spends on clothing for foster children or how much could be saved this way.
It would be dishonest not to mention that America has always been full of people like this. In the Seventies, they were plentiful where I grew up. This country has always provided a special fertilizer in the heartland for them — a mix of toxic Calvinism, twisted views of religion in which faith is recast as a set of rules and fables for the damnation of others, and civilization only a few hundred meters removed from Deliverance.
And so the pinched cruelty was a common thread over tense holiday meals in the Smith household, used for browbeating reflection on how the elders never had anything when they were kids and so etc…
The difference between then and now: The lunatics whose distinguishing features were stupidity, lack of perspective, dishonesty and a complete absence of charity weren’t massed and in power. They were just more assholes you knew sitting around a table and taking it out on family members and neighbors.
Like Wisconsin and a large number of other states, Michigan now has a good case of buyer’s remorse, one it can do little about. I don’t care to bet on the odds that 2012 will fix it.
