Our leaders, notably Congress and the administration, are increasingly desperate to rationalize reasons for little recovery in the middle class and high unemployment. So they look to Wall Street, which is doing fine, and economists to tell them it’s all the little people’s fault.
Structural unemployment is what it’s called. It’s an argument that makes the case that rotten is the new good, that nothing can be done because the country has moved on and the unemployed are so because they lack what the country needs for the future. So corporate America has decided to discard them.
They lack the necessary skills.
Except the American middle is not lacking in skills. Working for the census last year made this abundantly clear. The census’ labor, taking a great deal from those knocked into unemployment by the Great Recession, had all kinds of skills and varied training. And they were largely educated. You could not characterize them narrowly — as flawed in their education and training — which is what structural unemployment arguments always try to do.
Today’s news — from this article — delivers all the rancid goods needed to justify walking away from the national mess in the three minutes time it takes to read it.
For example: “Swonk believes that one of the lasting outcomes of the recession will be a skills shortage driven by educational inequality.”
Which, from experience, is rubbish.
The very next graf has one source disputing it, a position also taken by Paul Krugman:
Bart Hobijn, an economist at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, argues against the skills mismatch theory for driving up natural unemployment. Hobijn recently studied the unemployment rate among recent college graduates — who are theoretically resistant to the effects of a skills shortage — and found that they were faring just as poorly in the labor market as others, implying that skills mismatch isn’t having much of an effect on the natural unemployment rate.
Then the man finds a different reason to explain recalcitrant hiring. It’s the extended unemployment benefits, he reasons. The implication that it made people to lazy too find minimum wage work compounded by the fact that employers don’t like hiring low wage workers because, wait for it … they are lazy crap. Although the words “lazy” and “crap” don’t enter the discussion.
The US is great at making weapons and parasite economy stuff — financial services and monetized networked circle jerks (Facebook, Twitter, etc) — and virtually nothing else. And these industries don’t broadly spread their riches to the overall populace. The good fortune comes only to those directly connected to them — a feature of countries which are either saddled with or adopt rising levels of inequality.
One can marvel at the stubborn optimism of the 24-year old, of the ability to get a book contract, and the revelation of information that it’s important to hold onto your laptop. Or you’ll really be in a world of hurt.
Read it. It’s one example of a nation that’s given up on its people.
On the other hand, if you’re in arms manufacturing, things are jolly good.
Weeks ago I predicted Raytheon and others would get great numbers from our Bombing Moe adventure, even once we abandoned the job. Others, like Little Tommy Atkins, for instance, would shoot off all their nice American-made smart bombs and missiles. But Mo would still stubbornly refuse to die or run away, presenting them with the need to order even more from America’s armorers.
And such has been the case. Business at Raytheon has been wunderbar.
From a press release:
Raytheon Company (NYSE:RTN – News) announced today that its Board of Directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.43 cents per outstanding share of common stock. The cash dividend is payable on August 11, 2011 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on July 6, 2011.
Raytheon Company, with 2010 sales of $25 billion, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, homeland security and other
government markets throughout the world. With a history of innovation spanning 89 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art [missiles] and [war] support services. With headquarters in Waltham, Mass., Raytheon employs 72,000 people worldwide.
`It seems to me that Canada is not alone in misunderstanding its munitions’ requirements,” [John Pike] said. “What kind of war did Canada think it was going to fight? Did they think this war was going to be over quickly or that the Americans would drop all the bombs?”
But Adm. Giampaolo Di Paola, the chairman of NATO’s military committee, has denied that the alliance’s member countries are running low on ammunition.
Uh, yes, yes they did. Now they’re having to reorder stock and so disappointed.
You may have wondered why I stopped updating Bombing Moe.
Well, when Uncle Sam wandered away from the fight because it was obvious people in pick-up trucks who jump up and down on tanks we just bombed don’t make much of a military, I — like anyone with sense — knew it was all over.
Little Tommy Atkins & the Flying Desert Rats weren’t going to get the job done. Neither was Sark. And the Flying Emirs of Qatar are just an assortment of high button bag and henchmen.
After leading the first stage of the Libyan intervention, the US earlier this month withdrew its forces from offensive operations, ceding control to Nato and its Arab allies.
Britain, France and the rebels are increasingly frustrated that neither other Nato allies nor the Arab states are prepared to attack Gaddafi’s forces, insisting they will only help enforce a no-fly zone.
With Britain and France bearing the burden of the ground attack operation, there are fears that the allies lack the military force to shake the Libyan regime.
Mahmoud Shamman, a spokesman for the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council, said the Nato had allowed Col Gaddafi to regain the initiative on the battlefield since it took over from the US.
“When the Americans were involved the mission was very active and it as more leaning toward protecting the civilians,” he said. “Nato is very slow responding to these attacks on the civilians. We’d like to see more work toward protecting the civilians.”
A French official suggested that the US should deploy its specialist ground-attack aircraft including A-10 Thunderbolt tankbusters and AC-130 Spectre gunships, assets that Britain and France lack.
Did they actually think that a bit of the ol’ shock and awe would work this time around?
You’ll have noticed the US news wandered off the topic, too. War? What war? Oh yeah, that one with the guys in pickup trucks getting shot up by Moe after the professionals lost interest.
At a time when companies are redoubling their efforts to find alternative energy sources, the idea is to reproduce and speed up a process which has taken millions of years and which has led to the production of fossil fuels.
“We are trying to simulate the conditions which existed millions of years ago, when the phytoplankton was transformed into oil,” said engineer Eloy Chapuli. “In this way, we obtain oil that is the same as oil today.”
The microalgae reproduces at high speed in the tubes by photosynthesis and from the CO2 released from the cement factory.
Every day some of this highly concentrated liquid is extracted and filtered to produce a biomass that is turned into bio-oil.
The other great advantage of the system is that it is a depollutant — it absorbs the C02 which would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.
“It’s ecological oil,” said the founder and chairman of BFS, French engineer Bernard Stroiazzo-Mougin, who worked in oil fields in the Middle East before coming to Spain.
Ecological oil, as if the new ‘oil’, when burned doesn’t release all the alleged CO2 used making it. All the laws of chemistry, mass action and combustion rewritten.
Five to ten years and we’ll replace Iraq, says the man.
“US oil giant ExxonMobil plans to invest up to $600 million in research on oil produced from algae,” it is said.
About the same amount of money for the first two weeks of the war on Libya. That’s pretty niggardly, considering they’re going to rewrite history and physics.
“Companies, in particular those in the aeronautic sector, have shown keen interest in this research, hoping to find a replacement for classic oil,” it concludes.
And finally, the dilemma of training and weaponizing the Libyan rebel rabble. Can the CIA do it? Or special ops? And what heavy weapons can we ship them, cadged up from eastern bloc and Chinese surplus on the arms trader market?
They would have more ammunition if they did not keep firing into the air … Decisions are often made after heated arguments or by following whoever shouts loudest and despite the courage of some, the tendency is to flee in disarray …
Posting has been low because I’m taking care of an ailing cat for a friend who has to be away.
Anyway, I was eating dinner with another acquaintance yesterday when I mentioned one line from the atrocious blog I linked to over the weekend.
“How was California lost?” it asked plaintively. Keep in mind, this is from someone who puts a picture of Ronald Reagan at the top while peddling a T-shirt with the somewhat baffling Tea Party-esque motto: “This Abdication Nation will not stand!”
So my friend almost fell off the chair laughing when I quoted this line to him:
Was it the communism and socialism promulgated through Hollywood?
It is momentarily amusing in it’s total lack of clue. Here’s a young guy who has been to the other side of the world — Afghanistan. But geographic travel, even being part of a long war, hasn’t broadened him. He dumbly believes Hollywood was a source of commies.
However, it’s also a pathetic indication of why the US isn’t much of an overachieving country these days unless one counts the executed technical perfection of bombing a feeble enemy’s military.
Next, small items from Bombing Moe. When the A-10 Thunderbolts and Spectre gunships were ordered up for Libya it more-or-less confirmed that we’re in a war aimed at dissecting all of Moe’s military.
These are very close air support assets, used for blowing tanks and artillery out of the way in deserts, hamlets or cities, so the rabble parade of small pick-up trucks with old commie machine guns mounted in the back can pass by and flash the victory sign to western cameras. At those times, of course, when they’re not stopping the parade to jump up and down on one of the blown up remnants of Moe’s army.
QAF Flying Emirs! Odyssey Dawn 2011! We stayed out of the way and helped fence the oil!
Spam funny of the day: More fake neighborly comment on politics and national debt by the bot-person trying to get an ad pointing to a service that facilitates offshoring and tax-avoidance in Panama published.
So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.
Welcome to America in the second decade of the 21st century. An army of long-term unemployed workers is spread across the land, the human fallout from the Great Recession and long years of misguided economic policies. Optimism is in short supply. The few jobs now being created too often pay a pittance, not nearly enough to pry open the doors to a middle-class standard of living …
When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.
G.E. is the nation’s largest corporation. Its chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. You can understand how ordinary workers might look at this cozy corporate-government arrangement and conclude that it is not fully committed to the best interests of working people.
Not fully committed. Ya think?
I’ve never commented on other posts at SITREP on Globalsecurity but a post today takes the piece of cake.
It’s in the slot for Derek Reveron, a professor at the Naval War College. At SITREP he generally contributes a variety of pep talks on Afghanistan.
The post, is by someone named Gary Good, recommended by Reveron, professor. Good is a soldier who regularly deploys to Afghanistan and the piece is here.
It’s on Afghanistan, too, and leads to the author’s blog. One sentence jumps out.
And not in a good way:
We are here because me must Make Might Right.
Anyway, after reading it I was curious about the contributor’s blog. It’s here, called GoodWrites, where the fellow calls himself “The Writer.”
It’s understandably disappointing.
Wha’ happen’d to California, it asks. Was it the stinky hippies? And all the illegal immigrants cheating up the representation? And what about that 2010 census and all the Democrats?
Was it the drugs and free love in the by-gone 60s?
Was it the change in the law that required the Census to attempt to count illegal immigrants and then apportion Congressional seats based on both citizens AND illegal immigrants?
Was it the communism and socialism promulgated through Hollywood?
What was it that killed this wonderful, beautiful state?
Actually, there was no change in law requiring the census to count illegal immigrants. Census-takers, and the census, did not ask whether a human being living in a residence was a citizen or not. It was not part of the mission. And there was no category on the census form for
legal or illegal status.
But it has always been the census’ mission to make the best full accounting of everyone living in the United States, something census workers patiently explained many times to all those polled.
Anyway, I think the appropriate response to this is: We are here because me must Make Might Right.
Moving along to Bombing Moe. Readers now know when referring to an armored column, rebel, in Libya, we always mean a line of pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in the back speeding along Libya’s coastal highway. And whenever the US has blown up one of Moe’s tanks, the rebel armored column will stop, all the men will dismount, run over to the tank, climb on top of it and jump up and down, often shooting their guns in the air.
These are the future leaders of Libya. Or at least the new jailers and militia.
Qatar, which has conducted at least one sortie over Libya, is the only Arab country known to have actively joined with the international force.
DD has made a running joke of Qatar. It’s presence has slipped in and out of the Odyssey Dawn order-of-battle since last week. One day Qatar is going to join, the next day gone.
So a good bet is that the “one sortie” was Qatar’s transport plane flying to Souda AFB in Greece.
So what about Qatar? It’s just the kind of “ally” you’d want to show other Arab nations are supporting the US in this Libyan fight — a very wealthy oil country run by the usual scumbags who import indentured labor to work for them.
Qatar is a destination country for men and women from South and Southeast Asia who migrate willingly, but are subsequently trafficked into involuntary servitude as domestic workers and laborers, and, to a lesser extent, commercial sexual exploitation; the most common offence was forcing workers to accept worse contract terms than those under which they were recruited; other conditions include bonded labor, withholding of pay, restrictions on movement, arbitrary detention, and physical, mental, and sexual abuse.
According to the Trafficking in Persons Report by the US State Department, men and women who are lured into Qatar by promises of high wages are often forced into underpaid labor.
I think this calls for T-shirts. Perhaps with a flag of the country, or the image of the American-made transport plane Qatar flies. Along with the motto:
QAF Flying Emirs! Odyssey Dawn 2011! We stayed out of the way!
However, it’s only fair to mention most of the military action, other than ours, has been token in Odyssey Dawn.
“British Tornado GR4 Aircraft, on a mission over Libya yesterday afternoon in support of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 took part in a co-ordinated missile strike against units of Colonel Gaddafi’s Libyan Military.
“The Tornado aircraft launched a number of guided Brimstone missiles, destroying three armoured vehicles in Misrata and two further armoured vehicles in Ajdabiya. Brimstone is a high precision, low collateral damage weapon optimised against demanding and mobile targets.
This map from the Pentagon, furnished through Globalsecurity, shows the US still doing the heavy lifting over Libya yesterday. Everyone else, by the images, has virtually token presence. Of course, it may change. Or maybe not. However, the message continues to be that this is a big allied campaign.
The Odyssey Dawn order of battle shifts daily, seemingly dependent upon the unease various members of the ‘coalition’ have with their role and profile, particularly any alleged contribution by members of the Arab league.
For example, while Qatar was said to be sending a force on the first day of action, their yachts and US-made jets have yet to show.
The United Arab Emirates air contribution, said to be six F-16’s and six Mirages, is shown here. Whether they’re actually in action is another matter.
A Turkish diesel submarine, mentioned yesterday, is listed in the naval portion of the Libyan action here. As is Spain’s.
As I said, little submarines (as well as glorified merchantmen) seem to be a big way to get mentioned as a ‘coalition’ partner.
Watch tv and you know the ‘rebel’ force Odyssey Dawn is supporting is just a lightly armed rabble.
The pictures of the favorite weapon of the impoverished, a light pick-up truck with an old surplus Eastern bloc machine gun mounted in the back, are inescapable. The plastic gun story, all over television, has made this ‘force’ look like a collection of clowns yelling for close air support from Uncle Sam.
Moe has a lot of self-propelled armored artillery.
A video — here — shows one very large piece destroyed by a US strike.
It is an Italian Palmaria, a weapon developed exclusively for export. It bears some resemblance with the old Wehrmacht King Tiger. (Weight comparison, former to latter: 46 tons/69 tons.)
Libya was involved in a series of significant transactions with Italy in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1978 the Italian aircraft company Siai-Marchetti secured a contract to supply SF-260 light aircraft intended for training and reconnaissance. The G-222 military transport plane assembled by Aeritalia was also supplied to the Libyans. The Italian firm of Oto Melara received orders for a large number of Palmaria 155-mm self-propelled howitzers.
According to the page at Globalsecurity, Moe has 160 of them. Readers will note Moe also has 14 US M-109’s. Also under Moe’s command are a great many large-calibre Soviet armored howitzers.
Even if many of these are inoperable because of general incompetence, one still asks the rhetorical question: How do the Libyan dudes in technicals and sneakers advance against Palmaria?
Moving along, it’s good to look at the other token military forces involved in Odyssey Dawn.
Saudi F-15 pilots in Mountain Home, Idaho, will lead to cultural intermingling? Ludicrous. Say it again, might have to break fingers.
This one is so astonishingly emblematic of the clapped out American system DD had to laugh.
It is an ace piece of reporting, published at al Jazeera’s website, even employs a song title from the B-52’s, “Private Idaho,” as a heading.
The story itself is about training the inept Saudi military so it can handle F-15 Strike Eagles. And it’s going to be done in Idaho.
The fur is already flying, of course.
Some of it reads:
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a Saudi pilot trained to fly in the US slammed a Boeing 757 jetliner into the Pentagon, killing more than 180 people.
Less than a decade later, with the Middle East in a state of upheaval and following the recent arrest of a Saudi college student on bomb charges, the Pentagon is planning to bring dozens of Saudis to the US to train them to fly – and to kill …
Last December, amid the holiday rush, the US air force quietly announced that it had selected Mountain Home Air Force Base as the preferred location for the long-term training of a contingent of pilots and flight crews from the Saudi Royal Air Force as part of a $60bn arms deal between the US and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced that autumn.
Under the mammoth military package, Saudi Arabia is set to receive 84 new F-15E Strike Eagles – advanced fighter aircraft designed for air-to-air and air-to-ground combat missions. Capable of flying day or night in all weather conditions and reaching speeds in excess of twice the speed of sound, each F-15, packing missiles, bombs and a 20mm cannon, is a formidable weapon.
Under the air force’s proposal, Saudi pilots will learn how to fly the advanced fighters at Mountain Home Air Force Base for five years, from 2014 to 2019, with the possibility of a longer commitment left open.
Bravo!
“Mountains of money for Mountain Home,” it continues, explaining how the air base was mothballed around 2005, throwing the local Idaho economy into a slump.
With the training of Saudi pilots, it’s estimated the community will receive $1 billion.
However, this pales in comparison to the $60 billion dollar deal paid to US arms manufacturers for the Saudi weapons deal.
Yep, arithmetically, the locals are getting a big .016 off the taxpayer dollars sent to the the US arms companies — like McDonnell Douglas — making the stuff for the oil kingdom. That’s a great deal.
“Anger at the proposed project, however, is brewing,” reads the piece.
The resentment is a minority view, says one retired Air Force man for the article.
It’ll be good for ‘cultural intermingling’ (in Idaho? C’mon now, get real. You could probably get away with the claim in LA County. In Mountain Home, ludicrous.) says someone.
The US, it ads, has been training Saudi pilots since 2007. The better to use all that gear we’re selling them as part of the war boom.
The piece — one again — is here. Paradoxically, it has a providence from American journalism. (Read to the footer.)
