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.
As one might have expected, the US media lost its mind over the Osama bin Laden hit. It quickly dipped into fantasies clinging to thin reeds of evidence.
Ignore all the stuff where the people left alive in the place, Osama’s wife or kids or helpers, said something like:”Yeah, that’s him. You got him. Now please don’t shoot me.”
Or any of the commandos: “Yes, that sure looks like him and it’s what all these papers and letters say.”
However, for bragging, invention and exaggeration nothing has topped the stealth helicopter stories, started by a fragment image passing for a photograph and Aviation Week magazine.
So maybe there was a non-stock helicopter in operation.
Here’s what the NY Times had to say on the 5th, one pretty standard example:
The assault team that killed Osama bin Laden sneaked up on his compound in radar-evading helicopters that had never been discussed publicly by the United States government, aviation analysts said Thursday.
The commandos blew up one of the helicopters after it was damaged in a hard landing, but news photographs of the surviving tail section reveal modifications to muffle noise and reduce the chances of detection by radar.
The stealth features, similar to those used on advanced fighter jets and bombers, help explain how two of the helicopters sped undetected through Pakistani air defenses before reaching the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad.
[The non-standard tail rotor] could have allowed operators to slow the rotor speed and reduce the familiar chop-chop sound that most helicopters make.
Now, let’s review the first news of the raid, from the Pakistani Twitter user in Abbottabad:
1. “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”
2. “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”
3. “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”
4. “Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours???, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad”
Didn’t read muffled or particularly stealthy.
Instead of stealth, one could easily argue for a certain lack of capability in the Pakistani military. Predator drones violate Pakistani airspace daily. Do they track all of them? Can they? And if radar sees drone or helicopters with similar radar signatures and/or flying the same speed, how — in Pakistan — do they distinguish between the two?
Anyway, the genes for myth-making are strong in the US.
They’re inextricably bound up with the American talent for fabrication and reflexive bragging, further embroidered by the reality that the US government is in the habit of not giving accurate accounts of anything in the last decade.
As a writer, Ted Nugent is a useful metaphor for systemic fail in America. While Uncle Ted is big on talking up merit and innate ability as a basic foundation for success, if such things were even the slightest requirements for his getting book contracts or print space, Nugent would never have earned enough money to buy even one weekday copy of a Michigan newspaper.
Good news, lads! Good news! Howard knows how to spell the word ‘cockroach.’
“flea-infested maggots” — (1), not biologically possible
“subhuman goat ticks” — (1), redundant
“rabid dogs” — technically, not arthropod, but what-the-hey!
“cockroaches” (6 invocations, including once in the subhed)
As for the last reference, you know Nugent really wanted to use “cocksuckers” but WaTimes editorial policy still isn’t quite ready to let him go that far.
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.
And then finally, Mr Ryan said, America needs sound money. He told stories of traveling around Wisconsin and being handed pieces of currency from Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe, he remarked on how nothing was more insidious than inflation …
It’s rotten ol’ Tea Party fruit, the crop from years of Fox News’ hourly gold bug commercials, Glenn Beck and parades of experts. One in particular, whose name I forget, was fond of showing an example of some astronomically numbered Zimbabwe note.
He had turned it into a souvenir business.
The phrase “fiat money” is more code for the same thing. Here, a sample from Google — it’s all Ron Paul, goldbuggery, catastrophe, conspiracy and fear & loathing associated with quantitative easing. Another example, as if you needed one, of how Google results can easily be bombed into trash by the practices and world beliefs of a relatively small social class. (An it’s also an example of what story one uses to persuade people who aren’t such hot thinkers to vote for tax cuts for the super-rich and elimination of social programs and public school education.)
If you run across people like this — and I see the house of one of ’em everyday when I cross the el Molino Street bridge on the way to Rick’s at lunch, a place with a big lawn sign advertising some kook AM radio host — it is best to cross to the opposite side of the street.
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.
Good news, lads! Good news! Not only is Ted up for the part of Howard in the remake of The Treasure of Sierra Madre, but he’ll also be on the Simpsons!
Here is a man that has been attacked for my militant hatred for drinking and driving, and drunk idiots ruining lives because in Hollywood, if you aren’t drooling, puking and dying it is not a party. If you want to see a party watch Uncle Ted – I have been clean and sober for 63 years and this is a f**king party! Write that down!
If the NBA had any true gay convictions, the NBA should host a Homosexual Night. During halftime, the homosexuals could come down on the court, hold hands and prance around the court to music by the Village People. The NBA could then give each homosexual a pink basketball as a symbol of solidarity.
Homer Simpson on gays:
I like my beer cold… my TV loud… and my homosexuals flaming.
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.
The Global Assembly Line is a misnomer for a dystopian, complex jumble of production that uses any number of countries and its citizens. Environmentalists are already aware that the price tag on most mass global consumer products already fails to factor in the true ecological cost (“natural capital”) of the product.
From elements in mobile phones to leather in trainers, all are habitually “subsidised” by the environment. Furthermore, with electronics, ethical arguments have tended to focus on the end of the chain, where consumer behaviour conspires with Moore’s Law (the amount of computing power that can be bought for a certain amount of money doubles every 18 months) and planned obsolescence to create mountains of e-waste.
In the world of consumer electronics, the pressure to work overtime appears to have been caused by the sheer popularity of new products. Whipped into a frenzy by marketing and favourable product reviews, we consumers shriek for the latest gadgetry and the factories must oblige.
It’s worth reading the testimonies that tell us what life as a “techno-serf” is really like. A clue: it’s totally at odds with the liberating, blue-sky, wireless possibilities offered by the sleek phones and laptops. The words: “Twelve hours of work = standard” and: “One year and I’m dead” were recently found in the notebook of a young man who had been working for a famous electronics brand in South Chungcheong province before he took his own life. We are beginning to hear of intense worker despondency and depression. It’s really about time we listened. These stories help to blunt the usual retorts of: “It gives them jobs” or: “They are just having their industrial revolution now.”
Good news, lads! Good news! If you had a button you could push to blow up the iKit as it went into his mouth you’d use it.
While the popular music industry in this country worked hard at guaranteeing it had no friends as it came to an end, it really didn’t deserve Steve Jobs and Apple.
My friend, the drummer in the band, is an iPod addict.
Me, I’d hit a new one with a hammer for a copy of the daily newspaper or a taco at Rick’s.
In preparation for the May show I went to Guitar Center in Pasadena for a power adapter. Of course, all are made in China. There’s no choice in the matter.
While there I browsed distortion pedals.
Virtually all of them were Chinese-made things, all old American designs, some priced so ridiculously low it’s obvious people are literally dieing to make them and get them here. The company doing this most effectively is Deltalab. It markets guitar effects pedals for an average price of $39 at GC.
That’s human misery and rip off non-living wage condensed in a small painted metal box, inefficiently shipped across the Pacific in a huge container transport, for the sake of the bottom line and the outsourced economy.
It was impossible to stomach buying anything like it no matter how attractive to the over-leveraged purse.
So I wound up buying a used Fulltone OCD. It was made in America. SoCal, too.
