While the rest of the country has gone to Hell over the last ten years, the Pentagon has been untouched. While unemployment and outsourcing of jobs to China surged, the US military budget ballooned. When the global economy crashed due to Wall Street malfeasance in 2008, the Department of Defense was spared all pain. When millions and millions of Americans were added to food stamp programs, the war machine didn’t even hiccup. Which makes today’s Pentagon assessment that China will pose a threat to economic security because it is copying our weapons the laugher of the week.
The Pentagon, in its annual assessment to Congress of China’s military, flagged sustained investment last year in advanced missile technologies and cyber warfare capabilities and warned that Chinese spying threatened America’s economic security.
“Chinese actors are the world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage,” the report said.
“Chinese attempts to collect U.S. technological and economic information will continue at a high level and will represent a growing and persistent threat to U.S. economic security.”
Some graphs, conveniently taken from this week, on the real threats to economic security.
First, on outsourcing of employment, much of which went to China, from the Congressional Research Institute:
Second, unemployment plotted against escape from taxation of the US high upper class:
Essentially what has happened is that the US has abandoned all manufacturing with low profit margin to China. That means all household dry goods, consumer electronics and toys but not big ticket items like weapons, jet engines, automobiles, expensive health care equipment with no margin for error and aircraft.
The Pentagon and the arms manufacturing industry, or the self-licking ice cream cone, is only interested in the weapons part. Wouldn’t want anything to trump our Weapons Shops of Isher.
“The United States could be in for a surprise in 2013-15 if ‘China successfully exploits it extensive cyber-espionage efforts and unveils new weapons systems that are on par with U.S. systems,’ said Capital Alpha Partners LLC, a investment analysis group, in a research note on the Pentagon report,” reads the Reuters report.
Yes, that’s something that threatens the very existence of the vanishing middle class, no doubt about it.
All right boys! You’re really on top of things. If you keep doing what you’re doing, eventually there won’t be anything left to defend.
The court stenography pool in action. A screensnap’s worth 1k words.
The world is full of cheats, liars, lazy bloodsuckers and people who cut corners. If their house gets in your way, burn it down.
While you scale your mountain of success, lend a hand to the person behind you and pull them up with you. Atlas doesn’t shrug in my book. Atlas commends, constructively criticizes, encourages and challenges those following him. Be an Atlas.
Burn down the houses of people who get in your way. But lend a hand. The logic, scintillating, as usual.
The views shot up this mornin’. Someone, either inflamed or amused, has pointed it out.
And this might have something to do with it. Bravo!
One of my friends is always sending me links for lectures posted at TED. I always delete them and send a retort meant to discourage the sending of more in the future. It bums him out that I’m this way.
The reason TED stuff is virtually worthless: It’s for semi-bright nerds and other simple-minded and easily led folk who actually believe its a web engine for the portrayal of genius and innovation. If you subscribe to Wired, you probably think it’s neat.
TED is for tech industry groupies, part of the culture of lickspittle. And today it’s in the news in a small way for spiking a talk on the US economy, one in which a TED lecturer — a venture capitalist you’ve never heard of named Nick Hanauer — argued that the wealthy aren’t job creators.
Paul Krugman has made the same point, much more successfully and to a much wider audience on the pages of the New York Times for the past few years. And I don’t believe he’s ever needed TED to get the word out.
It’s not a hard point to make because all the data is in.
So the only bit one needs to see is a slide, its information now published in many different ways by different people around the web, on the tax rates for the wealthy versus employment in this country.
It destroys any argument that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to more jobs for everyone else. In fact, just the opposite. There’s no more trickle-down than there is a tooth fairy. (But at least your parents put some coin under the pillow.)
Radically cutting taxes on the top over the long-term destroyed much of the economy for the middle class. Unemployment surged. It’s ugly.
Since these facts are anathema to all arguments about the economy put forward by the Republican Party, such information is often thought political.
So if you always thought TED was high-button excrement but couldn’t quite put your finger on what was shite about it, today’s news is an example. TED can’t deal with facts that might annoy its audience of libertarian tech shoeshine boys and girls.
The Arizona Star published a big piece on survivalists/preppers today. It featured Tim Ralston, mentioned previously on the blog as Tim Thumb, the man who shot a big chunk of his opposable digit off in a gun accident for the worst reality tv show, ever, Doomsday Preppers.
Why feature the heevahavas?
Well, they’re local color. And for some, including Tim Thumb, training preppers has become a business in a down economy. While the logic of taking survival advice from someone known for a spectacularly stupid and painful accident with a firearm on television escapes me it has apparently worked in just the opposite manner for Ralston.
There are firearms too, including handguns and a laser-sighted rifle. Because if there is one thing Ralston is sure about, people are going to get very angry very quickly when a solar storm knocks out the power grid. Or the economy collapses. Or zombies attack (though fictional, Ralston still has the perfect tool for reintroducing the undead to death).
The more people ready to face doomsday, he figures, the fewer who will come knocking at his bunker (and those of others) looking for food and water.
And that day could arrive next year, Ralston says, riding a coronal mass ejection (which is even sloppier than it sounds) that triggers an electromagnetic pulse …
Lisa Bedford considers herself a turtle in the disaster-prepping race. Slowly, steadily, the Peoria mom has amassed the food, water and equipment necessary to deal with a disaster — not the “asteroid strikes Earth” kind, necessarily, but the sort that might force the family to live on their own for weeks and months.
Bedford is a calmer survivalist, cringing when she hears of people talking about super volcanoes or nuclear attacks or melting polar ice caps and the global flooding that will result.
“It (doomsday prepping) seems to hinge on fear-mongering,” Bedford says. “At the core, I believe it’s about common sense and an awareness of what’s going on worldwide, not just in America.”
Certainly survival plays a part, and the author of “Survival Mom: How to Prepare Your Family for Everyday Disasters and Worst-Case Scenarios” has a gun and knows how to use it.
Her fears are more down-to-earth than those buried 3 feet under in a bunker. Should economic jitters give way to strife and panic, she will be ready. And if the doomsday scenarios pitched by extreme preppers make people more apt to stockpile necessities, so be it.
“Yes, the shows are fear-mongering,” Bedford says …
There is mention that preparation mania has roots from deep in the Cold War, specifically mentioning the Cuban missile crisis. There’s not much merit to the argument. A nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union was a real possibility although the number of warheads in the arsenals made fallout shelters pointless. And everyone was in the same boat together.
For the modern preppers/survivalists, everyone is definitely not in the same boat. If there is a shared community, it is one on the extreme nuts right and most of its theology is aimed at telling stories about how all the undesirables “in the city” will need to be warded off and/or killed after a disaster. And the end-of-civilization scenarios have little basis in the real world.
This bothers one of the preppers profiled in the Arizona Star piece. It’s been his business for decades and of the current craziness:
Cody Lundin of Prescott is someone who knows well the cyclic trends of prepping.
When Lundin began preaching the value of self-reliance almost 30 years ago … he was a voice in the wilderness …
But Lundin is having a difficult time bearing all the doomsday-prepper chatter. He shakes his head at the extremism espoused by those who want to store mountains of food and an arsenal of guns in a remote bunker.
The survival at all costs ethic makes him queasy.
Reporter Scott Craven mentions Tim Thumb’s Crovel entrenching tool for beating someone’s head in as a hit with the prepper crowd.
In the 1985 NYC world of the Watchmen, Rorschach only dealt with the city’s underbelly. His favorite activity was putting the squeeze on ex-felons at Happy Harry’s and beating to death those he ran across in the act of perpetrating violent crime. One scene from the comic shows him readying his cravat for use in strangling someone interrupted while raping a woman in an alley. When Rorschach finally comes to blows with a ‘better class’ of person, Veidt, he is easily defeated. Refusing to compromise on his black and white sense of right and wrong, he’s put to death in the snow at the bottom of the world by Dr. Manhattan.
So it’s hard to know what Rorschach would think is right for Wall Street. Because he avidly reads The New Frontiersman, a raggedy-ass newspaper from the extreme right, he would not be sympathetic to over-compensated business executives.
Since Rorschach’s sense of morality defined him, compelling him into the streets to destroy the wicked without mercy or hesitation, it is inspiring to think of what he might do to the shadowy bonus recipients of Wall Street. Would he throw one down an elevator? Handcuff another to a stanchion in an apartment, leave a hacksaw within reach, and set the room ablaze with gasoline? Would he “put fourteen in the hospital needlessly” while squeezing the name and address of their boss from them? Would he crush one of their skulls out of sight in the men’s room?
In the United States, it has not yet come to that. However, if the men of Wall Street are seen to be beyond punishment …
On the other hand, Rorschach had no fondness for liberals or others thought to be soft and morally ambiguous, those he thought equally responsible for the collapse of the alternate history 1985 America in Watchmen. He could be just as likely to take a look at the toxic decay foaming up out of the gutters of Wall Street, threatening to drown everyone not at the top and upon hearing screams for help, just whisper, “No…”
Who in Congress is feeling twinges from their conscience? Which men or women among them feel they should be doing something in this time of great need? Some members keep making requests for data crunches on various facets of our economic and national failure — like the youth labor market and corporate outsourcing — from the Congressional Research Service. And since the CRS is unfailingly honest in such matters, it has produced useful information, over which absolutely no action will be taken. Because the Republican Party, as everyone knows, abhors facts and information.
There is now widespread implicit knowledge that oursourcing has been very bad for Americans. But absolutely rock hard data, illustrated nicely, is always very good to have. If only because it is inarguable.
Two figures give one the gist of the CRS report on outsourcing. They are damning.
Outsourcing has not been offset by a 1-to-1 level in foreign return investment into hiring in the US. Also, US corporate multinational outsourcing has remained inexorable and constant over the last ten years, dipping or leveling only when a recession has occurred, or a global economic collapse. That is, it is no different now than at the beginning of the last decade when it really took off.
Readers will notice how the practice of shipping jobs overseas accelerated at the beginning of the last decade. The slope of the line has remained fairly constant with leveling occurring in the middle of the decade when the Bush administration put the country into a recession. It also plunged upon the global economic collapse brought on by Wall Street.
However, readers will also see how it had picked back up again slightly by 2009, while commensurate employment in the US itself was still plunging.
The second figure shows US corporate multinational foreign investment against outside investment into this country.
There is nothing particularly close to 1-to-1 balance after 2000. Jobs went overseas. The balance has always been negative for American labor with foreign return investment not making up the losses.
The report also notes that when the jobs and production lines go overseas, the value chains which include other related support industries also go with them. And are not replaced.
So who is requesting such reports and why? What is the point? Our leaders, and everyone else knows that at this juncture, no action will be taken, regardless of any findings or indications of ongoing calamity.
In e-mail, Steve Aftergood informs DD: “It’s entirely possible, even likely, that no one in Congress requested these reports and that they were self-initiated by the CRS analysts.”
So I could have been overly generous in my assessments. However, it is heartening that people of integrity and conscience work at CRS and are trying to contribute to the national debate.
Music to read a CRS report to. “You buy that toilet, it was made in China …”
Law enforcement and homeland security personnel face an average of 55 daily encounters with “known or suspected terrorists” named on government watchlists, officials told Reuters.
The figure – which equals more than 20,000 contacts per year – underscores the growing sweep of the watchlists, which have expanded significantly since a failed Christmas Day 2009 bombing attempt of a U.S. airliner. But officials note that very few of those daily contacts lead to arrests …
In addition to business-killing taxes and regulations, California has the third-highest state income tax in the nation, the nation’s highest sales tax and the highest gas taxes in America.
Get this: Roughly half of California’s income taxes are paid by just 1 percent of California’s residents. It’s no wonder the most productive people are leaving the state each year as more bloodsuckers move in …
The way out of this mess would be painful. Massive cuts would be required, services slashed, and agencies gutted and eliminated …
Liberalism has failed around the world, and it has failed here, too.
Yes, its a state of bloodsuckers of the classic type described by Ayn Rand, pulling down the powerful job creators and intellects. And I am one of them. As you can plainly see I leech on the work of the producers, like Ted Nugent in the above video, to get views and laughs on YouTube.
Ted knows the Republican Party is dogfood in California. The demographics of the state, where the majority of the people live — on the coasts and in the cities, do not support it. Much of this can be laid at the feet of the party’s antipathy to the Hispanic population.
It’s time to stop thinking of the Republican Party as an exclusive club where your ideological card is checked at the door …
Most of Schwarzenegger’s editorial was devoted to lamenting how the GOP has turned into a party of extremists, opposed to getting anything done while rooting out everyone who doesn’t possess a Tea Party far right purity.
It’s marginalized the party in California. However, through state law which requires a two-thirds majority to pass any budget legislation, its members have effectively stymied all attempts to rectify California’s monetary crisis, much as the filibuster has been used in the Senate to halt national government.
Schwarzenegger faced this all through his tenure as governor. His own party ruined any attempt at government, in effect ruining his run and reputation as a politician and public servant of any merit.
Schwarzenegger, again writing only non-specifically about his problems with the party:
I bumped up against that rigidity many times as governor. Not surprisingly, the party wasn’t always too happy with me. But I had taken an oath to serve the people, not my party. Some advisors whose opinions I respect urged me to consider leaving the party and instead identify myself as a “decline to state” voter …
An inclusive party would welcome the party’s most conservative activists right alongside its most liberal activists. There is room for those whose views, I think, make them sound like cavemen. And there is also room for us in the center, with views the traditionalists probably think make us sound like progressive softies.
Note the waffle through insertion of the “I think” bit. It’s only my opinion guys. Please don’t kill me, Ted-like folks.
The crazies are already crazy enough, buddy. Don’t make it worse. A new series created by JJ Abrams — Revolution — illustrates how marinated US popular culture is in electromagnetic pulse doom stories. In the real world it’s solely the property of the extreme right wing. But you can’t have a television show with just those characters. That would be called Doomsday Preppers, an existing niche product designed to monetize the peculiar rather than vend something for network primetime family viewing.
It’s gotten so you can’t turn around without being hit by another JJ Abrams creation. There are so many of them you know he’s now like everyone else in such a production position, an exalted deity who assigns his name to lackeys, allowing them to phone in whatever it is that needs phoning in under his blessings.
And it sure looks it from the trailer. How unique. Another tv series with civilization destroyed, electricity gone, people playing survivalist, down to the various tribes, this time using bows, arrows and muskets.
Is there anyone who doesn’t see “electromagnetic pulse” crap on tv or in movies as plot devices/scenarios/predictions a couple times a month in 2012 USA? Not likely.
What sets Revolution slightly apart, and any other thing like it in the last three or four years, from the kook survivalist craze is that the cast can never be like anyone you see in prepper videos.
Everyone is caught flat-flooted when disaster arrives. Nobody has a years worth of dried corn and pemmican, no basement armories with a quarter ton of ammunition, no gun room with a couple belt-fed weapons. The houses are never built from cast-off shipping containers. And they’re not all camo-dressed right wingers. About half the cast will be visibly worried about falling into a world where only the gun, mercilessness and physical strength rule. The fascists are almost always the bad guys.
While you’ll see the bits about having to fight off others coming for your stuff, those coming for it are never the same types the prepper/survivalists mean when they advise on learning how to shoot moving targets. The progressive, liberals, educated and registered Democrats/Commies aren’t the unprepared targets everyone is hoping they won’t have to shoot up because they’ve come stumbling up the road to the safe house.
With a peak in the cycle of solar flares approaching, U.S. electricity regulators are weighing their options for protecting the nation’s grid from the sun’s eruptions—including new equipment standards and retrofits—while keeping a lid on the cost …
They are studying the impact of historic sunstorms …
“This is arguably the largest natural-disaster scenario that the nation could face,” said Mr. Kappenman.
Mr. Kappenman has consulted for companies that make equipment to harden the grid.
Others are more cautious in their predictions …
The private sector and scientists with the US government have now turned wise to what happens when the lobbyists from the Cult of EMP Crazy (or EMPAct America) run wild. And they have successfully shoved off to the fringes the constant assertions that the nation faces an imminent return to the days of the horse and buggy.
That hasn’t stopped the EMP lobby, which is the same as the Bomb Iran lobby. They simply change their name to something that sounds important knowing that reporters won’t check the rosters from the old kook brigades for matches.
And so, one of the chief lobbyists for EMPAct America, Peter Pry, appears in the Journal story as “executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, a group that members of Congress designated to track electrical-grid risks and that supports Mr. Kappenman’s conclusions.”
The Task Force on National and Homeland Security is EMPAct America with a second name, the same group of right-wingers that has always been lobbying for ballistic missile defense and bombing Iran before the mullahs send American civilization into the abyss using a missile launched from an offshore barge.
