Are you kidding me? Intel and Nike's personal representative? That's like letting the fox in the hen house, he's truly anti U.S. middle class.
I don't think so! Try Marcy Kaptur as someone who should join or Heath Shuler from NC and he represents that conservative Populist Democratic voice and is vilified on Progressive blogs but as far as I can tell, he's pretty Populist.
According to Dr. Wing Thye Woo of U.C. Davis, China needs to realize...it's in the same global boat with the rest of us.:-) China has serious problems of its own at home. We also need to use stimulus dollars to retool our productive capacity, instead of focusing on creating consumer demand. We need to bite the bullet and fix our industrial base NOW. China will be less worried if it can see eventual balance on the horizon.
I've offically still made a $100,000 profit on the house I bought in 1998. But that's only because the land is included and Oregon has such strict land use laws that anything within the urban growth boundary just keeps going up in value.
The house itself is now down to 25% of the total price. By the time I'm done paying off my mortgage, it'll be cheaper to bulldoze the place and sell to developers than try to find a buyer.
That's a fairly good description of what's going on- we're already IN a deflationary spiral, have been for about 30 years now, but easy credit hid it. Now that the easy credit has disappeared, the second half of the spiral cycle (deflationary prices) can happen.
We have steady wage declines and to supplement their incomes many people either went into massive debt via credit cards and/or used their home equity loans through inflated home evaluation as an ATM.
So, wages overall are declining, the real unemployment rate is @ 14% basically and now with the never ending debt spiral stopping are wage declines that have been going on steadily for over a decade ...their effects finally appearing?
Is overrated to a large extent once you hit robotic labor for most manufacturing processes. CNC and 3D Print technologies are quickly making up the difference- I'd give it another 10 years to mature, but someday soon a microprocessor will just be a 32nm printout of gallium ink on a silicon substrate, and while it may still take $50,000 to build a fab, it won't be taking the billion or so that Intel pours into theirs.
Once you reach that level of tech, then the only thing worth shipping is information- what the microprocessor or TV set should look like, plans to feed into the machines.
I read his blog after I wrote this piece. Finally someone is aware that Stimulus money can go to foreign controlled corporations, be offshore outsourced and he points specifically to the auto bail out and how U.S. taxpayer money shouldn't be going to a corporation shrinking U.S. operations, firing workers, lowering wages and moving abroad.
That is what new hires make. What is the point? Seriously. What kind of wage is that and that's what investors expect?
Business week has a fairly in depth article on all of it and it's just seriously messed up. It's like "well, if we cut retirement, health and wages we can be competitive in 24 months".
If that is seriously what foreign car makers are paying workers in the United States....we sure as hell should not be buying foreign cars.
I mean manufacturing is not an easy or unskilled per say job and that's the wage?
Competitive against who and are then he puts post retirement costs over a 15 year period of 103 billion dollars.
so, what, Americans are being told generally they cannot have any retirement? How much of this is health care costs
and if so, is it yet another case that the United States bloat costs are making us non-competitive?
Jesus, who cares at that point? and probably more importantly, who can afford a new car at $14/hr?
The "new" administrations plan (remarkably similar to the old administrations I might add) is to save the skins of the financial oligarchy. I would think that's apparent to anyone.
True it might not be PC to utter that in Washington, but a great many "normal" citizens understand what is happening.
There's a reason Wall Street and other establishment icons did the seemingly nonsensical thing of splitting their significant campaign contributions between Republicans & Democrats in the last election.... and that was to procure the "best government money can buy"!
exactly how GM is going to restructure the company overseas.
It's not reasonable to ask US taxpayers to foot the the bill to keep the company afloat globally.
Retooling will cost billions, however, if the company was nationalized, and the machines currently in Britain and Germany shipped to the US (let alone India and China), the company could reshuffle their production to smaller vehicles at a much lower cost because there would be less need to retool machines.
The only other reasonable alternative it seems would be for the German and British governments to cough up cash to keep their domestic operations afloat. And it seems that this is the idea. GM is planning to ask for bailouts of Vauxhall in Britain and Opel in Germany.
If nothing else, this is an interesting case study in how corporations no longer fit into national boxes. I will be disappointed if the government doesn't put clear limitations on the US of bailout money overseas. Gm's overseas operations should be rescued by their national governments if at all.
There is a middle ground, not justifying sociopathic behavior. But there are limits on self-sacrifice and I am referring to Marxism, or magically people would put aside self interests for the common good. It's more people will contribute to the common good....when it's also good for them.
Herman Daly. Well, a lot of us on EP spend a lot of time on own posts. So, if someone wants to take up the cause and do an analysis, research, essay on Prof. Herman, that would be good.
Yeah on the IMF. My concern is there Geithner was in the NY Fed while all of this went down. What was he doing, spending time writing up vague and non-concrete press releases?
But right now the IMF is issuing dire warnings with people in Thailand praying the IMF comes into the U.S. and puts their evil conditions on our economy like they did to Thailand. Most interesting...what goes around....?
You lose efficiency of scale at I see us breaking humanity into over 6,500,000 small communities, of under 1000 people each. It's hard to commit fraud if doing so means you have to see your victims at family reunions
Of course there are many ways to define efficiency, but one will be that a few of those communities get together to take over many.
I don't see how you're going to build TVs and microprocessors this way. But you could build clubs, axes, and ballistas.
hard to know where to start. So I'll pick one at random.
there are some invisible sociological and psychological strings being implied here with architecting an economy
It seems to help if there is academic justification for behavior that is clearly self-serving, especially if reality is providing precious little validation. I'm thinking in particular of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand (taken out of context as necessary) and Milton Friedman. OK, so I just bought out Company X using their income to pay off the debt and I had to fire 2000 people, but it's all to the good because I'm purging inefficiency and the Invisible Hand maximizes the public good. OK, so I just invented a new derivative so we can take on more leverage without incurring more risk, and see, S&P rated the bonds AAA. OK, so I just imposed harsh monetary policies on TinyDevelopingCountry which may cause ruinous inflation, unemployment, and starvation now, but that's for the best even if my banks make out like bandits because once TDC learns fiscal discipline (which of course is only for the little people) they will reap the wonders of the Free Market.
If I were in any other line of work I'd be taken out and shot. But the amazing thing is, I might actually believe I'm doing the right thing, because that's what the system selects for.
Which gets us to: I think they believed, bizarrely that they would raise up middle classes globally, which of course is absurd and if it happens the timeline is such that they replaced the U.S. middle class...i.e. traded the US to become a banana Republic.
Geithner's tax issues did not bother me nearly as much as his stint with the IMF, where they actually believe this, or used to anyway, even if it meant destruction of the economies they were helping out. His early policies smack of Rubinomics to me; but I'll be optimistic and hope he turns things around in time.
a Herman Daly primer post would be cool
I'd like to see one that can lay out a critical assessment. Because there are plenty of models out there which sound good in theory but don't work in practice. The necessity of what he says is clear; the implementation is murky to me.
Another question: our economy is driven largely by consumer spending. Why then is our labor philosophy designed to suppress aggregate demand? How can we not see that this is counterproductive?
The name-calling referred to upstream also applies to Europe: "socialist", "lazy", "old world", "chocolate eaters". They're eating our lunch on energy and transportation.
Hi, I created an account. Thanks for showing the truth. One thing lately a lot more Americans are opening their mind.
During the dot com bust I know managers that use to be H1b believers started loosing their jobs and looking for work. Lately, it's been last bastions of H1b American believers that are loosing their jobs. I own a consulting company and hire Americans. Always believed that we should help ourselves (Pro America) before worrying about our neighbors. If we have a good economy then we can help the poor countries.
After all this mess we will be become a better nation. We have already started the reboot (ctrl+alt+delete).
you might want to create an account, upper right column.
Then, you might want to reply to the comment by hitting the reply button.
You have posted a comment in a different thread, different post.
Then, on you are a racist xenophobe as well as protectionist. This is just attempts at name calling because it works.
They use it to drown out any statistics, realities on the ground of real job losses, real wage repression, real cutting of careers short through labor arbitrage.
Unfortunately for most Americans that's really a scary insult. Who wants to be a racist? So, it works very well to stop people from looking at all of these global labor issues objectively and acknowledge the statistics.
Corporations are trying to turn the word protectionist to mean anything at all with trade policy modification and it's obviously false. Protectionism means tariffs and no one is recommending that (or few are) so this is pure corporate lobbyist generated spin.
One of my favorites is for people to say major studies, done by highly credible researchers, where the actual research clearly has correct methodology, assumptions, mathematics....some of these cats try to say oh don't you know that organization are racists? to try to discredit the report. My case in point is the Center for Immigration Studies. Many of their research reports are actually funded by them but done by some heavy hitter researchers who not only are not racists but well respected authorities. Then the research itself is credible.
I cannot say that about every organization, even every paper but this sort of blanket "oh they are racists" because they do not like the conclusion of some research paper is pretty pathetic in my view.
I was on another blog recently and literally they said the Government Accountability Office were racists. Just unreal.
Are you kidding me? Intel and Nike's personal representative? That's like letting the fox in the hen house, he's truly anti U.S. middle class.
I don't think so! Try Marcy Kaptur as someone who should join or Heath Shuler from NC and he represents that conservative Populist Democratic voice and is vilified on Progressive blogs but as far as I can tell, he's pretty Populist.
I'll be sending an e-mail to David Wu tonight as well.
According to Dr. Wing Thye Woo of U.C. Davis, China needs to realize...it's in the same global boat with the rest of us.:-) China has serious problems of its own at home. We also need to use stimulus dollars to retool our productive capacity, instead of focusing on creating consumer demand. We need to bite the bullet and fix our industrial base NOW. China will be less worried if it can see eventual balance on the horizon.
I've offically still made a $100,000 profit on the house I bought in 1998. But that's only because the land is included and Oregon has such strict land use laws that anything within the urban growth boundary just keeps going up in value.
The house itself is now down to 25% of the total price. By the time I'm done paying off my mortgage, it'll be cheaper to bulldoze the place and sell to developers than try to find a buyer.
That's a fairly good description of what's going on- we're already IN a deflationary spiral, have been for about 30 years now, but easy credit hid it. Now that the easy credit has disappeared, the second half of the spiral cycle (deflationary prices) can happen.
What if....???
We have steady wage declines and to supplement their incomes many people either went into massive debt via credit cards and/or used their home equity loans through inflated home evaluation as an ATM.
So, wages overall are declining, the real unemployment rate is @ 14% basically and now with the never ending debt spiral stopping are wage declines that have been going on steadily for over a decade ...their effects finally appearing?
Is overrated to a large extent once you hit robotic labor for most manufacturing processes. CNC and 3D Print technologies are quickly making up the difference- I'd give it another 10 years to mature, but someday soon a microprocessor will just be a 32nm printout of gallium ink on a silicon substrate, and while it may still take $50,000 to build a fab, it won't be taking the billion or so that Intel pours into theirs.
Once you reach that level of tech, then the only thing worth shipping is information- what the microprocessor or TV set should look like, plans to feed into the machines.
Unfortunately, Milton Friedman never studied Henry Ford.
n/t
Well, let's go with Henry Ford's original calculation
5x360=$1800 - and he expected every employee to afford a $500 Model T every year out of that.
$14*8*5*52=$29120- and we expect people to afford a $16000 Kia out of that?!?!?!?
You're right, there's something highly wrong with these ratios.
I read his blog after I wrote this piece. Finally someone is aware that Stimulus money can go to foreign controlled corporations, be offshore outsourced and he points specifically to the auto bail out and how U.S. taxpayer money shouldn't be going to a corporation shrinking U.S. operations, firing workers, lowering wages and moving abroad.
I feel validated.
That is what new hires make. What is the point? Seriously. What kind of wage is that and that's what investors expect?
Business week has a fairly in depth article on all of it and it's just seriously messed up. It's like "well, if we cut retirement, health and wages we can be competitive in 24 months".
If that is seriously what foreign car makers are paying workers in the United States....we sure as hell should not be buying foreign cars.
I mean manufacturing is not an easy or unskilled per say job and that's the wage?
Competitive against who and are then he puts post retirement costs over a 15 year period of 103 billion dollars.
so, what, Americans are being told generally they cannot have any retirement? How much of this is health care costs
and if so, is it yet another case that the United States bloat costs are making us non-competitive?
Jesus, who cares at that point? and probably more importantly, who can afford a new car at $14/hr?
The "new" administrations plan (remarkably similar to the old administrations I might add) is to save the skins of the financial oligarchy. I would think that's apparent to anyone.
True it might not be PC to utter that in Washington, but a great many "normal" citizens understand what is happening.
There's a reason Wall Street and other establishment icons did the seemingly nonsensical thing of splitting their significant campaign contributions between Republicans & Democrats in the last election.... and that was to procure the "best government money can buy"!
exactly how GM is going to restructure the company overseas.
It's not reasonable to ask US taxpayers to foot the the bill to keep the company afloat globally.
Retooling will cost billions, however, if the company was nationalized, and the machines currently in Britain and Germany shipped to the US (let alone India and China), the company could reshuffle their production to smaller vehicles at a much lower cost because there would be less need to retool machines.
The only other reasonable alternative it seems would be for the German and British governments to cough up cash to keep their domestic operations afloat. And it seems that this is the idea. GM is planning to ask for bailouts of Vauxhall in Britain and Opel in Germany.
If nothing else, this is an interesting case study in how corporations no longer fit into national boxes. I will be disappointed if the government doesn't put clear limitations on the US of bailout money overseas. Gm's overseas operations should be rescued by their national governments if at all.
There is a middle ground, not justifying sociopathic behavior. But there are limits on self-sacrifice and I am referring to Marxism, or magically people would put aside self interests for the common good. It's more people will contribute to the common good....when it's also good for them.
Herman Daly. Well, a lot of us on EP spend a lot of time on own posts. So, if someone wants to take up the cause and do an analysis, research, essay on Prof. Herman, that would be good.
Yeah on the IMF. My concern is there Geithner was in the NY Fed while all of this went down. What was he doing, spending time writing up vague and non-concrete press releases?
But right now the IMF is issuing dire warnings with people in Thailand praying the IMF comes into the U.S. and puts their evil conditions on our economy like they did to Thailand. Most interesting...what goes around....?
You lose efficiency of scale at
I see us breaking humanity into over 6,500,000 small communities, of under 1000 people each. It's hard to commit fraud if doing so means you have to see your victims at family reunions
Of course there are many ways to define efficiency, but one will be that a few of those communities get together to take over many.
I don't see how you're going to build TVs and microprocessors this way. But you could build clubs, axes, and ballistas.
hard to know where to start. So I'll pick one at random.
there are some invisible sociological and psychological strings being implied here with architecting an economy
It seems to help if there is academic justification for behavior that is clearly self-serving, especially if reality is providing precious little validation. I'm thinking in particular of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand (taken out of context as necessary) and Milton Friedman. OK, so I just bought out Company X using their income to pay off the debt and I had to fire 2000 people, but it's all to the good because I'm purging inefficiency and the Invisible Hand maximizes the public good. OK, so I just invented a new derivative so we can take on more leverage without incurring more risk, and see, S&P rated the bonds AAA. OK, so I just imposed harsh monetary policies on TinyDevelopingCountry which may cause ruinous inflation, unemployment, and starvation now, but that's for the best even if my banks make out like bandits because once TDC learns fiscal discipline (which of course is only for the little people) they will reap the wonders of the Free Market.
If I were in any other line of work I'd be taken out and shot. But the amazing thing is, I might actually believe I'm doing the right thing, because that's what the system selects for.
Which gets us to:
I think they believed, bizarrely that they would raise up middle classes globally, which of course is absurd and if it happens the timeline is such that they replaced the U.S. middle class...i.e. traded the US to become a banana Republic.
Geithner's tax issues did not bother me nearly as much as his stint with the IMF, where they actually believe this, or used to anyway, even if it meant destruction of the economies they were helping out. His early policies smack of Rubinomics to me; but I'll be optimistic and hope he turns things around in time.
a Herman Daly primer post would be cool
I'd like to see one that can lay out a critical assessment. Because there are plenty of models out there which sound good in theory but don't work in practice. The necessity of what he says is clear; the implementation is murky to me.
Another question: our economy is driven largely by consumer spending. Why then is our labor philosophy designed to suppress aggregate demand? How can we not see that this is counterproductive?
The name-calling referred to upstream also applies to Europe: "socialist", "lazy", "old world", "chocolate eaters". They're eating our lunch on energy and transportation.
Hi, I created an account. Thanks for showing the truth. One thing lately a lot more Americans are opening their mind.
During the dot com bust I know managers that use to be H1b believers started loosing their jobs and looking for work. Lately, it's been last bastions of H1b American believers that are loosing their jobs. I own a consulting company and hire Americans. Always believed that we should help ourselves (Pro America) before worrying about our neighbors. If we have a good economy then we can help the poor countries.
After all this mess we will be become a better nation. We have already started the reboot (ctrl+alt+delete).
you might want to create an account, upper right column.
Then, you might want to reply to the comment by hitting the reply button.
You have posted a comment in a different thread, different post.
Then, on you are a racist xenophobe as well as protectionist. This is just attempts at name calling because it works.
They use it to drown out any statistics, realities on the ground of real job losses, real wage repression, real cutting of careers short through labor arbitrage.
Unfortunately for most Americans that's really a scary insult. Who wants to be a racist? So, it works very well to stop people from looking at all of these global labor issues objectively and acknowledge the statistics.
Corporations are trying to turn the word protectionist to mean anything at all with trade policy modification and it's obviously false. Protectionism means tariffs and no one is recommending that (or few are) so this is pure corporate lobbyist generated spin.
One of my favorites is for people to say major studies, done by highly credible researchers, where the actual research clearly has correct methodology, assumptions, mathematics....some of these cats try to say oh don't you know that organization are racists? to try to discredit the report. My case in point is the Center for Immigration Studies. Many of their research reports are actually funded by them but done by some heavy hitter researchers who not only are not racists but well respected authorities. Then the research itself is credible.
I cannot say that about every organization, even every paper but this sort of blanket "oh they are racists" because they do not like the conclusion of some research paper is pretty pathetic in my view.
I was on another blog recently and literally they said the Government Accountability Office were racists. Just unreal.
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