Random Musings on American Jobs

[midcan5]

As Americans wonder why unemployment has grown, I never hear discussions of the impact of outsourcing on jobs. While I am not a fan of tariffs and other protectionist policies, I am concerned that if manufacturing, service, graphic design, programming, printing, textiles, furniture, information, and helpdesk jobs leave the country what will Americans do: manage the workforce in India while the kids make coffee at Starbucks and toss burgers at MacDonald's! In the CNN list below is the corporation where I work, and today there are over 6000 jobs in India that used to be done here.

And then there is this crazy idea that buying Japanese and Korean cars is just wonderful. Is everyone Japanese and do the Japanese build American cars in Japan and support our economy? When I mention this to people they look at me like I am crazy. I tell them when the Japanese support me, I'll support them, till then I'll buy American as much as I can.

And consider too the standard economic argument that purchasing products where they are made cheap allows you to manufacture the things you do efficiently - and that would be? Or that buying foreign is OK when it comes to material items, but we should drill for petroleum here in our backyards because that too makes sense. Isn't that one enormous contradiction. Must be economists don't agree.

The other day I am driving behind this pickup with a Marine sticker, a NRA sticker, and a negative Obama sticker and the truck is a Toyota. Why does that strike me as odd? It would seem that if you are advertising your ideological preferences as an American why in the heck would you be in a Japanese truck? Ever hear of the NRA in Japan. After 911 I wanted to make a poster that said if you support the Japanese and Korean economies, please use their flags on your foreign car. I wonder if the Marine was wearing a work shirt made in Vietnam? You think.

But then I see those wonderful Golden Arches in a toy store. Ah the preparation for your future employment starts young. Imagine the little ones instead of a doll house selling pretend 99 cent burgers to the pretend unemployed neighborhood children. Next I expect to see a Walmart playhouse, 'always low wages' and now we sell burgers and they are cheaper than the pretend burgers at MacDonald's next store. Wonder if they will have anti Union rallies too. Little children demanding freedom as they lug Ayn Rand around is a funny image. Oh darn, mommy's calling us to supper.

Even our American companies now build overseas as they try to compete. I purposely look at every product I buy and pay more if it is made here, but that is getting harder and harder. Again I am not a tariff fan or a hyper nationalist I just simply think if we, being the enormous spenders and consumers we are, bought more American products and supported places that supported American workers with fair wages, and supported the corner store rather than Chinamart we would all be a little more secure and the nation would be a little nicer.

Oh, and please write and tell the media and the businesses you support them or you disapprove. Your neighbors will thank you.

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/popups/exporting.america/content.html

Buy American - support your nation and yourself.

Thumbs up Day – Political Pass
Buy American - Support Yourself – Political Pass

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[mascale]

There are about 7.0 bil. people worldwide, mostly at a "need-to-eat" level of economics. It is difficult to lose jobs to a basically agrarian, unskilled, or "hunting-and-gathering," level of technology. When peoples worldwide start to have creature comforts, then peoples worldwide have to become engaged in the supply of them.

The Japanese, for example, sell Toyotas, but also village Port-a-Potties. They even supply trainers in their use.

The Ivy League educated: Clearly don't have that on radar, even whey are sober--and realize that they don't have radar!

"Crow, James Crow: Shaken, Not Stirred!)
("Rule, Britania! Britania Rule The. . . ." Clever Q. They'll never know it's me! "Crow, here!")

 

[Neubarth]

Well, we can always seal off North America from the rest of the world and form our own self reliant economic system on our own continent.

 

[eagleseven]

Back before Japan, China, and India were developed, in the good ol' 1950s, the average American family had:

one car
one black-and-white television w/ 3 channels
a small ranch-style house
a gas or wood-burning stove
a record player
a telephone line

Now, the average family has:

2+ cars
multiple HD televisions with 100+ stations
a two-floor McMansion
full-sized electric stoves, microwaves, and 10+ kitchen appliances
washing/drying machines
multiple IPods
multiple cellphones
multiple computers
garage-fuls of Walmart crap


Do you really want to go back to the anti-trade 1950s? Perspective is key.

 

[midcan5]

"Seal the border," who said that, oh you did.

"Between 1980 and 2004 America's GDP went up by almost two-thirds. But instead of making everyone better off, it has made only a part of the country wealthier, as another part slips ever more into the black hole of the working poor. There are now 37 million Americans living in poverty, and at 12.7 percent of the population, it is the highest percentage in the developed world." Wake up: the American Dream is over | World news | The Observer

And would it not be better for Americans to support businesses and business incentives that create not cheap labor jobs where they make nike sneakers for spoiled American brats but industry that supported the nations they reside in and were sustainable.

This is the world now. "In a world in which a child under five dies of malnutrition every two seconds, and close to a third of the planet’s population lives in a state of "extreme poverty" that often proves fatal, the global enactment of such a basic income proposal may seem wildly utopian. Readers may suspect it to be impossible even in the wealthiest of OECD nations." A Basic Income for All

And every right wing conservative republican on this site and maybe in the universe will argue that we already give too much away and our taxes are too high. Given those facts, help solve world hunger in a meaningful way. Ideas?

"It has become fashionable in certain right-wing circles to avoid embarrassment over the fact that the U.S. devotes a smaller portion of its gross domestic product to foreign aid than any other rich country by intoning pompously that throwing money at the problems of poverty or healthcare in the developing world doesn't work. So why bother? Lately, the leading exponent of such a view has been William Easterly, author of "White Man's Burden," who has been adopted as a kind of standard bearer by those who simply can't tolerate being made to feel guilty by Jeffrey Sachs, author of "The End of Poverty." (An exchange between Easterly and Sachs can be found here." William Easterly

Boston Review — banerjee.php

 

[eagleseven]

In one post, you bitch that Americans don't care enough about their own country...


...and in the next, you bitch that Americans don't care enough about other countries?


Make up your mind.

 

[midcan5]

Do you really want to go back to the anti-trade 1950s? Perspective is key.

For one thing they were not anti-trade, businesses here after the war took care of their employees, it is why healthcare for instance is often tied to your workplace. We have two American Cars, four American bikes, and more, seems we can do things here too. But again the idea is to support each other as each other support each other. "Trickle Around" not down.

 

[midcan5]

In one post, you bitch that Americans don't care enough about their own country...


...and in the next, you bitch that Americans don't care enough about other countries?


Make up your mind.

Life is complex what can I say.

 

[eagleseven]

Life is complex what can I say.

In other words, you want everyone to be rich like you? And world peace, while you're at it?

It seems you live with Obama in the virtual world Sarkozy described...

 

[midcan5]

In other words, you want everyone to be rich like you? And world peace, while you're at it?

What would be wrong with that? One can be rich in all sorts of ways but worry about a job and a livelihood certainly don't help.

----------------------------------------------------

Outsourcing of another kind. Another example that is repeated often today. Deregulation has lead to disaster and many of the policies started during the Reagan administration. But also it demonstrates that markets left alone without honest and insightful people work poorly. This article sorta surprised me.


"Ford CEO Alan Mulally offered one of the clearest descriptions of this dilemma in testimony to Congress last fall. The automotive industry is "uniquely interdependent," he said. This was particularly true "with respect to our supply base, with more than 90 percent commonality among our suppliers. Should one of the other domestic companies declare bankruptcy, the effect on Ford's production operations would be felt within days -- if not hours." Which is why, contrary to all traditional economic theory, Mulally went on to plead for a bailout of Ford's arch rival, GM. And why Toyota executives soon followed suit."

How Detroit Went Bottom-Up | The American Prospect

"Meanwhile, laws designed to bring American corporations more directly under the control of financiers encouraged corporate managers to focus more on making money and less on making quality goods. Liberalization of trade laws reduced fears -- both among managers and the population in general -- of mercantilist aggressions by nations like Japan, China, and Germany. Most important was the Reagan administration's overthrow of antitrust law in 1981, an act that established a new overarching goal for regulating competition. Rather than seek to ensure competition for the sake of competition, the aim now was to clear the way for any efficiencies that might benefit the consumer, no matter how much consolidation this entailed.

The result was an entirely new legal environment, one that made breaking up the traditional industrial complex much more attractive. Outsourcing offered a quick path to cash, as it enabled managers simultaneously to sell off in-house operations and to offload costly liabilities like union pensions. Outsourcing also promised longer-term savings as managers began to take advantage of the more lax competition laws to pool some production activities with rival companies. In the automotive industry this pooling took place in two ways. First, managers gathered in-house operations into new units and then spun these units off as independent firms that were free to serve competitors; two of the biggest products of this reorganization were Delphi, spun off by General Motors, and Visteon, spun off by Ford. Second, managers at different automakers increasingly turned to the same existing suppliers, like Bosch and C&A, for the same parts.

Top auto-industry managers never expected that the pooling of supply activities would continue to a point where any outside supplier would manage to capture nearly complete control over a production activity. On the other hand, no manager at a top-tier firm appears ever to have made any concerted effort to prevent such consolidations. The general assumption seemed to be that this industrial system would somehow regulate itself and that new suppliers would continue to emerge naturally."