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Offshoring The Economy: Why The US Is On The Road To The Third World
Submitted by Paul Craig Roberts,
On January 6, 2004, Senator Charles Schumer and I challenged the erroneous idea that jobs offshoring was free trade in a New York Times op-ed. Our article so astounded economists that within a few days Schumer and I were summoned to a Brookings Institution conference in Washington, DC, to explain our heresy. In the nationally televised conference, I declared that the consequence of jobs offshoring would be that the US would be a Third World country in 20 years.
That was 11 years ago, and the US is on course to descend to Third World status before the remaining nine years of my prediction have expired.
The evidence is everywhere.
In September the US Bureau of the Census released its report on US household income by quintile. Every quintile, as well as the top 5%, has experienced a decline in real household income since their peaks. The bottom quintile (lower 20 percent) has had a 17.1% decline in real income from the 1999 peak (from $14,092 to $11,676). The 4th quintile has had a 10.8% fall in real income since 2000 (from $34,863 to $31,087). The middle quintile has had a 6.9% decline in real income since 2000 (from $58,058 to $54,041). The 2nd quintile has had a 2.8% fall in real income since 2007 (from $90,331 to $87,834). The top quintile has had a decline in real income since 2006 of 1.7% (from $197,466 to $194,053). The top 5% has experienced a 4.8% reduction in real income since 2006 (from $349,215 to $332,347). Only the top One Percent or less (mainly the 0.1%) has experienced growth in income and wealth.
The Census Bureau uses official measures of inflation to arrive at real income. These measures are understated. If more accurate measures of inflation are used (such as those available from shadowstats.com), the declines in real household income are larger and have been declining for a longer period. Some measures show real median annual household income below levels of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Note that these declines have occurred during an alleged six-year economic recovery from 2009 to the current time, and during a period when the labor force was shrinking due to a sustained decline in the labor force participation rate. On April 3, 2015 the US Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that 93,175,000 Americans of working age are not in the work force, a historical record. Normally, an economic recovery is marked by a rise in the labor force participation rate. John Williams reports that when discouraged workers are included among the measure of the unemployed, the US unemployment rate is currently 23%, not the 5.2% reported figure.
In a recently released report, the Social Security Administration provides annual income data on an individual basis. Are you ready for this?
In 2014 38% of all American workers made less than $20,000; 51% made less than $30,000; 63% made less than $40,000; and 72% made less than $50,000.
The scarcity of jobs and the low pay are direct consequences of jobs offshoring. Under pressure from “shareholder advocates” (Wall Street) and large retailers, US manufacturing companies moved their manufacturing abroad to countries where the rock bottom price of labor results in a rise in corporate profits, executive “performance bonuses,” and stock prices.
The departure of well-paid US manufacturing jobs was soon followed by the departure of software engineering, IT, and other professional service jobs.
Incompetent economic studies by careless economists, such as Michael Porter at Harvard and Matthew Slaughter at Dartmouth, concluded that the gift of vast numbers of US high productivity, high value-added jobs to foreign countries was a great benefit to the US economy.
In articles and books I challenged this absurd conclusion, and all of the economic evidence proves that I am correct. The promised better jobs that the “New Economy” would create to replace the jobs gifted to foreigners have never appeared. Instead, the economy creates lowly-paid part-time jobs, such as waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks, and ambulatory health care services, while full-time jobs with benefits continue to shrink as a percentage of total jobs.
These part-time jobs do not provide enough income to form a household. Consequently, as a Federal Reserve study reports, “Nationally, nearly half of 25-year-olds lived with their parents in 2012-2013, up from just over 25% in 1999.”
When half of 25-year olds cannot form households, the market for houses and home furnishings collapses.
Finance is the only sector of the US economy that is growing. The financial industry’s share of GDP has risen from less than 4% in 1960 to about 8% today. As Michael Hudson has shown, finance is not a productive activity. It is a looting activity (Killing The Host).
Moreover, extraordinary financial concentration and reckless risk and debt leverage have made the financial sector a grave threat to the economy.
The absence of growth in real consumer income means that there is no growth in aggregate demand to drive the economy. Consumer indebtedness limits the ability of consumers to expand their spending with credit. These spending limits on consumers mean that new investment has limited appeal to businesses. The economy simply cannot go anywhere, except down as businesses continue to lower their costs by substituting part-time jobs for full-time jobs and by substituting foreign for domestic workers. Government at every level is over-indebted, and quantitative easing has over-supplied the US currency.
This is not the end of the story. When manufacturing jobs depart, research, development, design, and innovation follow. An economy that doesn’t make things does not innovate. The entire economy is lost, not merely the supply chains.
The economic and social infrastructure is collapsing, including the family itself, the rule of law, and the accountability of government.
When college graduates can’t find employment because their jobs have been offshored or given to foreigners on work visas, the demand for college education declines. To become indebted only to find employment that cannot service student loans becomes a bad economic decision.
We already have the situation where college and university administrations spend 75% of the university’s budget on themselves, hiring adjuncts to teach the classes for a few thousand dollars. The demand for full time faculty with a career before them has collapsed. When the consequences of putting short-term corporate profits before jobs for Americans fully hit, the demand for university education will collapse and with it American science and technology.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst thing that ever happened to the United States. The two main consequences of the Soviet collapse have been devastating. One consequence was the rise of the neoconservative hubris of US world hegemony, which has resulted in 14 years of wars that have cost $6 trillion. The other consequence was a change of mind in socialist India and communist China, large countries that responded to “the end of history” by opening their vast under-utilized labor forces to Western capital, which resulted in the American economic decline that this article describes, leaving a struggling economy to bear the enormous war debt.
It is a reasonable conclusion that a social-political-economic system so incompetently run already is a Third World country.
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And yet, there are very few places to run to...
Why did the US went into financialization and job offshoring?
Because in 1971 the US was no longer self-sufficient in oil.
Could no longer grow.
The banana republic stuff has been in our faces in DC and Sacramento since 2006 at least.
[Third World definition. The nonaligned nations — which are often developing nations — of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
They are in a “third” group of nations because they were allied neither with the United States nor with the former Soviet Union.]
In the classical sense, it is impossible for 'Murka to become a third world nation; however a devolving "banana republic" type
status seems likely. In many ways we are there. Look at the rust belt, it appears to be a different nation from Silicon Valley.
Contrast Dallas vs. Detroit. The disregard with which the blue collar class is held is sad. Really they are becoming useful only
in the sense that they can provide their offspring to be servants to a "techno elite", or drones for an ever burgeoning governmental
bloat, or for boots on the ground to impose corporatist/Zionist ambitions. Now the chains are on. https://youtu.be/rDj1y0qXqDk?t=54s
California meets a lot of the above third world criteria, as it is not aligned with America, hosts maybe 10 million third worlders, is a single party state, and has a vast reprimitivizing struggling hinterland to balance its coastal elites special world.
just look at all the homeless people on and around Market St in San Francisco - always feels like Felouja.
Last time I was there I saw a man takig a shit on the sidewalk right in front of Twitter HQ at 11am
Probably just one of their programmers doing a code dump.
I think there is a LOT more money in offshoring the upper management INSTEAD of the peons. With the leftover profit, I think wages would actually go up!
and just ditch the middle management...they are just fat buffer blubber between the two anyway
Middle management are basically there to prevent upper management from actually doing any work to earn their %30000 above-lowest-wage salary.
trump is right. tariff every import no matter who makes it.
insane that nyc/dc trades thousands of manufacturing jobs for a handful of bankster jobs
failure to install tariff = continued collapse of US
but remember to be patriotic whenever the masters need you to fight for them or more likely, spend into debt for them
That was my very first sight flying into Bombay many years ago.Not one, but many, as
you walked out of the terminal at dawn.
My then girlfriendm didn't speak in e word fir a whole month.
Mumbai has improved and cleaned up the shanty towns.Looks like they moved to SF.
"Mumbai has improved and cleaned up the shanty towns.Looks like they moved to SF."
There's a very good reason for that:
"When it comes to the poorest people on Earth, as percentages of our populations, there are now more of the poorest-of-the-poor in the West than in India, and a virtually identical percentage when compared to Africa."
Western Poverty: A Crime-Against-Humanity Proven In One PictureIncludes graph of the "regional composition of global wealth (re)distribution 2015"
Or the article's pic...
Get Curious.
Many posts here are too simplistic and a waste of time, because many here lack the interest, perhaps the time, to research these issues within its history. If many of you would do that, I strong believe many posts here could become quite interesting.
Anyway, because of a lack of historical understanding, many here are seduced and distracted by the symptoms, while the goals/diseases are spreading.
These three quotes below ‘might’ shed some light about my points (fraud, naiveté, and humanities main problem, surpluses to keep growing):
“If you add all the profits that the banks made from 1998 through 2008; in which the “ever-increasing” bonuses were paid from; 2008/2009 losses exceeded the ‘entire’ profit for those 10 years [1998 through 2008]” — Simon Johnson, of Baseline Scenario
“The Goyim is not stupid, he is trusting. This trusting instinct is what allows advanced civilization. The Goyim can be lead astray easily because he accepts things in a trusting way without critical reasoning. This is probably an evolutionary thing as a function of the last ice age.” — MEFOBILLS, at Zero Hedge
“Of all Roman conquests, only Asia had a surplus” — Cicero, 66 B.C.
Your posts are pretty hit or miss like this one.. sure MEFOBILLS hit that one out of the park but your other two quotes are smoke and mirrors.. did you cook up that Cicero quote?? He is a bit more wordy than a simple statement like that but yes he did understand the vast wealth of Asia (your banking loss quote is bullocks too since who really ended up with any of those 'losses' and were made whole anyway?)
... here is a more interesting way of how Cicero thought of conquest in Asia or any other productive entity:
"Wherefore, if on account of their allies, though they themselves had not been roused by any injuries, your ancestors waged war against Antiochus, against Philip, against the Aetolians, and against the Carthaginians; with how much earnestness ought you, when you yourselves have been provoked by injurious treatment, to defend the safety of the allies, and at the same time, the dignity of your empire? especially when your greatest revenues are at stake. For the revenues of the other provinces, O Romans, are such that we can scarcely derive enough from them for the protection of the provinces themselves. But Asia is so rich and so productive, that in the fertility of its soil, and in the variety of its fruits, and in the vastness of its pasture lands, and in the multitude of all those things which are matters of exportation, it is greatly superior to all other countries. Therefore, O Romans, this province, if you have any regard for what tends to your advantage in time of war, and to your dignity in time of peace, must be defended by you, not only from all calamity, but from all fear of calamity. 15For in other matters when calamity comes on one, then damage is sustained; but in the case of revenues, not only the arrival of evil, but the bare dread of it, brings disaster. For when the troops of the enemy are not far off, even though no actual irruption takes place, still the flocks are abandoned, agriculture is relinquished, the sailing of merchants is at an end. And accordingly, neither from harbour dues, nor from tenths, nor from the tax on pasture lands, can any revenue be maintained. And therefore it often happens that the produce of an entire year is lost by one rumour of danger, and by one alarm of war. 16What do you think ought to be the feelings of those who pay us tribute, or of those who get it in, and exact it, when two kings with very numerous armies are all but on the spot? when one inroad of cavalry may in a very short time carry off the revenue of a whole year? when the publicans think that they retain the large households of slaves which they have in the salt-works, in the fields, in the harbours, and custom-houses, at the greatest risk? Do you think that you can enjoy these advantages unless you preserve those men who are productive to you, free not only, as I said before, from calamity, but even from the dread of calamity?"
The Collapse of Complex Societies. Page 149
I checked and I misquoted. I should have written “yielded a surplus” instead of “had a surplus”.
The bank quote was to highlight the religion of “Efficient Market Hypothesis” that’s a total fraud.
By the way: Can’t find any evidence about Ice Age and ignorance.
BUT, my experience growing up and working around Jews and non Jews is that, automated work (nuts and bolts/actually work) is tedious and boring. Too much intelligence/reasoning is counterproductive. And would make their work/tasks even more miserable.
That’s my experience by watching/observing them.
just look at all the homeless people on and around Market St in San Francisco - always feels like Felouja.
SF is becoming an interesting symbol of the 'third world' status. Extreme wealth / extreme poverty directly juxtaposed all over.
Reminds me reading about the devolution of juaraez. At first the mid upper class were OK and consequently didn't give a shit about the situation but eventually the destitution and crime became so overwhelming it was no longer safe for them either, but by that point it was too late.
it is a city that projects a perpetual state of madness.. it has its brilliance as all insane genius brings and will be the canary in the coalmine forseeing the major collapse
america cant be 'developing' so what is the term for 'de-developing'....? we arent 'on the road' also. we are past the point of no return.
In Sacramento, since the 80's.
There you have it. Jimmy Carter tried to break the bad news to America.
But America doesn't 'do' bad news very well. Or at all.
So, screw maintaining the infrastructure, we'll financialize and offshore and threaten to start WW3 to get the rest of the planet to make up the shortfall. Until that doesn't work any longer, just about now.
And it is interesting to watch the contortions of economists as they continue to deny that the real economy is really shrinking.
As one can see by the climbing poverty rates , 20 per cent of children in the U.S. live in poverty. that number is rising not declining.
Food stamp use is increasing not declining.
The profilertation of pawn shops, title loan outfits and sketchy metal dealers are all signs of the affliction.
Detroit is proof no one in power gives a fuck about anything but staying in power.
Detroit is what New York City will be in 20 years. The rot is already apparent all over the midwest and is creeping southward. Florida,Georgia,Alabama all tumbling into collapsing housing markets, tradesmen unemployed, look around you.
Does this look like a recovery? All I see is people hanging on, pretending and hoping, most living on credit cards and morgaging their future to pay for the present.
The government spends all its time spying on the people instead of helping them, the government it seems is intent on destroying the people, but then who will they govern?
What a curious suicidal plan. we are further down the path to banana republic than most know. most people still watch tv and beleive the propaganda. When the power stops working it will be a great surprise to them. gold won't help, but canned goods might for awhile. there's your future precious metal, canned goods.
Impoverished children can be used more easily as soldiers.
The financial leakage from the wars has created this situation and since there is no end in sight, it will continue to put the population down.
When soldiers are no sent to fight in Syria it is once again the taxpayer who pays for the war costs, not the gas companies in Qatar who are to benefit from the military action.
..the worse, the better
"Detroit is what New York City will be in 20 years. "
Hope so. They deserve it.
Jimmy Carter, (coming right behind the bumbling fool, Ford), was the worst god damned president until fuckin' Obama, and didn't try to break the news to america about anything. He floundered around with a weak lisp trying to figure out where inflation and stagflation came from and never had a fucking clue. Tried to be a tough guy but he had gutted the military to the point that his rescue mission for the hostages had helicopters that literally fell apart and ran into each other.
NEVER hold that jackass, Jimmy Carter, as any sort of beacon of knowledge. He couldn't shit into a paper bag if it was taped to his ass and he had a mirror. He was the dumbest fucking idiot ever until our current esteemed resident showed up.
And the ONLY difference between Carter and fukin Obama is that Carter was an honest idiot. Obama, a half white, educated, house nigger (and this calls for a bit of racism), is no idiot, everything he's done has been planned by his masters.
Carter was an anachronism, he hearkened back to an earlier time in the 19th century, a time of probity and honest dealing. Some day historians will treat him less harshly. It was only because of special historical circumstances that a straight-talking, moral individual like Carter could attain the presidency. The public was repulsed by the slimeiness of the Nixon presidency and then the supposed bumbling of Ford (who sat on the Warren commission IIRC) and thus Carter found his path to the highest office. It was a historical accident.
For anyone not a psychopath, the office of the presidency is a minefield. This is why Obama seems so incompetent. It is a measure of his relative normality of mental constitution, more like only halfway along the spectrum of psychopathy. OTOH, he has boasted of his skill at killing people remotely by drone. But I think this just shows his insecurity in that role.
Let's hope for the country's sake, we get a complete psychopath like Hillary or Trump as the next president, someone who can play the game like it's meant to be played.
I'm oddly attracted to your thinking.
Did you just use Jedi mind control?
"Did you just use Jedi mind control?"
Hahaha, that's funny, Fart. No, he just used something called L O G I C. It is good that you recognized it, even if you think it is some sort of black magic. Now go put on a sweater.
Old Phart, sometimes you impart wisdom and good humor but you are totally buying the propaganda and the false red/blue divide and conquer B.S. used to keep Americans from achieving any real change through elections. One big hole you left in your Carter description -- you must have not heard they confirmed that the October Surprise was real--the hostages were delayed their release until after Carter was out of office and Reagan sworn in as president, in a secret deal between leading Republicans with Iran. Much like Seal Team 6 was virtually eliminated by piling them in an old junk helicopter after the fake Bin Laden killing, the helicopter mission was likewise set up to fail. This article is about point #1 but the helicopter matter is covered elsewhere and, of course, harder to prove:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/11/the-october-surprise-was-real/
Of course like many other men who knew too much, one of the main actors, Bill Casey, got the CIA director job under Reagan as a reward for helping set up the October Surprise hostage deal but was later found dead 2 days before he was scheduled to testify about direct involvement of the Bushes in Iran/Contra:
http://aangirfan.blogspot.co.id/2010/08/dead-spooks-carnaby-underhill-ca...
http://www.altacocker.com/other_items/bush-strange_deaths.html
F'ing with the deep state can be hazardous to your health.
+1000.
Unless you lived through that idiot Carter's presidency you have no idea how fucking clueless he was and how much the US had fallen. I was 18 in 1980 and I can tell you that it was miserable. If one thing summed up the sheer idiocy of Carter it was the "Attack of the Killer Rabbit." You can't make this shit up.
http://www.wnyc.org/story/hare-brained-history-curious-case-jimmy-carter...
I wont argue the economic policies of Reagan becuase but I can tell you he was a damn sight better than Carter. And Obama is a fucking POS a hundreds time worse that Carter. Carter was naive and incompetent but he came by it naturally. Obama is a marxist muslin who is intent on bringing this country to its knees with his Cloward Piven strategists in the white house.
Its my profound home that when this system finally collapses, people pull out their lists and grab their pitchforks, rope and torches and we have an accounting of those that have lead us here. There needs to be a re-enactment of the Ox Bow Incident but this time there won't be any doubt as to the guilt or innocence of those being tried before a jury of their peers.
you need to wake up to the mirror of what Carter was relating to the public.. he was trying to put the animals back in the barn that Nixon let out.. America the Great did not want to hear that and loved when Reagan 'Let Them Have Credit'
Think back to how 'fucked up it was during Carter' but tell me how much in debt anyone was? Poor is fine, debt is slavery.. enjoy your toys
Carter is the only President in my lifetime that I can have some good thoughts about during and after his Presidency. I would rather have more outsiders in the Presidency than not. I like how he distances himself when having X Presidential group photos taken. I concur.
Jimmy Carter tried to break the bad news to America.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Much as I hate to admit it (as I'm no fan of Jimmah), you may be right. In hindsight, Carter was the last President who tried to make the traditional social contract work. Since then, it's been using smoke, mirrors and steroids to create the illusion of prosperity.
Totally wrong.
Corporations needed to escape inflation increasing costs. Particularly once US off gold standard. Nixon got us off gold, made us good with China, got the Petro dollar, did the wage and price freeze . What a fuck up.
No income, no production, no economy.
Corporations needed to escape paying living wages. Corporations needed to increase executive to rank and file worker
pay discrepancy ratios. Corporations needed to show "uppity" labor who had the whip hand. Now the once thriving middle
class doesn't have the discretionary/disposable incomes needed to provide adequate sales and revenues for many
businesses. Now domestic investment has to find rent seeking avenues, for yield; that or consumer staples--thus we have
bi-flation. The dichotomy in the economy will become worse. Take a pick, either a Family Dollar or Tiffany's economy. because
the hand writing has been on the wall for the middle ground ,JC Penny/Sears niche, for some time. Both spouses are in the
work force, with record levels of debt--to what?--to sustain a dream that has faded. I'm glad I'm not in this predicament, and
I feel for those who are, because ultimately we are all lashed together like mountain climbers; well all but the .01%-- they own
the mountain.
Not to be a prick, just a bit of advice. It looks like you're in the habit of typing and hitting return as your typing space fills.
Type away and only hit return at the end of paragraphs.
You write well, but the formatting makes it a tough read.
Probably typing typing on an old Blackberry phone - where if you don't hit "Return", everything you type is lost once the cursor hits the right side of the tiny screen.
Thanks for the advice, I'll give that a try. When I first started posting I'd type to the end and just let it auto return, but I didn't like how it spaced it. Rarely do I return for paragraphs; I usually just have one long thought stream. I started hitting return before it got to the end of the space so I didn't have a couple words per line. I'm typing this the way I first started posting. Usually I'll hit return twice before I start just to get it below the avatar picture. Anyway, I figure you not to be a prick and the down arrow wasn't mine, I try to respect my elders Old Phart.
ThirteenthFloor,
Nixon was the last liberal president.
Also, you need to take each topic on its own.
And, it’s too bad that you missed capital controls in your list.
You're not very popular on this site but you are correct. Every President since Nixon has been, successively, the most right-wing President America has seen in the modern era. I'm talking about actual policy and effect, not rhetoric. Clinton's Crime and Welfare bills were the Reagan Administration's wet dream they could never have spoken of aloud. Obama's neverending War policy and privatization of the Treasury on behalf of the Finance Industry, Wall Street and the health insurers in particular, are long-standing right-wing fever-dreams.
If the progression holds, soon enough we'll be seeing open, unapologetic fascism. Trump's rhetoric has been a test of the public psyche. So far, overt fascism is testing very well. The Evangelicals are relatively unimpressed, but that's because they're even crazier than most of America.
They do the psycho cop / gay cop shit with these prez puppets.. didn't Bush put in more be-gay-all-day laws than Clinton? more big brotha shit with Obama in da house? TPTB figured out that is it much easier to push through conflicting shit through the bowels of the sheeples cognitive dissonance so one base doesn't boil to a frenzy.
Unbelievable. At its most basic level, right wing principles are based upon limited government. Since LBJ, the US government has grown to such a gargantuan size that the people are now indentured servants to Washington DC, rather than Washington being beholden to the will of the people.
If anything, every President since LBJ has been a left-wing tool.
I don't blame you for being so ignorant, though. I blame the government education/indoctrination system that has been poisoning and dumbing down the minds of American kids since the 1970s.
I understand that you can pretty much find any study/paper that can back any unreasonable theory/believe.
But I find very unlikely that you will find any paper about liberal US presidents in the last 40 years because they don’t exist.
Even if you try to distort the true meaning of being a Liberal.
swmnguy,
Your post is spot on.
It only gets worse from here.
Chris Hedges: America will be fighting the Christian fascists. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_radical_christian_right_and_the_war_on_government_20131006
Corporations needed to escape inflation increasing costs... so now we have deflation. The end.
China must be overflowing in oil if that is what dictates growth.
Splain that one to the Japanese.
Syria SITREP October 31st, 2015 by John Rambo http://thesaker.is/syria-sitrep-october-31st-2015-by-john-rambo/I love The Saker but that sitrep by Rambo was naive at best and flat misdirecting lies at worst. To not mention that the U.S. Is behind ISIS/ISIL/AlCIAda is unforgivable.
It's "The Road to Hell"
"And all the roads jam up with credit
And there's nothing you can do
It's all just pieces of paper flying away from you
Oh look out world, take a good look
What comes down here
You must learn this lesson fast and learn it well
This ain't no upwardly mobile freeway
Oh no, this is the road
Said this is the road
This is the road to hell"
Chris Rea
I've been traveling since March and all teh countries I have been to felt much freer, better to live in, safer and happier than the USA. The only homeless I've seen since leaving the US were 3 men in Tokyo (world's biggest city of 32m people). Even Serbia felt much better and definitely happier. I am in Australia now - and I love it here. Compared to the airport in Beijing I saw a couple of days ago, the DC Rreagan airport looks like a shithole
TIme to go to Europe and see what you think. Try the south of France or Munich and see what you think. Maybe Sicily....
outsourcing to cheaper labor began 6,000 years ago
r
https://enronnext101.wordpress.com/
is that when we switched from fucking monkeys to goats?
Well, I admire PCR as much as any man alive, and I feel incredibly brave disagreeing with him this time. (And I risk being dismissed as being incredibly stupid, of course; that goes without saying!) But... I don't believe the US will become a Third World country any time soon. Its collapse will be very slow, and very gradual; there is way too much momentum to be overcome, for the collapse to occur within his time frame.
(And - I write from the Cayman Islands, one of the offshore tax-havens that will likely be blamed for the eventual collapse!)
http://barlowscayman.blogspot.com/2013/01/offshore-tax-havens-what-they-do.html
The timing will be driven by the extent to which the dollar can retain reserve currency status. But the overall trend is inevitable.
Possibly, but I respectfully disagree it will be gradual. It will come as a shock, a 9.7 epicenter earthquake that has been planned from the beginning of NAFTA. Yes, the final results might be "gradual" as far as looting, storming, canabalism..but that's all.
"I don't believe the US will become a Third World country any time soon."
It already is, depending on how you define it. A few hundred families already control more wealth than 50% of the population. That's pretty third world by a lot of definitions. We do retain the vestiges of first world status because there remains a middle class (propped up by the Fed fueled stock market and easy credit), and welfare for the poor. Like most third-world countries, upward mobility is becoming less and less available to the average person, and a growingly smaller percentage have enough in the bank to cover even a modest emergency.
Regarding “We do retain the vestiges of first world status because there remains a middle class (propped up by the Fed fueled stock market and easy credit), and welfare for the poor.” I’m not so sure there is much American middle class left )if you count net worth or recognize their individual debt load … not to be disagreeable, but as an American expat reading from Asia, I think the middle class back home is an illusion propped up by the media.
This story http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/dec/12/americans-wealth-shrinks-middle-class-falling-home-prices
says “Only 9.5% of middle-class families assets are in stocks.” Note it is NOT an American media outlet.
Various resources based on data more than a year old suggest only a tiny single digit of stocks are owned by the American middle class. Google it … you decide which source is currently accurate, but please do recognize the trend.
The real middle class story is outside the USA …. here is an excerpt from a Credit-Suisse (again, not from an American media source) report just released:
“Despite a high incidence in North America, the region contains only 105 million middle-class adults (16% of the global total), significantly less than the 303 million members (46%) in the Asia Pacific region (109 million of whom are from China) or the 194 million residents of Europe (29% of the world). In fact, the number of middle-class adults in the USA has fallen below the number in China (see Figure 4).”
https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/mediarelease-assets/pdf/2015/10/gwr-2015-global-press-release.pdf
A true patriot loves his country always, and his government when it deserves it”
- Mark Twain
By the way, if we had ever declared war since 1947 ... we would not have the debt we have ..
there are laws on te books that REQUIRE tax increases and DISALLOW unreasonable profits in a rtime of war ... THAT is why we do not declare war.
But an Imperial Decree, ahem, Executive Order, declaring a National Emergency?
Well, those can be renewed indefinitely.
once workers got poor enough to be scared of management then they also got scared of questioning management of any type
I also generally love me some PCR, but as far as the departure of software engineering, there are jobs to be had here... perhaps too many American kids perfecting their video game skills instead of hitting the books though: www.amazon.jobs ~ 4,773 current listings
Riddle me this Batman. if America is awash in unfilled information technology jobs, why are there so many unemployed IT professionals.
everyday i meet an ex IT worker or two, I used to be one myself. Unless you love coding so much you'll work for McDonald's wages and sleep in your parents basement, you might as well throw in the towel
when i call my internet provider for service, I always get an indian or a filipino, named Jimmy or Steve, that ain't because nobody wants high paying call center jobs. thats because nobody wants to pay high salary call center wages, when they can offshore and get for pennies what used to cost them hundreds of dollars.
Information tech's glory days are long gone, Microsoft is floundering, Apple is selling watches and my phone has a faster internet connection than my laptop.
these gadgets are distractions, physical tokens of propaganda meant to distract you while you pay for the gadgets to monitor your thoughts, your activities, your finances, your social network, so that those in power can destroy you and your finances, and your friends.
facebook if that is the future, if that is progress, then we have no future.
information technology began as a means to plot trajectories for weapon systems, it will likely end as that as well.
everything you read, everything you eat, everything you touch has been manipulated, ask yourself why that might be, what is to be gained and by whom?
Don't beleive the dream, its frosting on a nightmare.
I evolved into the computer industry as it was taking off because that is where jobs were for people who could program and manage projects, and I had those skills from working in medical research.
I HATED HATED HATED my career in the computer industry.
The managers were brutal overlords, the work hours were just continuous with no concept of time not working. The corporate reorganizations, product group restructurings, management changes, product direction changes and cancelations were so frequent that I was dizzy and numb.
It is impossible to have a lifetime (eg 40 yrs) career in the computer industry because you will burn out or be obsoleted by technology and industry changes or be replaced by much younger and cheaper idealistic delusional beasts of burden. The only hope you have is of getting stock options that are worth enough to enable you to escape before you expire.
+ 100 to you for encapsulating my experience of working in the IT industry for the last 20 years, in a nutshell.
And yes you are right, I could not imagine lasting another 20 years, burnout comes quick in IT, with most people essentially re-skilling every 6 months to a year.
One of the best pieces of advice I saw here a few months back, aimed at anyone who is in or thinking of a career in IT is to study hard coding embedded chips, where platform changes happen at a much gentler pace
When I realized that what I described about the computer industry was true, I also realized that I had to get out before it destroyed me
I tried applying for jobs in organizations that only used IT rather than creating IT, but astonishingly NO ONE would offer me a job, in spite of my excellent record of work for top computer industry companies, eg Intel, Digital Equipment Corp, etc, because they all said that I was a "high-tech guy", would not be satisfied outside the high-tech industry, and would just quit after a short period.
Because of the horrific level of turmoil in the computer industry, I had already racked up 2 pages of job history, with 2 text lines per job, in only 4 years, which made me look like the much-reviled "job jumper", and it was getting hard to get job offers after each project was canceled/completed, reorganization, etc.
So I decided to make my job history work for me instead of against me and I marketed myself as a guy who works ONLY on turn-arounds, start-ups, new product developments/roll-outs, etc - and then I leave for the next creation challenge instead of staying to bounce around inside the perpetually churning organization like a ball in a pin-ball machine, and that I work primarily for stock options vs salary.
That change in self-marketing worked well - the recruiters I had were effective at getting me positions that fit my new profile whenever I was displaced, and eventually I was able to get enough stock options accumulated in public companies after almost 40 projects that I was able to become financially self-sufficient and I left the computer industry in my rear-view mirror.
It took more than a year for my mind and body to recover from the continuous high stress of being enslaved in the computer industry. I was so burned out that I could not take on anything, so I sold my house, got an RV and just traveled. That was how and when I got my life back.
You had the brilliant realization that very few job-seekers do, unfortunately. You realized that your job history doesn't matter to anybody, unless it shows why you might be unfit. What does matter to potential employers is if you have a clear understanding of your skills, and are able to apply them to whatever problems they might have.
Even better, figure out how to cut out the middleman and get hired as an independent at the true market value of what you do, as a consultant. Under capitalism, it's impossible for an actual employee to get paid what their work is worth, or there's no profit for the employer. No employer ever hired an employee for any reason other than he could make more profit by doing so than by not doing so. It's different with consultants, however. They're seen as a necessary cost of doing business, like maintenance or utility payments.
I was being ground into the dirt in my profession, and then realized that my total cost of employment to my employer was less than 1/3 of the revenue my work generated for my boss. It was a pretty simple business and in my position, I was able to see enough to figure that out. When I quit that job, I found I could easily bring in twice the income working about half as much as an independent than I had been as an employee.
You are not alone.. taking a year off is the only cure from the corporate IT visegrip that extracts all your soul... you need a year to let that refill and become one again. but then the struggle to ever deal with that part of society becomes unbearable.. popping xanax just to sit through another mindless meeting of cuntlapping a rotten corpse of a department until the last of budget cycles force the layoffs and reorgs, rinse repeat
becoming a sniper like you have is exactly how i see survival as well...
"Riddle me this Batman. if America is awash in unfilled information technology jobs, why are there so many unemployed IT professionals."
Exactly. Many are being filled with H1Bs.
Also many companies are going to Pune and other areas in India as a solution to costs.
A future US family driving somewhere.
http://royivankoe.com/oldsite/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/india-pune-8858...
Had a problem with Norton 360. Had to chat with Ramaden Chowtahoudin (Call me Kevin). Was weird, since my first name actually IS Kevin. Ok, Kevin, have a go at my personal computer with all access to fix the Norton Problem. Oh, by the way, I'm on the NSA and FBI watchlist, so expect a drone when you're done.
It's one big scam. I get calls from those Indian fuckers all the time, offering me what is essentially my current job for some ridiculously low wage. Then they go back and say they can't fill the jobs in order to get more H1B visas. That's why there are so many unemployed IT professionals.
and they expect you to be a carpet bagging cockroach just like them and run around the country taking 3 month contract jobs in shit hole towns
true - and very well put
r
https://enronnext101.wordpress.com/
Computer Science jobs are NOT IT, software development at a company like Amazon is no way comparable to an IT job. IT jobs are universally viewed as an expense to the company. Software development jobs at quality companies like Amazon have a much higher barrier to entry than the IT field in terms of quantifiable skills and good software developers add far more value to the company than they are compensated for and viewed accordingly.
eactly..it takes skills to code..skills india and china do not have lol
but the russian coders understand how to pick and switch code quickly and have the brains to spit out working stuff which is the real competition to the good coders.. that's the side of open source the holy fucknuts don't bring up.
I have 2 IT workers I supervise: one H1B Indian (onsite), one Russian (offshore, Moscow). The Indian has a few more years of experience over the Russian. They were hired to help me do my work, using a framework I developed. The Indian is driving me up the wall. I have to explain something, literally, a dozen times, and the info would still not register. He fucking pesters me with questions that indicate he's a retard. I literally spend half my day guiding and correcting him.
The Russian: I pointed him to the code, the how-to-guide, and provided him with 1 hour a week of teleconference for questions. He's now able to do, after 1 month, what the Indian imbecile still can't do after 6 months of training.
Fucking retard.
there is a massive shortage of people who can code good enough to pass the tests for microsoft, amazon, google, etc
the ex coders who are no longer in IT are just code monkeys at best.
Mate...when the US financial system collapses along with the Dollar you will get poor very quickly.
Nexus789: Exactly. People tend to forget that Madoff and Corzine sent monthly statements (snail mail or electronic) telling them how "rich" they were. Then one day, it was gone. They came, they lied, they stole. They both also sacrificed their sons to Mammon. Karma's a bitch, you know.
I think we have a LOT of things to blame, America can't hide behind fact that there are people in other countries willing to do the same job for less money. And the more I write this the more mad I get. I have been all over the world. I have seen poverty. There are stupid governments everywhere...in fact they are all stupid. But undernearth every damn one of them, are millions and millions of people who want to work to improve their lives.
I was at the Samsung plant in very rural China last week outside of Xi'an, where they hire many local village people. i was told they work for $2000 rMB per month. That's about $320. Whats the point PCR! should we boycott Samsung because they didn't open their plant in a rural city outside of Chicago!!
I've been in that village...and you get a hard working, educated (knows algebra, trigonometry, some english, history etc) 20x year old for $320 per/month who has a wife and a kid at home, where they more than likely live with parents.
What do you get in that city outside of Chicago? THATS THE DAMN POINT!! a punk who won't show up to work on time, wants $15 per/hour ($2,500 per/month), free health care and benefits all worth $4,000 per/month. And when America decides that protectionism is virtuous, samsung may open a plant here and who will pay $3,000 for their cell phone!!! NOT ME and NOT YOU EITHER PCR.
I downvoted you Antifaschistische because you are a myopic globalist apologist and cocksucker.
You parrot the bullshit "industrious 3rd world peasant/lazy american gringo" meme quite well and in so doing you stupidly perpetuate Illuminati propaganda....
fuck you. Fuck you and your upvoters....Fuck you and pick the lice out of my ears, you "broad-shouldered" genius of capitalism.
lighten up a tad
Antifaschistische
is a typical indoctrinated HR shill
their type are all over the place and that will never end
r
https://enronnext101.wordpress.com/
Bananananamerican. I can tell, you are not responsible for hiring people in America. I live/work in Houston and the problem I have hiring American's into high paid technical positions is echo'ed across this country everywhere.
In case you haven't noticed, all over America, American companies are forced to hire "non-gringo's men" to meet hiring quotas...
so...should an American citizen be forced to buy "things" only made in America including subcomponents?
Should American companies be allowed to sell their products across a border?
....ah, so you are a globalist too. :)
Well Antifashishitical, I can tell you never grew and maintained anything and if you were in charge of lumber we'd already have 0 trees left. If globalizm is all well and good then why the fuck can't we offshore our fucking government right along with those jobs? Why the fuck haven't the government wages go into the shitter too? It boils down to power and control cockhead not economics.. sociopaths reap what they rape while others are left to weep what they sowed
Exactly. The root problem of free world trade has been ignored. With free trade how can jobs not flow to low paid hard working countries? American labor rates must equalize with the world under free trade. The demands for ever higher minimum wages is a demand to outlaw working at a competitive rate. How out of touch is that? Before all the tech and know how was shipped over seas was the time to make a stand. The rot of America is the flip side of free trade. The economic PHD's did not mention when NAFTA was promoted and they still cover up with bogus statistics and funny money the unhappy truth.
You stated an obvious fact. You always want to pay less for the goods you purchase rather than the price you would have to pay for a locally produced item.
Eventually the locally produced item must come down in price or they go out of business. All supporting businesses lose as well.
It has an equalizing effect as Dr PCR stated. In order to compete we have to drop our living standards at least as low as those 3rd world countries. Maybe even lower.
So the US has a long way to go. Keep in mind that your living standard will drop as well. Deny it as you may because your the exception,but maybe your children.
I know a guy that used to have 4 stores and a thriving business. His father started the business. He used to drive top end Mercedes and BMWs. In a matter of 10 years he's now scraping by, he's driving toyotas , his college educated kids still live at home, one works for him and the other works as a cashier at a chain store. He said neither kid could find a good job.
It will happen slowly, then all at once.
Hey, How's life treating you?
Like it normally does...I'm toilet paper.
What's it treating you like?
Can't have it both ways. Either Reserve currency or trade barriers.
Banana Republic.
"a Third World country with First World infrastructure."
-Fred Reed
I guess you have never been to Akron, OH.
I just read my college Rider has a 7 million deficit. Fired 25 professors. And dropped 13 majors. I was shocked. Until I read that tuition is $39000 @ year. I had no idea. These college students have no chance.
Chucky was against something that was bad for America? Very strange....
And the FSA had the biggest income decline of any quintile? Stranger still....
offshoring is a function of a dying debt based-money monetary system...........nothing more, nothing less.....
blame the jewsury.......the big secret that the moneyJEWchangers dont want out is that the currency is created 'out of thin air'.........
attaching usury(interest) to the MOE is the biggest fraud perpetrated on humanity......99.99% of the sheep think that banks are lenders when in fact, banks are borrowers..........
Your first paragraph is completely wrong!
Show us an empirical evidence about your statement.
It is a function of 'financialisation' where everything is determined via its lowest cost anywhere on the planet - labour, capital, etc. This is counterposed to the creation of competiveness via the prooduction of competitive tradable products and services within a national economy. In the former you would seek the lowest cost anywhere and the latter you would internalise value creation with a national economy via supperior technologies. The US 'elites' chose the former and the consequences for the people of the US has been a steady decline living standards and the the lost of international competitiveness. After WW2 the US used to dominate all industry segments technologically. No longer. The 1% have done well though.
Nexus789
After WWII, the US dominated EVERYTHING simply because we weren't devastated by WWII as everywhere else in the world was. For a long while we were the worlds sole source of pretty much everything as they recovered from the effects. That allowed our industries to become slack and build in designed obsolesence, that ultimately came to haunt us in the late 70's when 'Jap-Crap' suddenly became superior to our home produced products. Japan, Korea and other countries worked to build increasingly better products, until they got to the point that they surpassed us by decades.
I remember looking into the hood of the first Nissan car I'd every seen. Every clamp was in the same direction that would make it most convenient to access. Every dipstick faced you right side up with an inscribed indicator. The gear shit was centered and had the gear layout exactly as you would shift. Hell, EVERY car in the lot had their tires facing the same way, the print aligned, row after row [Winter Garden, Florida 1979] (And this was in EVERY CAR I LOOKED AT.)
A Ford, Chevy or any other american car would have clamps every direction, the dipsticks would rotate randomly and have no indication of what they were for (you had to know), gear shift knobs were usually upside down, and our nationally produced cars were so bad we had to introduce Lemon Laws. You'd be lucky to have five tires of the same brand.
Further, it got to the point that people wanted to know what day of the week their american made car was done on...since Wednesday was less likely to be built by drunken, over-valued, narcisstic, union fuckers.
From about 1978 to present, the world kicked our ass at building better, more reliable cars. And our dumb-ass in the White House bailed out the american car manufacturer in 2009. That's how bad it was/IS.
At present, I wouldn't get an american car if they were handed out for free (that day may come). The quality is so poor I consider them death traps. There are constant recalls for death dealing defects. Our car industry should have died an honorable death back in 2009, when it should have. What we have now are zombie products that merely seek to suck our brains out.
And most people have already had a zombie encounter.
Most excellent and righteous rant.
+ 1
Well, thank you, but you're Douchen and you've heard better rants from me, and you've wrote much better, politically correct shit than I ever will. What the fuck did you do to have assume an alternate personna on ZH?
My facebook one, OldPhart Outin TheDesert, was obliterated by facebook and the FBI when the FBI came to visit. All over, "Who should we shoot first, banksters or politicians. This is the chicken and egg sort of problem."
What horrifying shit did you write?!
Even though you are missing on the real targets on the auto industry fiasco, I totally agree it is a bitch that in the 80's we had real free speech and by the end of the 90's and into the dot com boom the PC doctrine rose and rose until the 9/11 noose took hold
(...you don't know the asinine mismangement of early LEAN attempts in the plants that led to all those fuckups you mentioned.. things like, you have 10 seconds before welding that door before the next one, so we want you to screw on these door handles during that time...my Dad worked on the line so yeah, once that came in place, you got the results you mentioned.. since the tarrifs went down and cheaper decent jap cars came abroad, management felt they had to get more out of the higher waged union workers instead of realizing it was the beginning of the wage race to zero. The sticking part was the unions were smart enough to hold onto benefits and give up salary since they knew the dollar was going to shit so healthcare would get out of control.. that was like asking to keep part of their compensation to be paid in gold since inflation can destroy a small raise but benefits keep your cost of living more honest..)
i can go on and on, people tend to water and grow their own version of history anyway
Millions of recent recalls by almost all manufactureres were for air bags made in JAPAN. Toyota has been recalling millions of cars for years with the latest just recently. The unintended acceleration problem was real but great PR limited the damage or convinced the public it never happened. They also had an opposite problem where pressing on the gas the car would have an occasional large lag with drivers afraid to drive them for fear of an accident. Rotted out external oil lines or blown engines because owners didn't realize a special Toyota oil was required thus any warranty claims denied. Volkswagan has been notorious for poor quality and now has the diesel emissions scandal. Walk on water Tesla has always been dogged by poor quality but it's cult following kept it out of the limelight until the recent Consumer Reports downgrade. Honda has had millions of bad engines and transmissions. Visit any of the owner specific forums and you'll realize all brands have plenty of problems.
Although wages and bennies are much less overseas people do not realize that in most cases what one American can do with a machine the Chinese hire a bunch of bodies to do the same job by hand. There is so much hand work that it is claimed it takes five days to make an Ipad. Even mundane stuff that could be done solely by machine are done by hand. The need for increased manpower necessitated more drill sargent supervisors They worked hard because they were forced too not because they wanted to. Then more executives to watch the supervisors. I watched one video where normal procedure was to park a trailer in the lot and for an hour or two about a dozen guys carried boxes of jeans from the building and stacked them in the trailer. In the US the trailer would have been backed into a door and one guy with a forklift and one helper would get the thing loaded in half an hour.
One thing not mentioned anywhere is the boondoggle of costly regulations that companies must meet. Many thousands are put in force every year. Many are completely nuts. Like they are now formulating new safety rules for Christmas lights. On average there is only one incident per year in the US. NAFTA had plenty of environmental regulations built into it which the Mexicans usually ignored. Some are really nuts like the chicken tarriff. In realiation for countries putting import tarriffs on US chickens the US enacted large tarriffs on imported completed trucks. Toyota would ship in trucks without a bed and would make the bed in the US and install it. This was years ago and may have changed. Plus they now make trucks in the US. Ford makes it's Transit van in Turkey as a passenger van complete with seats and windows. After entering the US the seats and excess windows are removed and thrown in the garbage to avoid the tarriff. It's cheaper to do it this way but too expensive to send the seats and windows back to Turkey.
Then we have CEO's who are too lazy to run a manufacturing operation and gladly outsource the operation and let someone else deal with the headaches. Of course the CEO needs a plane to visit those far flung operations so he has justification to buy one and travel the world on the companies dime. Plus unlimited personal use too. Every year at the Masters, and other major sporting events, the local airports are overflowing with corporate jets.
the same thing was said about british cars (shoddy quality)
I agree with you largely..American cars are shit..but my ford pickup truck is a good vehicle.
Americans can make good pickup trucks.
When foreign companies tried to get started with pickups, Lyndon Johnson (father of US welfare) signed legislation to levy a super heavy duty tax on imported pickups. It was called the 'chicken tax'. It gave American companies, through crony capitalism and a taxpayer gift to the unions, an advantage for a very long time over foreign competitors in light trucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
In fact, a Harvard professor wrote a paper on how that chicken tax came back to haunt the US auto industry, since the US manufacturers found much higher margins in trucks, due to the protective tax, they gravitated toward building everything on a truck platform to avoid competition and fuel mileage and emission requirements. Detroit took it's focus off the lower margin sedans to focus on trucks. Meanwhile, the foreign competition were building a pile of very capable sedans. That's when we got slammed, if you will remember, when gas prices skyrocketed. We had nothing here to compete with when the crowds abandoned their gas sucking trucks. Everything went to Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mazda, BMW, and on and on. Detroit has been playing catch up ever since.
they should of just kept making the old cars that last and could take a crash.. they were safe except for the people they smashed into who were in those cheaper structured jap cars. The main lesson usa auto should of grabbed early on was to make most cars front wheel drive. Getting rid of fishtailing was the main reason people bought into those jap cars for safety reason.. then complained on the heavy rear wheel cars smacking them into the ditch
link for dollar purchasing power chart only
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-why-us-dollar-not-going-zero-an...
Usurious
You wrote: offshoring is a function of a dying debt based-money
Offshoring has more to do about growing. Extracting whatever wealth and resources available. Also, with little concern for labor rights, nations population, and their environment. Euro is a good example.
Debt has more to do with compensating for lack of growth. US is a great example of giving up manufacturing to become the largest consumer.
And the only way they could have done, actually, that’s how the US did it, it was through debt. Lots of it.
Dollar purchasing power has nothing to do with offshoring. In fact, if it wasn’t for offshore demand, the dollar would have devalued a lot more.
And because of the dollar other attributes. Not that these go unnoticed within the Zero Hedgers.
After WWII the USA was the only industrialized nation that hadnt been bombed into oblivion. Of course the 50s and the 60s were our hay day. But you didn't expect that to last forever, did you?
Could have as Regan initialted a project called 'Socrates' to analyse how to keep the US competitive. It was found that the foundation of all supperior competive products/services is technology. Socrates created a system and framework that would have always given the US a technoloogical edge. Bush 1 closed it down and the decline started in earnest.
True, but that's not all. The endless stream of cronyism, corruption and regulations that favor huge established entities assures individuals with great ideas and energy never get to start and grow into replacement industries.
The western world is hopeless.
The rest isn't much better.
And much is worse.
yes but in many coutnres people naturally collabrate and share much more than Americans or British do. That makes life much easier and more fun. in that sense we in the US are much worse off - we have all the worst aspects of banana republics without social capital, sharing and collabration.
small towns still have it..
many of those other countries you mention aren't 'multicultured' like the usa so you should retrace the steps of the decline to the cause.. this country is bombarded with 'diversity tolerance' but to also not trust anyone.. and then the sciopaths that take advantage of the few honest giving people which turn them into basket cases
If you want any evidence of third-world status, visit almost any area of the Midwest these days. The area I grew up in used to be the world's leading producer of a certain commodity, producing just about 100% of the world's market share. Today, almost every single gas station has "WE TAKE EBT" or just "EBT" on its signs. Millenials whose parents and grandparents graduated from high school and found instant family-supporting jobs are now stocking shelves at grocery stores or selling retail.
Symtomatic of all the things PCR mentions as once productive capabilities are lost the supporting infrastructure is lost also and jobs move from skilled and high income to low skilled and low paid.
Come to houston if you wanna see third world culture. It will surely make you think twice.
Now, now... I agree that much of the Midwest is worse for wear, but there are a few pockets where of decent growth - KC, Madison, Minneapolis. Primarily its medical equipment, agriculture processing, medical IT, and financial.
Didnt Minneapolis fall to the Somali Kaliphate?
A lawn doesn't die at once. first you get yellowspots then brown spots, the bare spots, then the bare spots become more in number and larger until there is no grass just dust and dirt and mud and rock.
Think of Akron and Cleveland and Youngstown as bare spots, if you don't fix the bare spots eventually the entire yard dies. The bare spots are indicators of the overall health of the economy.
The economy is dying, how can you have an effective healthy economy when you don't make anything to sell to each other?
this ain't rocket science and if you beleive your eyes and your wallet instead of your televsion set and its happy songs of the dream world, you'd see we are poorer, financially and spiritually. we are weakened and we apparently will stand for pretty much anyone in authority asks for or takes from us, like our civil rights for example or common law and the prosecution of financial fraud.
Even a desert has oasis, that doesn't mean soon the entire desert will be a savannah again. Instead of pointing out the remaining green spots, ask yourself why there aren't more, why isn't the economy better. We have the natural resources, the people and the money (especially the money - since its created by thin air) and yet the only growth industry is poverty.
fuck the grass... take out a loan and build a pool... heat it with your second mortgage
America's greatest resource is debt.. tap into it
This is why Trump is winning in the polls. He's the only one talking about bringing back our jobs from overseas and ending NAFTA.
Trump 2016!!
Make America Great Again !!
Trump is an arrogant asshole. But, he's not a neocon, or a career politician, or a fucking lawyer. So, I'll probably vote for him if he's nominated.
a pig ass ugly arrogant asshole. Arrogance is usually used to try to cover insecurity and inferiority
And, from what he says, he's not taking oligarch handouts. He claims to be self-funding...
He's on my maybe list, but Scrooge McDuck is still a favorite.
He is neo con. He gave his soul to the tribe.
He's no more a neocon than the Clintons are Democrats, these people are nothing more than crony capitalists
He's also operated his life legally that I know of. Hillary could be charged with dozens of felony crimes. Just shows you who the sheeple admire these days.
Trump 2016 is like a time machine to Trump 1958. That is the America he wants to bring back...Give it a shot, but I wonder if it is too late.
@dark pools of soros
Why So Much Jewish Fear and Loathing of Donald Trump? Professor Kevin MacDonald October 29, 2015
great read - thanks.. i've been off my hinges lately wondering if anyone else was seeing the real swell behind Trump's support
I always wondered back in the early 1980's when manufacturing jobs were being shipped offshore.....what's the end result?
Cheaper products? Nope. If a pair of Nike shoes costs $4.00 to make over there.... why do they sell for $100+ over here?
Same thing as when a contractor hires a whole crew of illegals to build your house. Does he pass the "savings" along to you? Nope.
Is this a trick question, Duc?
Yeah, $4.00 over there, $18.00 over here. The difference is $14.00, less shipping, and Nike keeps $11.00 more per pair of shoes.
Then there's the added benefit of giving the country where the manufacturing jobs moved to more money to buy American exports.
No noogies please.
What exports? Weapons?
What else?
We educate their students here with grants and freebies, so they can go back home then design their own weapons systems. Since they typically score 20% higher than US students on entry exams, I'll bet they become pretty darn good at it. Perfect. You know, I don't know why anyone here complains at all. Just look around. The US is a perfect paradise. Everything is fine. All problems solved. And everyone I talk to always tells me "I won't be around when that happens". So we also have a huge number of optimists. What more could you ask for?
Ignorance is Piss
Bid the Soldier: Yeah, $4.00 over there, $18.00 over here.
Real Nike', not "rip off" Nike' sold in some shit hole urban flea market. I've never seen real Nike's sold for $18 Ever.
How many exports from USA does China buy? How's that trade imbalance doing? What is it that we produce here in USA that we export to China?
I misunderstood your poorly worded question.
I meant that if $4.00 was Nike's labor cost per pair of shoes over there, their labor costs must be $18.00 over here. While the shoes retailed for over $100 everywhere as everybody knows.
As usual you were only going for upvotes from your friends.
Tech stuff.
you ignored his premise.. he said 'Where art thou savings from slave labour?' just as 'Where art thou dolla gas from bombing Iraq to shittles?'
"As usual you were only going for upvotes from your friends."
rolling eyes
it's all explained i this 100% prophetic interview with James Goldsmith from early 90s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwmOkaKh3-s
Killido:
+1000 for the Goldsmith interview link!
Died of pancreatic cancer a few years later.
Amazing interview.
You simply don't hire the contractor. You go to Home Depot or Lowe's or wherever the illegals congregate.
I need a contractor. They look around each other until one guy steps forth. $12 an hour. Ok, I need tilers that know drywall and some electrical. Three thousand step forward, $10 an hour, three thousand remain. Then it's you, you, and, um, you.
$40k labor on home renovation is suddenly $8k because, after the first day, you don't need that contractor anymore.
umm, trust me on this. Got two coming tomorrow to grout the patio tile.