Paul Craig Roberts,an Assistant Treasury Secretary during the Reagan Administration, and a dyed in the wool Conservative, says that Bush is hastening the day when we will be reduced to Third World Status.The symptoms are ever present and growing in magnitude and virulence.First, our political structure has been debased by phony elections,a corrupt judiciary, a legislature beholden to money,a corporate culture based on risk aversion and government largesse and an executive branch which asserts power that every tin horn dictator that we used to despise drool with envy.
Second,the steady destruction of the manufacturing base in the country is beginning to impact all high end activities in design, research & development and product innovation in many fields.That reduces the opportunities for younger people whose education has been relegated to the back burner in this administration’s mad dash toward wars with just about everyone on earth.The plant closings and layoffs at Ford essentially ensure that the era of upward mobility for the vast majority of our people is over.Bare survival and constant economic fear is going to be the norm.
Thirdly, I believe that the momentum is now shifting toward countries like China and India that have made the education and economic empowerment of their citizens the cornerstones of their economies.It is not a coincidence, I think, that on the day that brought gloomy news about Ford and GM, India was declared the third largest economy on earth behind the U.S. and China.We can expect a massive assault from these two giants in the decades ahead in fields as diverse as conventional manufacturing,medicine, research & development,legal, accounting and banking services,not to mention the ubiquitous call centers.
In the midst of this disintegration, we seem to be lacking anyone on our side who can articulate the problems we are facing, how it is due to ideological blinders and how it can be corrected by thinking of our people and children as assets to be nourished and not as burdens to be endured.It goes to the core of the idea of what a society is for,except to enhance the well being of all individuals.Until that idea takes root, we can expect to see Indians and Chinese dominate the world economic scene.
I also think that Bush’s stand on things like stem cell research is a piece of that slide.
If the research departments of our universities are legally restricted in what they can study, we will lose top American students to foreign universities. And those student’s probably wouldn’t come back — how could they practice their profession if it’s against the law?
As the research departments of the universities slide in reputation, the rest of the departments will also slide. It’ll be a steady progression.
Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, is an excellent book that documents the anti-intellectualism and the relegation of science as a handmaiden to business that is a major facet of this administration and its supporters.
I wish I understood why they are pushing these policies. They seem suicidal to me. And I can’t counter arguments if I don’t know what the real purpose is.
And I guess you’re saying that book would tell me?
I think it gives some good insight but the basic reasons are pandering to the fundies and pandering to big business.
But why would big business want to lower the education abilities of the US?
That’s just a side effect of not wanting inconvenient facts get in the way of making money. They like science fine as long as it serves their purpose. They like education fine as long as it produces the nice little worker bees.
Under the old inefficient model, when we did not know where the next good idea was coming from, we had to support advanced “education” and accept the costs of millions of people having opinions and demanding a voice in society.
Now the economy can purchase the innovation without supporting expensive skeptical thought and activism.
The pinnacle of western civilization was the period when we took expansive action to reduce economic efficiency, particularly at the top end. It’s economic efficiency that’s being used to tear civilization apart, here at least.
Maybe you, or someone you know, has applied for a job, taken a test, gotten all the questions right, and not gotten the job.
That is because for low-level, low-paying jobs, someone who is very educated is not going to be a good fit. They will get bored, and make errors, or they will go to sleep. Some jobs not only require that the worker not think, but is not able to think.
If you haven’t had that experience, you almost certainly know someone whose middle or upper wage “thinking” job has been outsourced or downsized away, and in desperation, they seek anything they can find, and their rejection will include the “O” word – overqualified. An educated person in a low level job is just not good business. Not only will their performance be sub par, as outlined above, but they will be even more likely to leave as soon as someone offers them a couch to sleep on or a dime more an hour than the employees whose education level is suitable for the duties of the job.
A little education is desirable – if the guy unloading the truck can read the labels on the boxes, that can save time and therefore money. But if he can read the labels in several languages and tell you all about the manufacturing process of each product, that is not so good. It is more than is needed for the job, and sooner or later, he will demand more money because he has this excess knowledge, or go somewhere else to work, and you are out the investment you put in him, in terms of processing and paperwork, and whatever minimal “training” may have been involved.
Now big business expects and does not mind high turnover. This is something that consumers frequently complain about, that the people working at the electronics store know nothing about electronics and are there only to get that minimum and a bit paycheck until they hear that Target is taking applications.
But turnover of overqualified workers is faster, so much so that that processing cost may not even be recuperated, and there is also a social element. The overqualified worker is more likely to disrupt the workplace, be aware of government regulations like OSHA, state laws about breaks, unions, and have a knowledge of many things the other workers have never heard of – but now they hear of them, and next thing you know instead of doing their job until time to punch out, they are wanting to think and be creative and go to night school and have a union rep come and talk to them and the stairs fixed, etc.
As the US transitions to a single industry (defense and corrections-related) feudal state, most jobs outside of that arena will be service jobs, fast food, sales clerk, maintenance and housekeeping, etc.
There is simply not a need for so many educated workers. In fact, there are already too many of them.
Forty years ago after I graduated from high school and had a couple of years of college, I went to an employment agency and demonstrated that I could type 60wpm without error and handle an adding machine with dexterity. Then, I scored 98 out of 100 on their shortened IQ test. I was frankly told that I was too intelligent for the jobs they had to offer. I would grow bored, etc., etc. I was shocked, I tell ya.
On my own, I did go on to find employment in advertising and marketing where high intelligence is a plus. But, those kinds of jobs are extremely rare and highly stressful.
Recently, when I applied and got a job at Michael’s, I very consciously dumbed myself down. I mimicked my interviewer’s lack of grammar and deepened my Southern drawl. I find myself doing that now with my neighbors and the people I deal with in stores. Using the English language properly is interpreted as being snobbish and condescending; being educated is considered being a smart-ass. Our society has never truly valued education and intelligence except in isolated academic enclaves.
We need to realize that with China and India entering the world markets, there is a huge surplus of educated labor force that the global corporations are seeking.This labor force that is available at ridiculously inexpensive rates is the way many of these corporations plan to fatten their bottom lines.
Already many legal,accounting, banking and other service tasks are moving to India.We can expect major moves in medicine and surgery in the next few years.Even higher education, which is getting beyond the reach of the middle class will move to India because of the excellent universities over there that teach in English and the Professors for the most part are distinguished people who have been educated in UK, US, Germany and other Western nations.
I remember a rant from an old and prescient movie called Network, where the head of an NBC like network, played to perfection by Ned Beatty, says:There is no America or Russia or China.There are only IBM,Exxon,GM,and other global corporations.National boundaries have ceased to have any meaning.That rant is probably more relevant than ever today as the same corporations, along with intel and Microsoft, are heading for India and China in search of highly educated workforces that are turned out in the millions in both countries.
The heady days of steadily advancing economic opportunities like those existing in my parant’s days are long past.Our economic realities are going to be lowered expectations, lurching from one crisis to the next,steadily declining standard of living not just for ourselves but for our children as well.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, there’s two problems with this:
#1: It relies on cheap energy and cheap transportation. As the era of cheap oil draws to a close, outsourcing like this is going to be harder and harder to justify, and is going to become more and more expensive.
#2: Many of these workers will be exploited, used up, and discarded as soon as they attempt to improve their situation. This will also cause problems for the corporations, as many of the workers don’t have the contextual knowledge necessary. “Cog programmers” don’t work in IT, but the problems the cause don’t show up on the bottom line for years.
#3: Those workers that do manage to avoid the abovementioned fate will feel no loyalty to their employers. Expect many of these companies to be challenged and dethroned by rising Indian and Chinese companies, who progressively cut off their access to cheap labour.
I would like to agree with your predictions but there are a couple of problems that come in the way:
1. The reliance on cheap energy may be true of manufacturing but in the service sector where India dominates, energy is an insignificant input.
2.I do not see any time when India and China will run out of supply of this cheap source of highly skilled labor. India’s IT companies are already moving up the IT food chain doing increasingly more sophisticated work.That not merely shuts the door on our own IT companies but allows India to provide a ladder fro their entry level IT workers to move on up.
3.Because the workforce involved in IT work in India is miniscule in relation to the total labor force, it is going to be a long time before you see any inflation of labor costs except in isolated cases.
Nope, it’s still necessary. Outsourcing companies rely on being able to fly their executives and the few trained technology monkies they employ around cheaply. They can’t do that, the “comfort level” goes way, way down.
Problem is there’s not much “up” for them to go. The glass ceiling’s really, really low. Especially since the main temptation is the call of a western-ized consume-and-consume lifestyle which – guess what? – is going to become increasingly expensive over the next decade or two. There’s also the problem of both countries lacking the required support infrastructure for that kind of economy.
We already are, actually. And it’s already slowly resulting in a migration of outsourcing towards China, where the labour costs still much lower. (And can be kept low by the government by force if necessary) Why do you think Microsoft’s so interested in China? It’s not because of the market. (There isn’t one – the Chinese don’t want to pay the prices Microsoft wants to charge) It’s because of the cheap labour!
while at this moment, there are many people working these jobs for 10% of the US wage for the same work who as you say, aspire to nothing more than western clothing and western style consumption, etc, as enchantment with the west continues to trend down, and western dependence on these mouse-slaves continues to trend up, notice that India now has an “IT minister,” a cabinet position, and these slave workers know very well what their brother in law, who works in a cube in California makes for the same job they are doing, in the coming years, there will be increased pressure on western companies to bring the pay scale more into parity with what they pay for the work in the US.
Another thing to bear in mind, for the Indian mouse slave who does NOT wish the western consumption lifestyle, he can take his $10 an hour, which obviously goes a lot further than it would in the US, and live simply and save enough to buy a bit of land, a sprinkle of livestock, and by the time that $10 does not go as far in India, and he has married, he will be in a position to lay down his mouse, if he wishes, and repair to his little plot of land, turning his back on the western lifestyle, and quite able to live comfortably in the more traditional Indian way.
Or, he can work for an Indian company that does the same thing the western company does, who will agree to pay him $12 an hour, putting the ball back in the court of the western company who is free to offer him $16 and better benefits, or hire workers in his home country for $60.
In short, the current situation is a make fast bucks while you can enterprise for everyone involved. It is not sustainable, and in light of US foreign policy, and the very real likelihood that everyone involved might well be exploded before a decade has passed, there is no need for it to be sustainable. 🙂
Right. That’s what I’m saying. The problem is that the doomsday prediction requires it not only being sustainable, but continuing indefinitely. We’re already seeing the outsourcing trend die off (and domestic IT hiring pick up again, at least in Canada) as executives pause to think for a second and realize that they’re training and funding their future competition. Outsourcing’s not just for the techs anymore, folks. They realized that, in the long term, they were outsourcing their entire company. A lot seem to be realizing that this is a bad idea, and that the quality of work they were getting was very low (not because the programmers were worse, but because of the very nature of outsourcing), and turning away from the cheap solution.
Of course, I expect that American executives, having been put through a much more rigorous anti-intelligence selection process, will take a little longer to catch on…
This week I’m pricing purchase of a new permanent employee–CNC computer control for my craft business machinery.
We often hear that ‘artificial intelligence’ is far in the future but it’s actually well in the past. Remember that information technology multiplies existing human intelligence.
One generation ago most of us were just learning about the chance of setting up computerized spreadsheets for small and medium sized businesses. Project the same amount of advancement one generation farther forward that we had in the past generation, and information technology is going to look pretty magical by today’s standards.
We’re outgrowing our need for human inputs and we’re paying no more attention to our coming generation of progress than we did 20 years ago when we started pushing globalization.
Speaking as someone who’s actually studied computer science, this is total nonsense. It’s based on the same bad assumptions as most transhumanist pap – that the initial growth and innovation rate triggered by the introduction of the microcomputer will continue indefinitely. Yet we’re already seeing it slow down significantly.
Never mind that most of the ways we’ve found to use computers are bad…
The real purpose? Rewind the world to the late 18th century. Get rid of all the scary changes, oppress all the scary people, and make things work the way their God intended.
Further back, even. We’re looking at a pastiche here, an impossible blending of modern technology with Inquisition-era theology and pre-Magna Carta governance…
But we’ll render the planet uninhabitable for humans before it gets that far.
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Statement of The Honorable Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D.
Washington, D.C. – September 25, 2003
Members of the Commission, I appear before you as an independent witness, representing no interest group. I was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during President Reagan’s first term. I have worked on the Hill for Jack Kemp (I wrote the Kemp-Roth Bill), for the House Budget Committee and for Orrin Hatch and the Joint Economic Committee. I have held a number of academic posts. I was an editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal and for 16 years a columnist for Business Week.
Currently, I am chairman of the Institute for Political Economy, a Senior Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and a syndicated columnist.
I offer a different perspective on the “job loss recovery“. If my view is correct, we face a new problem that cannot be handled with exchange rate adjustments, retraining programs, employee protections, tax cuts, low interest rates, tort reform, and deregulation. If I am correct, the job losses that we are experiencing are not the result of the normal workings of free trade through which resources are reallocated from uses where they are noncompetitive to uses where they have comparative advantage …
(Counterpunch) September 3/4 2005 — The raison d’etre of the Bush administration is war in the Middle East in order to protect America from terrorism and to insure America’s oil supply. On both counts the Bush administration has failed catastrophically.
Bush’s single-minded focus on the “war against terrorism” has compounded a natural disaster and turned it into the greatest calamity in American history. The US has lost its largest and most strategic port, thousands of lives, and 80% of one of America’s most historic cities is under water.
If terrorists had achieved this result, it would rank as the greatest terrorist success in history.
“But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
without a doubt. While we’re busy expending our soft and hard treasures waging the wars for ‘democracy’, a war we cannot afford, China and India are busy locking up worldwide resources and jobs for their people.
Now, several years ago the auto industry led by GM started setting up shop in China so there should’ve been no surprise they’d close factories here and build the cars and jobs there. It’s called self-preservation – to hell with American workers-they cost too much. But the CEOs will be handsomely rewarded as men of vision.
So have you missed what’s at the Detroit Auto show? It’s the Dragon car -the Geely 7151 CK, a mid sized sedan – scheduled for sale here in 2008. Price tag under $10,000. Move over Hyundai.
Not a coincidence the recent announcements from GM Ford and Daimler-Chrysler is it?
Here’s a piece on what’s in store and why the diaryist is right we are headed for third world status. As the auto industry goes, so goes America.
“The dragon at Detroit’s gate”
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/HA24Cb05.html
The Chinese car get things disaterously wrong which is partly why they were so keen to manufacture Rover cars and indeed have the right to make the recent models. You might realise there can be a downside as this report in The Times last September indicates:
Ya know, flashback to when the Hyundai cars were launched not that many years ago. And the Japanese had the same safety issues. They soon overcame quality and safety issues. Now they’ve taken quite a share of the auto market.
Watch for BMW cars, GM cars ‘made in China’ to come to your dealer showroom sometime soon. Why do you think these automakers set up shop in China, closing plants at home?
IIRC Hundai is Korean – they were trying to get on the car bandwagon ala Japan (like China is now)- and as you note finally made a go of it.
On the personal side of this problem-the main machine my husband runs has been sold by his plant to one overseas.(Japan) The only small bright spot is that they may send him-hopefully us-to set it up and train the operators. It’s a touchy thing and to keep it running you have to basically toss the manual out and tweak it by trial and error.
The downside is that even if we can go we probably won’t be able to get jobs there. Tough policies for jobs and immigration.
And learning a new language is tough as an adult although I have been working on it. I’m surprised how many people have greeted this news with joy that we might be able to get out and a touch of envy-I don’t mean liberals or progressives or leftists but main stream, solid center people. It’s pretty bad when the glimmer of hope for a better life is emigration.
But then it probably won’t pan out, sending the person who is capable never trumps sending the suit who isn’t capable but looks more professional.
blog days.
We already are a 3rd world society.
None of this has anything to do with the Bush Administration. It’s been a 30 year process and longer, caused by up to a century-long failure of us to update our Constitutional system to suit the world where it operates. The modern world increasingly functions in venues where the Constitution doesn’t even apply.
Getting rid of Bush will fix none of this.
I think there is a lot of substance to your claim that the United States is already a third world society with regard to the details that you list. I almost gave you a 4, till I got to the end of your note.
However, I have no idea what you mean when you claim that this is casued by a long failure “to update our Constitutional system to suite the world where it operates.” I think that is incoherent nonsense. What exactly do you mean? We update our constitution with amendments, court decisions, legislative and executive actions to a lesser extent, and public understanding to a fundamental extent. What are you talking about?
You go on to say: “The modern world increasingly functions in venues where the Constitution doesn’t even apply.” The modern world “functions”? In “venues”? What the devil are you talking about?
The one factor that I haven’t seen mentioned is the drain that the military/police sector has on the economy. With about 50% of the federal budget devoted to these expenditures there is that much less available for health, education and infrastructure.
Here is a chart:
Federal Budget
I read somewhere in the last week or so(and I can’t remember where offhand) that the federal budget for Research and Development sounds good but the fact is that something like 97% of that R&D money ends up all going to the Pentagon.
There’s a huge piece of this puzzle in the rise of Wal-Mart. A good summary of what I mean is contained in a review of two new books, published in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday, and in slightly expanded form on http://shopopolis.blogspot.com.
Ironically in terms of fundamentalist support, it is classic Darwinism. Think of Wal-Mart as a swarm of locusts, with one adaptation–low prices, which eventually translates into offshore semi-slavery–and the instinct to survive and procreate. It consumes everything, then moves on.
You may want to read my essay which has spawned a vigorous discussion on Eurotrib:
http://www2.eurotrib.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2006/1/24/112920/581
It has wandered a bit from the point I was trying to make using Walmart as an example which was:
Walmart (and other firms in different sectors) are so large that they act as the only customer for their suppliers and can thus set the terms at which they buy items. This is called a monopsony and is explained in detail in the thread.
Corporations have no country. We may think they do – if they began here, if they cloak themselves in American images to sell their products and to get favorable handouts from the U.S. government, if we think of America when we think of them, etc.
However, this is a carefully crafted facade or left-over shell from the past: Big corporations are international personages, possibly flavored by their originator’s country, but not belonging to this country any longer. They have rights as individuals in this country, and expanding beyond. And like Animal Farm where every individual is equal but some are more equal than others human persons don’t count much compared to a corporate personage.
“Country-ism”, that convenient, protective medium we live within, like water to a fish, is something very different to a corporation. It is something to be used when convenient, (thus Halliburton is “proud to serve our American soldiers fighting for freedom”), and dropped easily if that’s an advantage, e.g Halliburton is “officially” housed in a drop box in the Caymans, or some such to avoid U.S. taxes. And if not dropped, then worked around, manipulated, de-headed, bought off, taken over, corrupted, etc.
The corporations don’t have complete control, but they are very very powerful; they may not take the long view, but they take advantage of pro-business people who do take the long view (like the Club for Growth).
And most people don’t even see what they are, and how they look at country identity. In the darkest hours, I wonder when I person = 1 vote, will become 1 unit of currency or 1 share of stock = 1 vote.
Black American child mortality rate, which is twice the national average, is worse than that in Fiji, Serbia, Tonga, Uruguay, and Barbados to name but a few. And the national infant moratlity rate for the US comes in at forty-second behind virtually all of Europe, Cuba, Aruba, Korea and Taiwan.
Verifiable deaths sentences were carried out in only 19 countries in 2005: The US, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, N. Korea, Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. Not exactly a list of first world powers.
the fact that America refuses to educate and teach its own, and that includes black children.
They segregate school systems or let school systems deteriorate until they turn into mini-Baghdads.
They allow gambling money in that doesn’t cover the lost revenue from property taxes to ‘help’ cash-strapped schools.
We don’t educate and teach fine black minds, but always run over to India and China to get the brains to work the machines and the technology. Why? You don’t find many blacks spying for other countries or companies in sensitive industries. We are causing our own decline.
Even if we go THC free, Industrial hemp would make farming viable again, and allow our textile and manufacturing industries to begin to come back.