[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tyler_JC', 'P')eople have been making the argument that productivity is bad for centuries and they've been wrong every single time.

Think of how many millions of jobs exist today that weren't even dreamed of by our parents generation.

Making the American economy less productivity would NOT increase employment. If we banned ATMs, would the gains to bank employees offset the costs to everyone else? If we banned the sale of slice bread would the gains to bakers offset the losses to everyone else?

[FairMaiden]

I am trying unsuccessfully to read "world made by hand"...I know it's fiction but knowing how the author believes it is not only possible but probable makes it difficult. I don't see that happening. I made an electric windmill as a high school science project, I really think he under-estimates the ingenuity of mankind. I am not an engineer or anything special - just an office manager.

But even if you don't see that world, how can robots/machines/automation continue to be cheaper in the future as the price of energy increases? Metals are in limited quanitity as well - so as scarcity sets in, the price should start to slow large scale production on machines, no? I mean, they are only better when they are cheaper...but they aren't cheaper if you can't get the metal and energy to build them and keep them going...

[bshirt]

[quote="Loki
I disagree strongly. We don't need communism, we just need politicians and industrialists who don't sell out their country for a quick buck. To begin with, we need to pull out of "free trade" agreements, institute strong tariffs, and slap big penalties on companies that send jobs overseas. Corporate globalism is responsible for gutting our industrial base---Ross Perot's great sucking sound has turned into a roar in the last 15 years.

We should also be much more aggressive about monopoly busting and encouraging small business. The latter can be done in a variety of ways, but preventing unfair competition from the Walmarts of the world is a good start. I've also been hearing talk of creating state-owned banks modeled on North Dakota's in order to provide funding for small businesses since the big banks can't be bothered. Granted, that's a socialist solution, but it's not the kind of centralized authoritarianism you're talking about. It's actually designed to help out small businesses compete in a market heavily skewed by megacorporations.

And last but certainly not least we need to end mass immigration. Anyone who suggests this is automatically labeled a racist xenophobe by liberal types, but it is absolute insanity to continue importing tens of millions of people while the number of jobs is stagnant or declining. I always find it ironic that ultraliberals support the same exact immigration policies as anti-union hyperconservatives. And let's not even talk about the environmental impact of increasing our population as rapidly as we are, due almost entirely to mass immigration.[/quote]

Wow.....what a great post.

100% on the money. Bringing in 100's of thousands of Mexicans a year is simply insane (except to the corporate Nazi leaders). How long can free education, healthcare, welfare, food stamps, etc, etc, be expected to last?

Sadly, I don't expect our politicians to magically have a change of heart any time soon. They're already bought and sold by the banksters/corporations.

I guess the only way out I can think of is a total and complete meltdown. Short term pain for a long term desperately needed purging.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('FairMaiden', 'I') am trying unsuccessfully to read "world made by hand"...I know it's fiction but knowing how the author believes it is not only possible but probable makes it difficult. I don't see that happening. I made an electric windmill as a high school science project, I really think he under-estimates the ingenuity of mankind. I am not an engineer or anything special - just an office manager.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ut the ultimate accomplishment of the already rich, the newly rich and the corporate rich, has been their global solidarity on the corporate/financial front. It's been a long run up to globalism, but the rich have great patience. As an American, all my life I've heard their chief mouthpiece, the president of the United States, beginning with Eisenhower, right on up through Kennedy, Reagan, Ford, Carter and Bush, and now Obama, sing the same song. Which goes moreover like this:

"Trade is the road to peace. Commerce and business know no national boundaries. They link nations together on productivity, creating jobs and peace across the world."
It sounded good at the time. Who would have thought that the people enjoying all this harmony and peace brought about through globalization would be enjoying it in a one big happy planetary work gulag?

(snip)

Thanks to globalization, the American, Australian and European working classes are on their way to extinction, in terms of their traditional rights, and quality of life. Just like the workers being poisoned to death by circuit board toxins in Guiyu, China, their fates will be determined by global capital, either by default or by bitter struggle against it.

(snip)

Between the corporate and financial elites and the slobbering masses stands the American Information Class -- the reporters, talking heads, news anchors and pundits. In short, the entire gaggle of meat puppets and journalism hacks who have been cultivated and bred to be clueless by the university industry and others serving our corporate empire.

(snip)

Even if CNN decided to send Coop to Guiyu to cover the blood poisoned worker women with the deformed children, the result would be the same. The guy in Cedar Rapids would see further proof that "Me live in best place in world. Got Cheetos." Or perhaps a nice Cotes du Rhône if you are a member of the commodity drugged educated faux middle class.

And I wanna say to them: "Not for much longer, buddy. Not much longer. And you can thank Anderson Cooper and a helluva lot of other people like him who do not have a clue, but nevertheless inhabit your very mind, for that."
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146569

[Cloud9]

Australia lies awfully close to China. You are assuming as China’s star rises in the east they will remain benevolent.

[MarkJ]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') heard an incredible number on CNN the other day.. it was either 300,000 or 500,000 teachers that they expect to get laid off nationwide in the next year. It's like there's a global war on decent jobs

[americandream]

Me suspects this fellow is in thrall of the Chinese economy.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cloud9', 'A')ustralia lies awfully close to China. You are assuming as China’s star rises in the east they will remain benevolent.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('americandream', 'M')e suspects this fellow is in thrall of the Chinese economy.

[SeaGypsy]

To some extent the guy is right about Australia.
Despite being a huge country with abundant resources, Australia is far from all rosy.
An ordinary family in Australia can barely exist on 1 full time ordinary working class wage. Certainly not run a car after living expenses.
I will break it down for you as simply as I can.
If you live and work on the South East Coast of Australia along with the other 90% of the population, an unskilled full time job will earn you $600 after tax per week, semi skilled about $800 and trades about $1000.
Rent for an ordinary 3 bedroom suburban house in employment areas is average $350 starting price per week. To buy, best part of half a million. Factor a deposit of 10% and you can see why the government keeps dishing out 1st home buyers grants.
If you work in the mines the money goes like this: about $70k for a low skilled, $120k ticketed and $140k+ full professional. For this you will be out in the middle if nowhere risking your life for 12 hour day/ night shifts for 2 weeks then home for a week, with 6 weeks annual leave.
So what happens is the people with the fat $ jobs and families take half million dollr mortgages and pay half of their wage into them for 15 years. By which time there has usually been a divorce and there are some very unhappy people around.
This is why myself and thousands of other remote workers have homes in Asia.
Here at home my rent in $100 a month. Beers are 60 cents. Smokes are 30 cents.
I earn more in one day working in Australia than my 3 Filipino tradesmen uncles earn in a week put together.
So if I stay in Australia, I can just afford to keep working. If I live simply there and save, I can spend up to half my time in Asia, island hopping.
To me it's a no brainer.

[Serial_Worrier]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'H')istorically, you're certainly correct as far as total number of jobs. Although one could argue maybe that paradigm has broken down, we do have 20% real unemployment right now -- something is causing that. And I think it could also be argued that increasing productivity via automation has lowered the quality of jobs (we have a lot of part-time McJobs in this country).

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Serial_Worrier', '
')In many ways people were happier a 100 years ago because "ignorance is bliss".

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('WildRose', '
')stores moving to automated checkouts

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Serial_Worrier', '
')The problem isn't the McJobs.... there were plenty of menial jobs in 1910. The problem is that people are AWARE of all those nice jobs in the professional arena where people tote their iPhones around all day.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', 'T')hose automated checkout lanes are a joke. They have to have someone man a station just to watch over them

[shortonsense]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Keith_McClary', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', 'T')hose automated checkout lanes are a joke. They have to have someone man a station just to watch over them

[MarkJ]

Hiring better performing cashiers makes more sense than automated checkout lines since human interaction is necessary for many purchases or problems.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]Stores Count Seconds to Trim Labor Costs

SHELBY TOWNSHIP, Mich. -- Daniel A. Gunther has good reason to keep his checkout line moving at the Meijer Inc. store north of Detroit. A clock starts ticking the instant he scans a customer's first item, and it doesn't shut off until his register spits out a receipt.

To assess his efficiency, the store's computer takes into account everything from the kinds of merchandise he's bagging to how his customers are paying. Each week, he gets scored. If he falls below 95% of the baseline score too many times, the 185-store megastore chain, based in Walker, Mich., is likely to bounce him to a lower-paying job, or fire him.

The brains behind Meijer's system is a consulting and software company known for decades as H.B. Maynard & Co., which last year became the Operations Workforce Optimization unit of Accenture Ltd. Borrowing from time-motion concepts first developed for U.S. steel mills and factory floors, it breaks down tasks such as working a cash register into quantifiable units and devises standard times to complete them, called "engineered labor standards." Then it writes software to help clients keep watch over their work forces.

Mr. Guglielmi says Meijer "expects employees to be at 100% performance to the standards, but we do not begin any formal counseling process until the performance falls below 95%." If a cashier is "challenged in their position," he says, the company provides "training and counseling to help improve their performance. If this doesn't help them, there are various alternatives." He declined to elaborate.

[Outcast_Searcher]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MarkJ', 'H')iring better performing cashiers makes more sense than automated checkout lines since human interaction is necessary for many purchases or problems.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

1. 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

2. 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

3. 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

4. 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.

5. A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

6. 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

7. Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

8. Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

9. For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

10. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

11. As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

12. The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

13. Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

14. In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.

15. The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

16. In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

17. More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.

18. For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

19. This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

20. Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

21. Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.

22. The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.
http://www.businessinsider.com/22-statistics-that-prove-the-middle-class-is-being-systematically-wiped-out-of-existence-in-america-2010-7

[americandream]

There will only be two classes left when globalisation is complete. Those who own capital and those who work for a bowl of rice (plus a bit of prostitution on the side to repeatedly buy the junk that's on sale).