[efarmer]

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/jagdish_bhagwati.htm

Roberts trades opinions on outsourcing in 2004.

I agree with him on many points and break with his views on climate change (agree on carbon credits being another "war on ____" scam) and a few other things.

The knowledge on how to build, market, and improve any manufactured products always go to the point of manufacture, either by synergism immediately, or via slower migration over a period of time.

America has exhausted the lag time between outsourcing labor and forfeiting expertise, market control, and future dominance in the technology involved in the innumerable products. This is true in our educational products and our manufactured products as well. We act as if holding up our prices makes our products better, if you are going to be stupid, I suppose hubris is in order as well.

We made our fast bucks and now we are going to reap the grueling and persistent consequences.

I do believe Roberts paints the collapse scenario past dire and into fantasy land, but then again,
it seems we bet our nation on an empire we can't admit or acknowledge, but can't stop trying to maintain. It is down to being good for the international corporations, competing nations, and the politicians whom they have purchased. We are now past having our government looking the other way so the corporations could grift foreigners out of money to loan the populace, and have moved onto printing money to buy our own debt with. Yup, a snake eating it's own tail and thinking it is a mighty clever reptile to boot. This is after our confidence was built up for nonsense by using petroleum energy and natural gas fertilizer to grow corn to convert it into alcohol to make up for not having enough petroleum. While this might seem unsustainable, the snake is a powerful senator and the corn farmer is in his district and both of them come from a long line of self eating snakes and men who are good at setting food on fire, either directly, or after it has been processed and value added by one of the snake's other reptile associates.

Try a basic experiment, ask people you know if America is an empire or not.
Prepare to hear that we are the world's only superpower (we don't say empire).

Uh oh, the world's only superpower is broke on it's ass without a clue or backup plan.
I sure wouldn't want to be the people who did this to them.
(For extra credit ask who did this to America.)

How long does it take for a snake to eat itself into a tight loop and have to quit?

[Sixstrings]

This little bit of fiction by Roberts made a big splash, it was even on Drudgereport. What amazes me is that the reality of the past couple years has been stranger than any story. But hey, if it takes fiction to wake some folks up then just as well.

[donnaj8887]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('efarmer', 'h')ttp://www.vdare.com/roberts/jagdish_bhagwati.htm

Roberts trades opinions on outsourcing in 2004.

I agree with him on many points and break with his views on climate change (agree on carbon credits being another "war on ____" scam) and a few other things.

The knowledge on how to build, market, and improve any manufactured products always go to the point of manufacture, either by synergism immediately, or via slower migration over a period of time.

America has exhausted the lag time between outsourcing labor and forfeiting expertise, market control, and future dominance in the technology involved in the innumerable products. This is true in our educational products and our manufactured products as well. We act as if holding up our prices makes our products better, if you are going to be stupid, I suppose hubris is in order as well.

We made our fast bucks and now we are going to reap the grueling and persistent consequences.

I do believe Roberts paints the collapse scenario past dire and into fantasy land, but then again,
it seems we bet our nation on an empire we can't admit or acknowledge, but can't stop trying to maintain. It is down to being good for the international corporations, competing nations, and the politicians whom they have purchased. We are now past having our government looking the other way so the corporations could grift foreigners out of money to loan the populace, and have moved onto printing money to buy our own debt with. Yup, a snake eating it's own tail and thinking it is a mighty clever reptile to boot. This is after our confidence was built up for nonsense by using petroleum energy and natural gas fertilizer to grow corn to convert it into alcohol to make up for not having enough petroleum. While this might seem unsustainable, the snake is a powerful senator and the corn farmer is in his district and both of them come from a long line of self eating snakes and men who are good at setting food on fire, either directly, or after it has been processed and value added by one of the snake's other reptile associates.

Try a basic experiment, ask people you know if America is an empire or not.
Prepare to hear that we are the world's only superpower (we don't say empire).

Uh oh, the world's only superpower is broke on it's ass without a clue or backup plan.
I sure wouldn't want to be the people who did this to them.
(For extra credit ask who did this to America.)

How long does it take for a snake to eat itself into a tight loop and have to quit?

[massymoxieman]

I have always believed that the two things that would destroy the American economy were the outsourcing of our industrial base and Peak Oil. For some more entertaining Peak Oil doomer porn, I highly recommend the novel Julian Comstock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Comstock It takes place the century following ours, which turns into a "False Tribulation" die-off, followed by a theocracy.

[Vogelzang]

Vote Republican and save America.

[americandream]

America is the global investors safety vault, even the rich Chinese and Russian ruling class. The day it dissolves is the day global capitalism collapses, from Beijing to Caracas, Jo'burg to Oslo.

[BasilBoy]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hile John le Carré is famous for his spy novels, he wrote a widely read antiwar essay in 2003 titled "The United States of America Has Gone Mad." He reads an excerpt.

[americandream]

Funny how these characters, who made their fortunes on Cold War paranoia, are now, all of a sudden, born again peace lovers.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BasilBoy', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')hile John le Carré is famous for his spy novels, he wrote a widely read antiwar essay in 2003 titled "The United States of America Has Gone Mad." He reads an excerpt.

[efarmer]

It is all heady and thrilling to write about the red haired siren Soviet agent and the square jawed Western agent with a keen mind and monster libido. But this is from an era when the game is intelligence and leverage for the most part. This is the era of potential machine war with relentless sniffing about for intelligence and ferreting out potential weaknesses to exploit, and endless gaming.

But then it comes back to the old Roman Empire game, or the British Empire game, and that is the game we are seeing played out more and more.

The one where a GPS bomb hurltles from an aircraft worth as much as all the real estate in a one hundred mile radius of where it is flying combined and locks onto the coordinates and blows all the humans packed into a mud hut out as particles in a concentric spray. Hopefully the bad guy is in there with the women and children. It is the one where tribal people scratching out a go of it among the scrub and craggy rocks scramble to adapt and where they scramble to stay out of the way of the fight between their old oppressors and whatever it is the new army is here for that is consolidating their ground now.

We are going to have to get as honest as the Roman Empire if we intend to keep this up. We are going to have to watch the nuance wash off of plunder and stop spouting that we are here to liberate them and bring them into the 21st century, and admit we are here to attempt to keep ourselves in the 21st century, and we are running low, and we have come to take their shit.
We have the part down cold where you take a corrupt weasel from the local populace and install him as a leader of his people.

[deMolay]

"We Have All Gone To Look For America" http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101216/bs_ ... my_special

[Serial_Worrier]

Yes America is sick and getting sicker. Projected obesity climb to 46% by 2020! This is not sustainable, something's gotta give.

[sparky]

A pretty good overview of the U.S.

........."Deets makes $16.28 an hour working by the plant's furnace which reaches temperatures of 1,600 degree Fahrenheit (870 degrees Celsius) and he takes as much overtime as he can.

"Overtime is the only way to get by," he said, with barely contained frustration. "But it gets very tiring very quickly."


..........A widely accepted definition holds that wages of about $20 an hour -- $41,600 a year -- is the minimum needed for a family of four to obtain middle-class rank in America.

UAW members have traditionally bought the cars they made thanks to their middle-class wages. Now there are many small, used Asian brand cars in the parking lot at Nexteer because they are more fuel efficient and low-paid workers can afford them."


........ Manufacturing as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) peaked in 1953 at 28.3 percent. By 2009 it was 11 percent. Employment in manufacturing continued a roller coaster ride for a couple more decades, peaking in 1979 at just over 14.5 million workers. But by 1979 the oil shocks began to threaten the middle-class status of manufacturing workers.

The 1970s stand as a "bookend to the New Deal era: that which was built in the thirties and forties -- politically, economically and culturally -- was beginning to crumble," writes Jefferson Cowie in his book "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class."

From the 1980s onward, manufacturing jobs and the sector's contribution to U.S. GDP declined, a process accelerated by productivity enhancements and increasing competition from lower-cost markets. Now there are just over 8 million manufacturing workers in a population of 300 million.

"The post-World War Two paradigm that allowed unskilled workers to go straight from high school into the middle class died in the 1980s," Mesirow's Swonk said.




http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6B ... 0311468:z0


.....

[Denny]

That company name "Nexteer" referred to in the article, it seems like a play on words, as in "next tier". Sad isn't it, when a manufacturers claim to fame is built on cutting people's standard of living.

They paint an overly rosy picture of Saginaw, Michigan's past. I went there on a few business trips in the 70's, and it was a pretty dismal place back then too. Though people had jobs. I can't even imagine how depressing it must be today.

[timmac]

10 Poorest Cities in America and how did it happen

City, State, % of People Below the Poverty Level

1. Detroit , MI
32.5%
..............................
2. Buffalo , NY
29.9%
.............................
3. Cincinnati , OH
27.8%
.............................
4. Cleveland , OH
27.0%
............................
5. Miami , FL
26.9%
............................
5. St. Louis , MO
26.8%
...........................
7. El Paso , TX
26.4%
..........................
8. Milwaukee , WI
26.2%
.........................
9. Philadelphia , PA
25.1%
.........................
10. Newark , NJ
24.2%
.........................

U.S. Census Bureau,
2006 American Community Survey, August 2007

What do the top ten cities (over 250,000) with the highest poverty rate all have in common?


Detroit, MI- (1st on the poverty rate list)...

hasn't elected a Republican mayor since 1961
.........................................................
Buffalo, NY- (2nd)

hasn't elected one since 1954
........................................................
Cincinnati, OH - (3rd)...

since 1984
........................................................
Cleveland, OH - (4th)...

since 1989
.......................................................
Miami, FL - (5th)

has never had a Republican mayor
.......................................................
St. Louis, MO - (6th)...

since 1949
........................................................
El Paso, TX - (7th)

has never had a Republican mayor
........................................................
Milwaukee , WI - (8th)...

since 1908
.......................................................
Philadelphia, PA - (9th)...

since 1952
.......................................................
Newark, NJ - (10th)...

since 1907.
.......................................................

Einstein once said,

'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again

and expecting different results.'
................................................................................

It is the poor who habitually elect Democrats ....

Yet they are still POOR.

[Lore]

It's also not surprising that most of these cities were once the jewels of the American industrial revolution and are now part of the dying rustbelt after big business and corporate greed sold them all out.

[Cog]

Rather they were abandoned by corporations when the demtards tried to tax them out of existence to pay for their ever expanding social programs.

[Cloud9]

I suspect it is a combinaton of both truths.

[Windmills]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('timmac', 'I')t is the poor who habitually elect Democrats ....

Yet they are still POOR.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lore', 'b')ig business and corporate greed sold them all out.

[mos6507]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'R')ather they were abandoned by corporations when the demtards tried to tax them out of existence to pay for their ever expanding social programs.