Seems to be "By order of the President"
If you haven't heard the report of the remarks recently made by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden over what the role of his agency, it's a little troubling. And it hasn't gone unnoticed, at least not by syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer:
"If I didn't know that Obama had told this, I'd demand the firing of Charles Bolden the way I would Michael Steele," he continued. "This is absolutely unbelievable."
Recently, Bolden, in an interview with Al Jazeera English, said that the "foremost" mission of NASA is to improve relations with the Muslim world. This drew the ire of Krauthammer on the July 5 broadcast of Fox News Channel's "Special Report with Bret Baier." (h/t Gateway Pundit)
"This is a new height in fatuousness," Krauthammer said. "NASA was established to get America into space and to keep is there. This idea to feel good about their past and to make achievements is the worst combination of group therapy, psychobabble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy."
Charles Bolden
"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator - [Obama] charged me with three things," Bolden said. "One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."
Posted by: Total War ||
07/06/2010 14:29 Comments ||
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#4
Upon retaking the House, the Trunks should immediately defund NASA until after 2012 and the problem rectified.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
07/06/2010 15:25 Comments ||
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#5
Well, put a fork in me because I'm done. This is nuts. So, the purpose of NASA, now with it's budget cuts, is to social engineer people? It can't fly space missions so I guess it's going to toss other things around. Not sure they'll learn much about aerodynamics that way, but I guess their stuff does fly. More to the point though, what's next? Giving space capabilities to Iran so the can make ICBM's and Global Positioning so they can also start deploying smart IED's?
#6
How the FUCK is it NASA's responsibility to improve relations with the muslim world? Isn't that the state department's area of expertise and mission?
God our government is completely fucked. I am almost convinced there is only one way to fix it, and that way ain't purdy.
#13
Hey, it's Al Jizz. He just following the the tune called by the Panderer in Chief. What's he gonna say, "Muslims have about as much influence in space travel as cheese does"?
#14
Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."
Seems to be working, previously they would have chopped off his head. Lecturer's hand cut off
Given that they are our future, it might not hurt to postpone everything by 30 minutes if that is what it takes to accommodate this. Everything, that is, except their bedtimes.
Pushing back school start times by just 30 minutes each day can improve alertness, mood and health in adolescents, according to a study published in JAMA's Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.
"Ranging from the amount of sleep they were getting, to self-reported sleepiness, to self-reported depressed mood to tardiness, the study demonstrates you can make a positive impact with relatively small change in start time, " said lead study author Dr. Judith A. Owens, director of the pediatric sleep disorder center at Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.
According to the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), most adolescents experience biological changes to their internal clocks during this transition from childhood to adulthood. Those changes often cause them to fall asleep later. When those young people must awake early for school, they don't get the 8.5 to 9.25 hours of sleep their bodies need.
In addition, a 2006 poll by the NSF found that nearly one-half of adolescents in America were getting less than eight hours of sleep, and many reported that they were aware they were getting less sleep than they needed to feel their best.
In the current study, researchers looked at just over 200 students in grades nine-12 at a private school. The students took a survey, both before and after the school start time was changed from 8 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. to find out about sleep-related problems and both sleep and wake behaviors.
Overall, the number of students who reported feeling unhappy, depressed, annoyed or irritated decreased. Also, fewer found themselves at the health center for fatigue-related concerns.
"If you really need nine hours, and you're only getting six and a half hours or seven hours, even that extra half-hour can make a big difference," Owens said. She says future studies should include looking at academic performance.
"There are a lot of schools around the country at least contemplating doing this. I think it would be very important for these schools to make an effort to systematically examine the impact- whether that's positive or negative, because we need to have the data to show to schools who are thinking about doing this, because it's not a trivial challenge from an operational standpoint. There are a lot of issues to be resolved. We need to have strong enough evidence that it has a positive beneficial effect in order to recommend this- that other schools do the same thing," she added.
Owens noted that the school in the study did not go back to their 8 a.m. start time, as originally intended.
#1
I have only one thing to say that nullifies this whole article, invalidates the research, and disproves the premise.
CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
ACT average 17, Dropout rate 48%, self esteem very high.
#2
Shorten the school day, and triple or quadruple the actual number of hours taken up by actual investigation of ideas and development of intellectual skills during the hours that remain. Most time spent in US public schools is busywork, babysitting, or multiple-choice testprepping.
#3
Most time spent in US public schools is busywork, babysitting, or multiple-choice testprepping.
Yeah, high school was the biggest waste of six years of my life. Well not six years, but it was a waste in a low performing, high minority school. The problem with a short school day is that students won't go home and hit the books. Esp. with the parents away at work and an empty house ... I would rather see toughened curriculum and discipline. If you fail, you fail and get held back. And year round schooling.
Posted by: ed ||
07/06/2010 8:57 Comments ||
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#4
Go 9 to 5. Two weeks off in the summer. Get the kiddos used to it. They'll be doing it the rest of their life. If they're lucky.
We are all morning or evening people. Scientists have established that our genes dictate around half of what they call our chronotypes our natural preference for certain times of the day. Or night.
Evolution has produced a range of humans capable of being alert to danger at every hour of the day. Our experience confirms these findings. We all know people who love to be at work bright and early, with a cup of coffee to hand and decisions to make, and others who would rather stumble through the day until reaching a state of relaxed clarity around dusk, when their minds are purring.
The problem is that those with the genetic gift of morning-ness tend to be more highly rewarded. Morning-ness is perceived as a sign of activity and zest, whereas evening-ness implies laziness and loafing. How often did we have to see David Cameron on one of his early-morning runs to get the idea that here was a leader of potency and vigour? How different would it have been if he slunk out of bed to work, then exercised at around 8pm? Could a Prime Minister be elected today who worked like Churchill, reading, writing and thinking in bed before getting out of it at noon?
History is full of great bores praising the virtues of early rising, but few have made the case for letting the day drift by until you kick into gear around happy hour.
Yet the research continues to mount, arguing that evening people have qualities which should be nurtured. They tend to be more creative, intelligent, humorous and extroverted. They are the balance to morning people, who are said to be more optimistic, proactive and conscientious. And irritating, too. ;-)
Evening and morning are the right and left sides of our brain, the creative and the analytical, both of which we need to organise, process and advance our lives.
New research by Christoph Randler, a biology professor at the University of Education at Heidelberg, however, concludes that morning people are more likely to succeed in their careers because they are more proactive than evening people. It takes a PhD to figure that out? How about if the PhD figures out I'm getting a jump on the next morning? Eh? What do you think about that?
He surveyed 367 university students, asking them when they were most energetic and willing to change a situation. It was the morning people who were more likely to agree with statements such as I feel in charge of making things happen and I spend time identifying long-range goals for myself. Like where they're going to get drunk Friday night.
Discussing his research in the Harvard Business Review, Randler says: When it comes to business success, morning people hold the important cards. My earlier research showed that they tend to get better grades in school, which gets them into better colleges, which then leads to better job opportunities. Morning people also anticipate problems and try to minimise them. They're proactive. And evening people come along and spend all their time trying to fix the problems the morning people create. Could that be called reactive?
Christopher Coleridge, the founder of V Water, the fast-growing vitamin-enhanced water brand, has a different view on the advantages of morning-ness. Morning is always the best time to get people to make decisions because people are full of optimism in the morning. By 9am, nothing really can go wrong. You're full of hope. By 4pm, at least six annoying things will have happened, so by the evening you're slightly annoyed and frustrated. Fortunately, you then have the rest of the evening to pick yourself up.
Earlier in his career, when Coleridge worked in advertising, he found the culture much more focused on the evenings, when conversations over drinks would lead to creative ideas. But as an entrepreneur, he found mornings were the best time to corral people's energies.
Evening-ness, he says, can be exploited by companies that are full of young people. But mornings appeal more to people with families who want a schedule which allows them to get in early and leave on time. For the growing army of part-time and freelance workers, tight schedules are just as important. They tend to be very focused because they are moving from project to project and they don't have time to yack away.
In certain environments, morning-ness is unavoidable. In the City, many of the most significant meetings take place before the markets open. Schools, however, force morning-ness on teenagers at a moment when everything else in their lives their hormones, their social lives, their working patterns is drifting towards the evening.
But can one change one's chronotype from evening to morning? Randler says somewhat, but it can be hard. He cites one study that showed half of school pupils were able permanently to shift the time they woke up by one hour. Chronotypes, however, do evolve over one's life. Adolescents tend towards evening-ness; from the ages of 30 to 50, people are evenly split between morning and evening; and over-50s are more morning types. Less melatonin, maybe?
The challenge for companies, Randler says, is to accept that evening-ness is an inherent trait and, rather than battling against it, find ways to get the best out from their night owls. What a concept. I'll guard against sabre-toothed tigers trying to sneak off with your baby from the cave at night, and you hunt them in the morning. That works. You don't really want me trying to hunt with you in the morning, and I don't need you falling asleep on me at night.
In Britain today, hating Israel has become a valid criminal defense. Last week five people charged with destroying property valued at some $225,000 at the EDO MBM arms factory in Brighton during a January 2009 break-in were found not guilty of all charges. They were found innocent although all five admitted to having committed the crime.
And they were following the direction of the presiding judge, who was so concerned about the poor, suffering Gazans, despite the fact that the miscreants punished a company for something it hadn't done -- the company does not happen to sell its product to Israel. Innocence is no excuse to people like that.
#1
The verdict was perverse. A judgment based on a defense that isn't established in Law, is invalid in a Trial Court. However, superior courts can correct "defects of Justice." I don't like that either.
Posted by: Boss Omomomp9613 ||
07/06/2010 14:54 Comments ||
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#1
Neither the public sector nor the private sector is creating decent jobs in any significant capacity. Both parties' economic zealots ignore the fact that their orthodoxies have given us a stagnant jobs market that is heavily dependent on serial asset bubbles manufactured by the Fed. Artificially cheap money creates bubbles that stoke employment in sectors like construction, real estate and finance-- IOW, people flipping assets to each other without creating any real or sustainable economic growth.
Grove is right. An economy built on shipping manufacturing jobs to China-- ten jobs in China for each job created here!-- is greasing its own guillotine. California's economy will look like Michigan's within a generation.
We need a new political class in this country, one that puts the US first and that recognizes the mortal threat posed bu China to this nation.
#4
I still think the housing bubble created by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is the most destructive thing that ever happened to this country. How can our workers compete with Asians when it costs half a million bucks to buy a house? But then, what's gonna happen when all of those workers are unemployed?
#5
I still think the housing bubble created by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is the most destructive thing that ever happened to this country
Both parties supported this insanity. W was a big supporter, IIRC. Each party was scrambling to try to give the little people a hit from the cheap-money crack pipe.
Another feature of oligarchy is the way the little people are bought off with bread and circuses-- as a way of covering and diverting from a much larger allocation of public funds to crony capitalists at the top. So instead of being incited by the prospect of the big swinging dix on Wall St being able to borrow absurdly low-cost money from the public purse, and take on 30x leverage ratios with no B/S or mark-to-market requirements, the little folks got to speculate in their own dinky little kiddies' pool, via crap mortgages. Sort of like the children's table at Thanksgiving.
#1
The article doesn't mention the outsourcing of US jobs overseas, something that can't be pinned on the US government.
Andy Grove, former head of Intel, wrote an article last week about this:
From his opinion piece in Bloomberg:
Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975. Meanwhile, a very effective computer-manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers factory employees, engineers and managers.
The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenue last year was $62 billion, larger than Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. or Intel. Foxconn employs more than 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel and Sony Corp
You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work and much of the profits remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work and masses of unemployed? Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs.
#2
Like you AH, I don't like the fact that many of our jobs have gone overseas. But I think a little clarity on why is in order.
Or put another way, AH, the American labor force has become extortionist in their demand for income stream level and bulletproof security thereof, and that's ultimately the cause of this issue.
To the American public I say - critique management if you will, critique government and cynical politicians who have attempted to deal with the inevitable globalization of labor by ignoring or even promoting illegal immigration. Both of those critiques are valid. But ultimately the reasons for the offshoring of our work force are the poisonous and historically inaccurate notion that a certain standard of living and lifestyle and lack of worry or anxiety about said job are the birthright of any American who shows up to a job 40 hours a week, and the immature and unreasonable revolution of rising expectations that has paralyzed us since the 1950's.
Add to this the explosion of regulatory burden by government both in terms of money and time spent (which is a de facto form of pay to the employees - think OSHA, ADA, etc.) and you have a collusion between workers and government which is inimical to keeping employees here.
This attitude used to be confined to semiskilled and unskilled labor, but exists pretty much everywhere in the workforce. Management, CEO's tech jobs, everybody. We've all swallowed the Koolaid. Fifty years of almost every dispute going to the workers and management putting up only a token resistance because they, too, were making tons of money and didn't want to upset the applecart with stockholders imbued the workforce and management both with the idea that we could get everything we wanted forever. That this mentality eventually osmosed into the tech industry and a slightly or even greatly more skilled sector of the economy was inevitable.
I'm also not moved by those who clothe themselves in the flag - going to whatever lengths they must to claim that their little corner of the IT world is absolutely crucial to defense - in order to snow others into providing them with the income stream security they so crave. Yes, there are important defense secrets and capabilities, and they need protection. But the overwhelming bulk of the tech industry is not that. Certainly nothing like the precentage of those workers who claim to be indispensable.
There was a British MP (forget his name) who claimed that the basis of the financial meltdown in the West was quite simple; we have become accustomed to overvaluing the worth of our work in terms of the amount of lifestyle it justifies. I think that's a true statement in terms of the meltdown, but relevant to the offshoring issue as well.
I know this post will step on a lot of toes - my thoughts on this aren't exactly popular, I just hope that this time around I don't get threats of violence like I did the previous time I posted on this subject. I'm not happy about my fellow Americans being out of work or the nuts and bolts or electrons or photons of our industries moving elsewhere. But the truth is the truth. The reckoning has come. No more money. Not for credit, not for houses, not for a pay grade that is ten times what a worker in another country would get for the same product.
Yes, I know that other countries are less free, have less safe workplaces, are less environmentally safe, etc. That's a moot argument. I don't like that stuff, either. But even if those things were equalized, the sense of expectation and entitlement of Amercans is paralyzing.
It's time that Western workers in general and American ones in particular realize that if you do a job that lots of people can do, your labor isn't worth that much, no matter how skilled you are or how much education and training you have received.
Some people will be very rich, and have lots of stuff you don't. Get over it. In a scenario with realistic interest rates and pay grades it will only be a small fraction. It certainly won't include no mo uro, with the skill set I have. That's OK by me, my life is great without that stuff.
Instead of deriving all your satisfaction from owning houses and stuff and never having to worry about your job, relearn what Americans knew for most of our history in terms of the joy of community and religion and avocations and the freedoms we enjoy (even in the age of Obama). You can persist in wanting the 4000 square foot house with the fancy eyebrow windows over the garage and a new car every three years and the vacations you can brag about by the water cooler and the money to send all you kids to college (even the ones who probably shouldn't go) so that you can puff your chest out and feel good about yourself. Or you can get a grip and realize that the idea that 300 million of us can all have it all, all at once, was a dangerous and impossible dream. The good stuff in life isn't there. Time for America to relearn that.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
07/06/2010 6:49 Comments ||
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#3
Time for America to relearn that.
I hope you're wrong, but I'm afraid you're right, and the learning process is going to be long and ugly. But we have the right guy in the White House to start us down the path of understanding.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/06/2010 7:36 Comments ||
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#4
The author concludes:
The West is at its watershed, not because of a threat from a less-productive society. The collapse of the West is not because Islam is at the gates. Islam is at the gates because of the collapse of the West.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/06/2010 7:43 Comments ||
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#5
Fifty years of almost every dispute going to the workers and management putting up only a token resistance because they, too, were making tons of money and didn't want to upset the applecart with stockholders..
Fifty years ago the 'stockholders' were not institutionalized corporate raiders who played with companies like tokens. Real stockholders had invested interest beyond trading someone with a low performing bottom line though sound in management for someone who exploited or looted the structure to make a pretty bottom line for that seven or eight figure bonus from the Board that is largely outside anything close to accountability. Strikes and industrial labor relations in the 50s meant some adults were still in management and could remain in management because they were backed by real stockholders. Those type of 'owners' have long gone, replaced by account managers which transmuted too much business from a process to create a product or service to one which, like the mortgage derivatives, simply represents something of value associated to its function in the form of paper.
#6
uro, Fifty years of almost every dispute going to the workers and management putting up only a token resistance
Your world-view seems to have been frozen during the heyday of the AFL-CIO and UAW, about forty years ago. What you say was true in the 1960s and early 1970s, but it hasn't been true for over a generation. The age of Big Steel and Big Manufacturing in this country, of mass unionization of US manufacturing companies, ended around the time Reagan broke the PATCO strike.
You speak about "every dispute going to the workers", but in fact this nation's private sector unions, with the sole exception of the UAW, are impotent. About 90% of private sector employees don't even belong to a union at all.
You're right that there's not a lot that can or necessarily should be done to halt globalized competition, and that unskilled louts don't deserve to make $40/hr for pushing a button all day-- as Young Barry learned when he left academe to organize the community in the mid-1980s in steeltowns in NW Indiana.
But the hard fact is that if this country does not find a way to sustain a large employment base of 50m or more well-paid middle-class families, it will cease to be democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. It will become an oligarchy, on the latin model, with a harried and shrinking middle class squeezed between a swelling underclass and two types of elites in control of a large and predatory state: a small coterie of crony capitalists, and a huge, untouchable public sector union apparat.
That process is underway now, in the biggest, most economically advanced and technology-rich state in the union. Apple and Google, Cisco and Oracle and Intel all make money hand over fist. They dominate their markets. And they're not hiring in any appreciable numbers (100 jobs here or there is nothing in a 100-million strong labor market). This is precisely because the tech model that we've chosen to follow is to outsource everything imaginable that need not be done face to face. The result is that the strongest, healthiest, most competitive part of our economy is not adding, and has not for over a decade now, added any jobs on a net basis.
Unemployment in Silicon Valley is way above the national average. Many who are hired are receiving less money than they did 5 years ago, or are working as contractors without benefits.
As Andy Grove points out, we are greasing our own guillotine.
When the globalization fanboys put forth a CREDIBLE, well thought-out plan for providing real, sustainable opportunities to this nation's middle class once again, then there will be some hope of avoiding oligarchy in this last best hope for earth.
We can have the nice houses, cars, toys and savings if we produce those things. We used to do so until the 70's. We used to even export the surplus around the world. There was a reason that until fairly recently, trade and tariff policy was geared to favor domestic production. Because it created wealth and advancement for the vast majority of citizens.
Then in the '70s and accelerating in the '80s and 90's (yes under Reagan), via stupid and short sighted trade and tariff decisions (globalization), a conscious policy has been in effect to undercut the productive middle class, substituting virtual slave labor from around the world. This has incredibly enriched a tiny minority who could act as middlemen in this transaction (from Wall Street bankers, chain retailers to politicians).
Since then real wages of the middle class has not grown, and are now falling, while the profits of outsourcing have accrued to a tiny financial elite. But as we have seen in the past year, this is all coming to a screeching halt. The middle class has been bled dry and they and the government are heading to bankruptcy.
Posted by: ed ||
07/06/2010 8:47 Comments ||
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#8
I think you have it backwards.
For starters, a whole lot of the money the big businesses are paying the unions here (or not paying them when they don't have workers) don't really get to the workers, they go to union bosses, who get to manage that money as if it's their own.
Don't make the mistake of confusing the mobsters running the AFL-CIO with honest working people. If those of us out there in flyover country wanted to unionize, we could have, very easily, but we've spent the last forty years fighting that sort of thing, which is why union membership is at an all time low, outside of government.
I WISH I had time to describe how the whole "health benefits" and other benefits scams aren't increasing anyone's standard of living, or how health insurance both limits freedom and increases the costs involved.
The _Big_ businesses jumped into a whole lot of the regulatory overhead they complain about because it was useful to drive out of business a lot of their smaller competitors, at the same time they were contracting out their manufacturing overseas to avoid the negative consequences of _their own decisions_.
And you know? They relied a whole lot during that process on a free trade environment made possible by a lot of blue-collar conservatives who were voting for Republicans as the Republicans did nothing about their jobs being priced out of the market, against our will, by regulators and rent-seekers who give us no benefit.
In a really big way, that working class's support for free trade has been one of the major engines driving the growth of government and regulation in the west: they could come up with a regulatory environment and laws (supported by the big corporations and the unions in the NE, but NOT the working class as a whole, or even a plurality of it) that completely screw over people trying to manufacture in this country, but still allow them profits off of their imported junk.
Companies like HP and Apple and Microsoft and GM can dump their money into socializing the US economy, and count on the fact that Joe Redneck down in Mississippi is going to vote for someone who will vote against tarriffs so those companies can keep using Foxconn subcontractors to avoid the consequences of their own decision.
Pro-free-trade conservative working class people are failing the Prisoner's Dilemna.
If we didn't have as much free trade you wouldn't see HP (for instance) lobbying so much to raise the price of hydrocarbons (and therefore plastics) by trying to shut down tar sands ventures in Alberta. They can do that because they can have their plastic shit made in China from oil that's cheap there because China's state owned oil company, well, drills in countries ranging from Angola to Zimbabwe. (And Canada, and Venezuela, and Ecuador...)
In the absense of unilateral free trade advocacy from all of _us_, all of those large companies would have to stop backing the government regulations that strangle their suppliers here. They wouldn't be supporting Cap and Trade, for example. They'd be sending money to Sarah Palin's PAC and lobbying to allow drilling in ANWR.
#9
I really need to organize that train of thought better, and rewrite that post, but I don't have time. Y'all will just have to suffer the word salad if you want to read it, I have to get back to work.
The article doesn't mention the outsourcing of US jobs overseas, something that can't be pinned on the US government.
Andy Grove, former head of Intel, wrote an article last week about this:
From his opinion piece in Bloomberg:
IF you think that the government and the mountain of regulations and rent-seeking that have accompanied it didn't have anything to do with the outsourcing trend, you must be living a very sheltered life.
#11
I didn't say outsourcing had nothing to do with the government's actions, just that it is not entirely due to them. 'Private enterprise' as currently constituted had a lot to do with it. Rent seeking will be with us forever, along with the business cycle.
BTW, the US is already an oligarchy on the Latin model, as mentioned in comment #6. I keep meeting recent college grads dispensing coffee at Starbucks & passing out towels at the local gym. Maybe it's not too late to turn things around. A different political leadership & getting this info out are two of the critical changes needed.
#12
Re latin style oligarchy, one of the hallmarks of the style of governance in places like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico etc is the political class's deliberate use of debt default and currency devaluation as a tool of governance. We in Latin America North can't devalue our way out of this, as the $'s still the reserve currency, but our political class is determined to risk default via the only economic policy it understands: liquidity.
Both parties seek to flood the economy with artificially cheap credit as a way of stoking unsustainable asset bubbles that satisfy their cronies on Wall St (by creating hedging and carry trade opportunities) and that feed the public sector union beast.
Slight problem for this strategery: the little people on Main Street no longer can be bought off with cheap money because a) normal Americans have rediscovered yankee virtues like thrift and self-reliance, and b) the banks are sitting on their trillions that the Fed has redirected to their balance sheets, and c) the market for home-flipping (aka minor-league speculative opportunities for the little people on Main Street) has collapsed.
So now the political class has to do some thinking about fundamentals like how you create wealth, how you get quarterly earnings-obsessed multinationals to invest in job creation here in the US, how to end this policy of importing an illiterate underclass from Mexico etc.
We don't need to switch from Tweedledum to Tweedledee. We need a new political class altogether, one that recognizes the looming danger of oligarchy in this country and that is determined to halt oligarchy in its tracks.
#13
Fine thread. Please keep it up, although you may want to dumb it down some in case anybody in the administration reads it.
A great anecdotal read on the subject is Factory Girls by Leslie Chang. As I read the book I kept thinking whether any American father would want his daughter to be working in those conditions. And I also found myself thinking, look at how much you can do when government regulation is close to non-existent. It's not a simple trade-off.
Posted by: Matt ||
07/06/2010 12:04 Comments ||
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#14
We've had this argument before (we as a nation, I mean). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the talk was of how to stem US menaufacturing decline, whether we needed an industrial policy and so forth in order to meet the challenge coming from... Japan.
While Japan's stagnation seemed to settle that argument-- against industrial policy/interventionism-- it did not. There's a huge difference between Japan and China: the Chinese accept and encourage foreign investment, and no industrial nation on the planet can undercut Chinese wages. Another huge difference is that the Chinese are determined to secure natural resources all over the world, and are not constrained by any desire to avoid the appearance of imperialism or economic aggression. They couldn't care less about "local content" or other ways of making nice to the host country. They have no constraints to speak of.
If we do not get clear-eyed and smart about the Chinese threat, then we are finished as a middle class, prosperous nation. That would be fine with Wall Street and its Washington whores, and with the non-profit sector that lives on the sufferance of gazillionaires' taxes and charitable donations, but it would be the end of American democracy as we know it.
#15
Free Trade might be a great policy when you are a net exporter, but it's not working for the workers in the US anymore.
Under normal conditions, the current account deficit would force the Yuan/dollar rate down, which would help to correct the imbalance. But the peg supported by China is blocking that adjustment.
How about a tariff on Chinese goods specifically set to correct the FX imbalance, when it is out of a certain range?
Thanks for the comments, both pro and con, to my post. It's amazing how much attitudes have changed in a couple of years.
It seems like all here agree on many points, and disagree on a few others about this issue, but this thread is much more civilized and on a higher level than a similar one on the 'burg I was in two or three years ago. I had people threatening me and my family with physical violence for espousing the views I have on this subject. This thread is way more productive. Instead of feeling exasperated, I learned some stuff reading the responses.
Good stuff. I appreciate your posts.
ed #7
I must respectfully disagree with almost all of your post. Simply attempting to produce those things is no guarantee that the business will flourish or that there will be sufficent market at a given price point for the businesses to remain viable without subsidies. In essence, you are forcing (through the tax code, subsidies, and tariffs) your neighbors to pay the income you think you deserve without regard to the real market conditions. Would you like it if someone else with a marginal business model used the government to do that to you? I think not. The "wealth and advancement" you describe wasn't real if it was done by one group of people lobbying the government to intervene to make their own small piece of the economy more profitable. No different from farm subsidies, really.
Was there a conscious decision to harm the middle class, as you assert? Please. Evidence, if you will. That's conspiracy theory stuff. If the middle class would have stayed content with a REAL middle class lifestyle, by historical standards, many of those jobs would have stayed. Instead, much of the middle class watched HGTV and This Old House and decided they needed huge houses, saw TV and decided that they needed expensive vacations and cars, listened blindly to educators and told themselves that they needed to send all their kids to college or they weren't keeping up with the Joneses or being good parents, etc.
You're also way off base with the notion of offshoring being slave labor and that profits thereof being accrued to a tiny minority. Most of the people doing the jobs which have been offshored would not remotely consider themselves to be slaves. In fact, they enjoy a lifestyle that we in this ountry would have considered, well, middle class fifty years ago. And while some of the savings gained from farming out work to more reasonable and historically accurate labor costs did end up as corporate profits, much, much more of the "profits" from lower production costs accrued to people's retirement funds and, more importantly, the U.S. consumer in the form of lower cost goods. Remember that guy, the consumer? So few seem to. Everyone discusses management and employees, but they forget that the consumer has an interest, too.
Yes, things have come to a screeching halt. Bad practices by government and corporate America are certainly factors. But this notion of middle class being "bled dry" is exactly and precisely what I addressed in my first post on this thread. This is that revolution of forever rising ecxpectations I mentioned. It's simply a wrong notion. We aren't being bled dry at all. We are experiencing a reset to more normal historical levels. THAT is the explanation for the stagnation of middle class wages.
It's time for us all to realize this. If the never ending rising expectations don't go away, America will.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
07/06/2010 17:26 Comments ||
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#17
We are experiencing a reset to more normal historical levels. THAT is the explanation for the stagnation of middle class wages
On that we can agree. Americans' biggest problem is that we have a badly educated proletariat that pretends it's middle class and therefore feels entitled to a fat middle class lifestyle that would put them in the top 2-3% by living standard of nearly any country outside of northern Europe.
But expectations matter. It's in the nature of Americans to expect that each generation have a better life than the one preceding it.
Perhaps one way to preserve this American sense of improvement/progress/uplift while accepting the freakishness of our post-WWII era hegemony and the consumer paradise it enabled would be to redefine success-- away from the amount of stuff owned or the square footage of one's house, and toward the strength and depth of our families and communities and the richness of our culture.
Our family doesn't go out to movies. We don't have cable TV. But my kids read lots of books and draw and paint and build all kinds of stuff that teach them about physics and chemistry and electronics-- like this DIY compressed air rocket launcher. I have less success than my father did, and live in a worse neighborhood than the one I grew up in, but I don't think I'm a worse father than he was or that my kids are deprived compared to the way I grew up. I still think America's the best place for them, and still have hope for my country and for them.
#18
"But expectations matter. It's in the nature of Americans to expect that each generation have a better life than the one preceding it.
Perhaps one way to preserve this American sense of improvement/progress/uplift while accepting the freakishness of our post-WWII era hegemony and the consumer paradise it enabled would be to redefine success-- away from the amount of stuff owned or the square footage of one's house, and toward the strength and depth of our families and communities and the richness of our culture."
Thank you so much. lex, for putting into so few words what it seems to take me lots more to say.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
07/06/2010 20:22 Comments ||
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#19
How about a nomination to put this thread in The Classics?. The amount of thought illuminated here gives so much hope. As bad as things are, the upside is that people are engaged. I'm cautiously hopeful and this thread illustrates that we still possess the knowledge to pull ourselves out of this, however painful that must be. The job is to put that knowledge to action. Job #1 is to deliver a crusing defeat to the statists of both parties.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
07/06/2010 20:48 Comments ||
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Posted by: ed ||
07/06/2010 10:13 Comments ||
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#2
Ya, I agree if we ditch the military and stop spending on defence then all our problems would be solved! We could just send our savior Obama there and they will instantly love us and not want to destroy America. I feel so much better now.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
07/06/2010 10:41 Comments ||
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#3
Even if the US leaves Afghanistan, Afghanistan will not leave us, unfortunately.
#4
I don't know about Afghanistan but it's certainly true that military spending in the US, as in Britain and the rest of Europe west of Belarus, is going to be cut back.
We're nearly broke, and we haven't even begun to fill the multi-trillion $$$$$$$$$$$$$$ hole in public pensions-- not just S.S. but all the state and local pension funds that are each billions underwater. If we're to retain our credit rating, Romney or whoever follows Barry will have no choice but to cut our defense budget.
#8
The bulk of the budget is S.S. and medicare. No way on god's green earth that either of those will be cut significantly. Aside from defense, there are no other agencies that can produce anything more than chump change in terms of budget savings.
#9
Well, hell, lex, let's start with that chump change: Education and HHS come immediately to mind for complete elimination, but there are plenty of others....
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/06/2010 14:05 Comments ||
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#10
"I believe that ERISA legislation forbids any alterations to contractual pension obligations. Much less 50% cuts"
Does ERISA apply to the gummint?
And if it does, why expect the present federal gummint to follow it? They ignore other laws.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/06/2010 14:08 Comments ||
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#11
ERISA doesn't apply to the gummint. Basically, it sets standards for private pension plans.
(Odd, ain't it, that the gummint exempts itself from so many of these excellent laws it creates.)
Posted by: Matt ||
07/06/2010 14:33 Comments ||
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#12
'Odd, ain't it, that the gummint exempts itself from so many of these excellent laws it creates."
Not odd, really. As far as the Emperor's Ass-kissers Congress is concerned, that's not a bug, that's a feature.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/06/2010 14:46 Comments ||
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#13
'Odd, ain't it, that the gummint exempts itself from so many of these excellent laws it creates."
Apparently not, per this article in Barron's that notes that "the constitutions of nine states, including beleaguered California and Illinois, guarantee public-pension payments. And most other states have strong statutory or case-law protections for these obligations...."
Excerpt: The size of the legacy-pension hole is a matter of debate. The Pew report puts it at $452 billion. But the survey captured only about 85% of the universe and relied mostly on midyear 2008 numbers, missing much of the impact of the vicious bear market of 2008 and early 2009. That lopped about $1 trillion from public pension-fund asset values, driving down their total holdings to around $2.7 trillion.
Other observers think the eventual bill due on state pension funds will be multiples of the Pew number. Hedge-fund manager Orin Kramer, who is also chairman of the badly underfunded New Jersey retirement system, insists the gap is at least $2 trillion, if assets were recorded at market value and other pension-accounting practices common in Corporate America were adopted.
Finance professors Robert Novy-Marx at the University of Chicago and Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University asserted in a recent paper that the funding gap for state pension plans alone might exceed $3 trillion, in part because state funds are using an unrealistic long-term annual investment return of 8% to compute the present value of future payments to retirees, as is permitted in government standards for pension-fund accounting.... The academic pair, using modern portfolio theory, claim that state funds, as currently configured, have only a one-in-20 chance of meeting their obligations 15 years out.
MAKING THE STATE AND local pension problem all the more trying is that government entities can do little to wriggle out of their exposure, even if spending on essential services is threatened. The constitutions of nine states, including beleaguered California and Illinois, guarantee public-pension payments. And most other states have strong statutory or case-law protections for these obligations.
#14
lex, agreed and a great point. My little joke referred to the fact that ERISA (among many others) does not apply to the feds. In a sense, the least regulated institution in the country is Congress.
Posted by: Matt ||
07/06/2010 15:18 Comments ||
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#15
"In a sense, the least regulated institution in the country is Congress."
FTFY, Matt.
As for states being stuck with out-of-control pensions because of their constitutions, have they considered changing their constitutions? I guess whether it would work would depend on whether more people are getting paid outrageous sums by the state or more people are going broke paying the taxes for those outrageous sums.
And yes, I'm aware that in most states, the legislature has to approve putting the constitutional amendment on the ballot.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
07/06/2010 15:25 Comments ||
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#16
aha, got it, Matt. A little slow today, still trying to get back to work....
#17
Aside from defense, there are no other agencies that can produce anything more than chump change in terms of budget savings.
I dunno about that. Seems we went from $300 billion to $1600 billion a year deficits in less than two years. I'm guessing there's at least $1300 billion we could cut without touching defense ...
Posted by: Steve White ||
07/06/2010 16:20 Comments ||
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#18
There is an immoral way to lower the debt...
if the bondholders and their ancestors have accidents....
Mod note: Had to change title showed as a DUPE entry - there is the same title on a different article. Rantburg back office is sharp!
Vice President Joe Biden said after a three-day trip to Baghdad that the American people will see President Barack Obamas Iraq policy as a success when the "combat mission" ends on schedule Aug. 31. Biden said the administration "will be able to point to it and say, 'We told you what were going to do, and we did it."
Given President Obama's glaring domestic policy missteps, it is understandable that the public has largely been blinded to his foreign policy failings. In fact, these may have been even more damaging to America's future. Honduras, Israel,North Korea, etc.
The president's New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New-START) with Russia could be his worst foreign policy mistake yet.
New-START impedes missile defense, our protection from nuclear-proliferating rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. Its preamble links strategic defense with strategic arsenal. It explicitly forbids the United States from converting intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos into missile defense sites. The treaty fails to apply the MIRV limits that were part of the prior START treaty. Again, it may not be coincidental that Russia is developing a new heavy-load - meaning MIRV-capable - ICBM.
The treaty ignores tactical nuclear weapons, where Russia outnumbers us by as much as 10 to 1. Obama heralds a reduction in strategic weapons from approximately 2,200 to 1,550 but fails to mention that Russia will retain more than 10,000 nuclear warheads that are categorized as tactical because they are mounted on missiles that cannot reach the United States. But surely they can reach our allies, nations that depend on us for a nuclear umbrella. And who can know how those tactical nuclear warheads might be reconfigured? Astonishingly, while excusing tactical nukes from the treaty, the Obama administration bows to Russia's insistence that conventional weapons mounted on ICBMs are counted under the treaty's warhead and launcher limits.
By all indications, the Obama administration has been badly out-negotiated. Perhaps the president's eagerness for global disarmament led his team to accede to Russia's demands, or perhaps it led to a document that was less than carefully drafted. Don't be so naive, Mitt. It's part of The One's legacy.
Whatever the reason for the treaty's failings, it must not be ratified: The security of the United States is at stake. The only responsible course is for the Senate to demand and scrutinize the full diplomatic record underlying the treaty. Then it must insist that any linkage between the treaty and our missile defense system be eliminated. In a world where nuclear weapons are proliferating, America's missile defense shield must not be compromised.
#1
It would be one thing if Barry's bumbling were part of some coherent Russia-friendly strategy-- say, a long-term effort to play the "Russia card" against a predatory and surging China and the jihadists on Russia's southern flank.
But Barry doesn't care about grand strategy, or even foreign policy on a small scale. Foreign policy, history of interstate relations or the internal development of Turkey or Russia or Japan or China: these are all distractions from Barry's greater mission to bring social democracy to the US.
Time for the US to get smart about Russia and strike a bargain that will enable us to swap out Turkey and bring Russia into NATO. That's not the same as a badly-written missile deal. But it may involve sharing our defense missile technology in exchange for a jointly-operated base in, say, Azerbaijan, on Iran's doorstep.
#2
Mitt Romney writing an op ed about foreign policy in the WaPo.
hmmm.
The WaPo may be close to having enough Obama.
Posted by: lord garth ||
07/06/2010 9:22 Comments ||
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#3
I'm glad somebody in a leadership position is realizing just how badly Obama and his Merry Marxists have screwed over the United States with is lopsided nuclear treaty.
As I have said many times: Whose side is Obama on?
Posted by: ed ||
07/06/2010 9:53 Comments ||
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#4
As I have said many times: Whose side is Obama on? Posted by ed
Click the pic to see details you may have missed first time around.
To become the nation's first black president, Barack Obama not only won heavy percentages of the black and Hispanic vote but also managed to trim the Democratic Party's traditional deficit among white voters.
Four years after Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) lost the white vote by 17 percentage points, Obama lost it by 12, according to exit polls. While the 2008 gains were generally attributed to Obama's strength with young voters -- he won by 10 points among whites 18 to 29 years old -- he managed to improve on Kerry's showing with white voters across every age demographic.
Fast-forward to today. With the November midterm elections less than four months away, Obama's standing among white voters has sunk -- leading some party strategists to fret that the president's erosion -- and the party's -- could adversely affect Democrats' chances of holding on to their House and Senate majorities.
"Since in the past House elections white voters tended to represent the independent vote, [the midterms] will surely be devastating for Democrats running in an election that will be a referendum on the Obama agenda," predicted one senior Democratic operative who closely tracks House races.
In Washington Post-ABC polling, Obama's approval rating among white voters has dropped from better than 60 percent to just above 40 percent. In a June poll, 46 percent of white voters under age 40 approved of how Obama was doing, compared with just 39 percent of whites 65 and older.
The latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll reveals that Obama's standing among white voters is remarkably similar to that of President George W. Bush at this same time two years ago.
In the June 2008 NBC-WSJ survey, 37 percent of white men and 26 percent of white women approved of the job Bush was doing. In the June 2010 poll, an identical 37 percent of white men approved of Obama's handling of his job, as did 35 percent of white women.
Those numbers are all the more striking when viewed against overall perceptions of the two presidents. In June 2008, just 28 percent approved of the job Bush was doing while a whopping 66 percent disapproved. Obama, by contrast, is running far stronger with the nation as a whole, with ratings of 45 percent approval and 48 percent disapproval in last month's NBC-WSJ survey.
Context, as always in politics, matters here. First, as noted above, Republican presidents tend to far outperform Democratic ones among white voters. Second, Obama's sweeping win -- his 365 electoral votes represented victories even in Republican-friendly states such as Indiana -- meant that his numbers were bound to fall among whites (and nearly everyone else) once he began the task of governing. Third, Bush's numbers were bolstered by whites in the South (42 percent approval in the 2008 NBC-WSJ survey) while Obama's is hurt by them (29 percent approval).
Still, Obama's numbers among white voters have some Democratic strategists with an eye on the fall elections decidedly nervous.
One senior strategist, speaking candidly about his concerns on the condition of anonymity, noted that white voters made up 79 percent of the 2006 midterm electorate, while they made up 74 percent of the 2008 vote. If the white percentage returns to its 2006 level, that means there will be 3 million more white voters than if it stayed at its 2008 levels. That scenario, said the source, "would generate massive losses" for House and Senate Democrats in November because of Obama's standing with that demographic.
To avoid such losses, the Democratic National Committee has committed to spending tens of millions of dollars to re-create (or come somewhere near re-creating) the 2008 election model, in which Democrats relied heavily on higher-than-normal turnout from young people and strong support from African American and Hispanic voters.
The DNC's plan is ambitious, to say the least: In the space of a few months, the strategists hope to change the composition of a midterm electorate that, if history is any guide, tends to be older and whiter than in a presidential-election year. Put that way, it sounds crazy -- and it has drawn considerable skepticism from independent observers.
But given the reality that white voters -- again -- almost certainly hold the key to Obama's and the Democrats' chances in the fall, they would be even crazier not to try.
#1
So the Dims want to be the Party of Minorities?
Just so long as they're the minority party.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/06/2010 7:27 Comments ||
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#2
More like the Mythbuster's Model - "I reject your reality and substitute my own". Let's hope the Democrats continue to use this model through the first week in November.
#3
in 2008 the Dems sold the country a promise short on details and long on vague packaging and warm feelings. All of us with a gag reflex knew what was coming, but even we didn't guess just how bad, incompetant (or how Marxist)it would be after we took the wrappings off the box. The American people, minus those who vote based on their skin color, not their brain, have seen the product, Oblahblah and the Congressional leadership, and want no part of this. The MSM may think they can float another fluffy bunny and puppy story in September ( I think that is motivated by cupidity for advertising) but the people are finally, really really scared/pissed, and brand Demo is going to get drop kicked.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
