EASY READING CULTURE OF LIFE NEWS: US AUTO WORKERS: POOR AS JAPANESE AUTO WORKERS? « Culture of Life News 2
US auto workers are being reduced to the same level as Japanese auto workers. The US leadership considers this a good thing. So do many Americans who are jealous of US autoworkers getting good pay via unionization from 1930-1980. But many union members voted GOP because they hated hippies. So now, they live in a world set up by union busting corporate powers. And don’t understand how their betrayal of the communist/socialist left has left them all high and dry. And what about Japan? The unions there have even less power and the workers, less rights. GM is buying out as many union workers as possible and replacing them with cheap labor. This has been going on in Japan, too. Time to look closely at all this.
GM, Chrysler offers buyouts to all of its hourly workers – Feb. 3, 2009
General Motors is offering buyouts to virtually all of its remaining hourly workers, becoming the latest automaker to try to cut labor costs by giving nervous workers an incentive to leave the company.
The move follows a similar move by Chrysler LLC, which made an offer to its hourly workers on Monday.
The GM (GM, Fortune 500) offer, which takes effect Friday, is less lucrative than the deal proposed by Chrysler, or even offers that GM has made to its hourly staff in the past. The automaker will give most of its 62,000 U.S. hourly workers $20,000, as well as a voucher good towards the purchase of a GM car worth $25,000….
If more workers take the latest offers from GM or Chrysler than the companies want to cut, the 2007 labor deal allows them to hire new workers at a significantly lower pay scale, and with far less lucrative benefits than those who were on staff when the 2007 deal was struck….
Under terms of the loan, both companies must show progress towards bringing its labor costs in line with those at the nonunion U.S. plants of Asian automakers such as Toyota Motor (TM) and Honda Motor (HMC), or risk having the federal loan recalled.
Toyota is now the world’s biggest automaker. Therefore, they set the standards for everyone else. This corporation is based very much on heavy exploitation of both labor and foreign workers. The people in the deep south who welcomed this corporation got somewhat decent pay due to Toyota competing with US auto industries. But now that GM and Ford are making themselves more like Toyota and as the unions here die rapidly, the condition of workers here will mirror the condition of Japanese labor. And they have utterly miserable conditions.
YouTube – Забастовка российского Форд | Ford Strike in Russia
The Russians struck in 2007, demanding Western wages. I believe their wish will be granted: western wages will drop to meet Russian wages.
YouTube – Ford During the Slide into the Great Depression
First, let’s compare Toyota and GM stock performance:
TM: Basic Chart for TOYOTA MTR CP ADS – Yahoo! Finance
GM stock: 2.85 -0.04 (-1.38%)
GM stocks are penny stocks. Toyota stocks are very high. American investors love Toyota stocks and hate GM stocks. Look at Ford:
FORD MOTOR CO stock: 1.96 
0.08 (4.26%)
Ford is also penny stocks. Both are basically bankrupt. US auto unions still have enough political power to get Congress to bail out these two corporations. But of course, both are busy building state-of-the-art factories overseas, not in the US. If all businesses in the US were to destroy all unions and then drop all wages to Chinese or Japanese levels, why, our corporations will be as rich as the Japanese ones!
Except there would be virtually no one around able to buy anyone’s output. This is the harsh reality of modern manufacturing technology: it can easily crank out lots of stuff. It is designed to crank out lots of stuff. But if anyone can buy this stuff, they need to be able to capture the profits from production and labor and then use it to buy the stuff! This sounds simple and is nearly impossible to do except via two methods: taxing profits of production by 90% and using it to redistribute wealth to the workers or for workers to unite and have powerful unions capable of shutting down factories in strikes. Or have violent revolutions.
Posted
Hotlines set up around Japan have been flooded with calls from people sacked from their jobs. (AFP: TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA )
It is being described as Japan’s deepest, darkest recession since World War II.
The world’s second-largest economy is contracting significantly, demand for its exports is plummeting, and the country’s premiere car and electronics makers are shedding staff and cutting production.
The hardest hit region is the home town of the world’s largest car-maker. Toyota City rides on the fortunes of the big auto-maker, but the company is facing its first operating loss in its 70-year history.
And the city’s poorest workers, mostly Japanese-Brazilians who fill the factory floors, are feeling the squeeze.
I watch Japanese TV. There have been a number of anime in the last 10 years featuring these half-Brazilian Japanese. It is no surprise to see they are discriminated against. Japan still will not confront serious racism. Aso, the Prime Minister, has been outed for talking racist about a political rival who was descended from the Japanese lowest classes, the ‘untouchables’ of Japan. Toyota imported these Japanese transplants from South America because they wanted to exploit their labor. For they were ‘outsiders’ and therefore, would be unable to unite with racist union members and have a united front.
This is why US corporations exploit racism and language barriers and why they encourage foreign labor to come here to make it harder to organize. Back in the beginning of US union organizing, many people from central Europe came to America, all fired up by communism and socialism and were big supporters of unionization. This is why industries with many immigrants were the first to organize unions. Now, it is the reverse. Due to one big, big difference: the foreign labor here is either on a special passport easily withdrawn or they are ‘illegal aliens’ and can’t do a thing about anything but hope, no one sees them.
Toyota, incidentally, builds strictly in the countryside wherever they build factories. This way, they control the workers much better since they have to leave the area entirely if they are fired or laid off due to slowdowns. Then, when things get better, a different group is brought in. This keeps everyone from organizing. And Toyota has a faux union that is really a branch of the corporation, itself.
Mitsuhiro Masumoto goes to a working-class bar in Toyota City to drown his sorrows. He has lost his job at a parts maker for Toyota and he has just received an eviction notice for his apartment.
He is another Japanese-Brazilian, one of thousands of immigrant workers out in the cold as the recession deepens.
More than half the Japanese-Brazilian community in Toyota City has been laid off and Mr Masumoto has no savings because he has been sending money back home.
Hotlines set up around Japan have been flooded with calls from people sacked from their jobs. Many have also lost their company accommodation….
Like an increasing number of Japanese, home for Takemitsu Karitachi is a cubicle in an internet cafe.
“It is the same as renting a normal apartment, it is just that the room is small,” he said. “I don’t mind because there are many things to do if you just walk outside.” Mr Karitachi’s home measures just 1 metre wide and 1.8m long. It is the size of a decent wardrobe.
The utter indifference of the LDP elites is obvious: these are viewed as disposable people. Imagine forcing workers, trucked in from poorer countries, living in dormitories here in the US! Well, this is our future! Unlike the Japanese who, like the Jews in Palestine, have a very racist group theology, isolating ‘other people’, the US is made up of immigrants of every type. So the corporations can’t isolate people in dormitories, knowing they can’t live elsewhere.
Below is a screenshot of Toyota City in Japan. It is in the exact center of the country, far from anything else. The city, itself, consists of many factories, all of which are associated with Toyota, lots of low houses with no back yards or much of any open spaces and open fields all over the place for farming. There is no ‘downtown’ as far as I can see. Lots of Circle Ks and 7/11 stores, though.
2004: Kamata Satoshi: Toyota: Suicide and Worker Depression at the World’s Most Profitable Manufacturer –Toyota,company,workers,about,but,city,trillion yen,term employees
Toyota headquarters is at Number 1, Toyota-cho (town), Toyota-shi (city), about fifty minutes by train from Nagoya in central Japan. The city was once called Koromo, a beautiful name that evokes priestly robes, but the Toyoda family that founded the company had it changed to the very commonplace Toyota. This is the only place in Japan where a city took on the name of a family, and where a town took on the name of a company….
Thirty-one years ago, I dragged my tired legs through that gate every day for six months. I worked as what they call a “term laborer,” assembling transmissions, and wrote about it in a book called Jidosha zetsubo kojo–Aru kisetsuko no nikki (Auto Factory of Despair: The Diary of a Seasonal Worker).
Just glimpsing the layout of the plant from the street brought back memories of my exhaustion during those days. Nonetheless, I also felt a certain nostalgia for the place, and I wanted to take a look around inside, but where there once had been free access from the public road, a large gatehouse like a freeway toll booth has been erected and public access is restricted.
Back then my total wages, including overtime and night shift allowance, amounted to 79,000 yen ($720 at today’s exchange rate) a month. Today, the large newspaper ads Toyota runs for “term employees” promise a monthly wage of 254,430 yen ($2300), a threefold increase in thirty-one years…One would think that chairman Okuda, who is also chairman of Nippon Keidanren (the Japan Business Federation), might feel some embarrassment at utilizing term employees, the epitome of insecure employment, to the fullest extent, while reaping the highest profits in the world. Even more so, given that seventy percent of these profits are generated in North America and elsewhere overseas, as this world corporation boasts.
Below is a satellite photo of the Toyota main factories and their race track. Note that there are open fields right next to it.
In Japan, despite the property market decline of the last 15 years, housing is very expensive. This is why people are forced to live in tiny cells in ‘internet cafes’ which are nothing of the sort but are actually tenement housing of the worst sort. I renovated brownstones in NYC that were turned into tenement housing during the Great Depression. The Victorian rooms that were 16’x16 feet were subdivided by thin walls less than half an inch thick with a 3’x3′ square taken out by the previous doors and replaced by two doors going to each half. so the rooms were only about 140 square feet which is about twice as big as these Japanese tenements.
The horror is, these tiny, subhuman tenements are spreading and growing in size! And the public housing is virtually nonexistent and Toyota’s vicious owners know this and want this. It keeps the workers under their thumb. Below is a story from 2004, by a former Toyota wage slave who became a reporter:
Toyota has always suffused the workplace with a crisis consciousness in order to suppress wages. While I was working there, managers would regularly address the daily morning assembly, warning that Nissan was catching up, we’ve got to penetrate the American market, GM is powerful, don’t let us end up like Mitsubishi. Toyota used this kind of manipulation to keep wages at average levels and to steadily increase its internal cash reserves.
The result: manufacturing plants in twenty-six countries, total assets of 22 trillion yen ($200 billion), and 2.2 trillion yen ($20 billion) cash-in-hand in the “Toyota Bank.” Annual wage negotiations amount to getting together with the labor union to talk about “the priority of competitiveness,” and the workers and subcontracting companies are left to suffer.
With a thoroughly defanged company union and no countervailing power within the company, Toyota has been afflicted with a series of scandals that are astounding for the home company of the chairman of the Business Federation. The Labor Standards Bureau ordered Toyota to desist from unpaid overtime, the Nagoya tax office discovered 5 billion yen ($45 million) in underpaid taxes, the company was accused of leaking test questions for the national auto maintenance certification exam–all petty, stopgap mess-ups, unworthy of a world-class corporation. In its mind, Toyota is still a provincial company.
The conversation among my friends turned to an accident one early morning in May, where a 33-year old worker was crushed to death in a metal press, followed by talk of suicides, some from overwork, among elite technicians in the development division and among leaders of the labor union. Over the last decade, they said, they’ve seen a dramatic increase in depression among their coworkers.
Workers urged: Go home and multiply – CNN.com Articles about mental health care have begun to appear frequently in the labor union newspaper. One report of a November 27, 2003 labor-management council meeting noted that, “the company sees the high incidence of psychological disease as a grave situation.” The report, printed in bold type, amounted to a declaration of emergency.
I am not surprised to see rising depression in Japan. The workers there were savagely repressed with the blessings of the LDP who managed to cling to power nearly nonstop since WWII. The present prime minister is the son of a war criminal who worked to death military prisoners of war as well as Korean and Chinese slave labor. He is vastly disliked in all of Asia and sharply reminds everyone about WWII crimes which Japan didn’t have to pay for at all.
Many Japanese corporations relocated to the rest of Asia in search of cheap labor. But they should kid themselves. The politicans there itch to take away power over these factories. Isn’t it horrible that Toyota knew, in 2003, that the workers were unhappy? But did nothing at all. For the two things that make workers happy, higher wages and better working hours, are exactly what Toyota won’t give them.
Workers urged: Go home and multiply – CNN.com
Japan is in the midst of an unprecedented recession, so corporations are being asked to work toward fixing another major problem: the country’s low birthrate. Tell us what you think
At 1.34, the birthrate is well below the 2.0 needed to maintain Japan’s population, according to the country’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
Keidanren, Japan’s largest business group, with 1,300 major international corporations as members, has issued a plea to its members to let workers go home early to spend time with their families and help Japan with its pressing social problem. Watch more on this story
This is how the LDP deals with gross abuse of working conditions. Instead of passing laws forbidding near-universal ‘free labor’ at the end of the day, they simply call on the vicious men who work people to death, to stop doing it, once and a while.
This is why we have laws and regulations! The sort of conditions workers in Japan endure are due to lax government and no voice in the election process by which the workers can wrest some power from the bosses. Whatever goofy things unions get over time, this is still much better than working under Japanese-style anarchy. One of the racist parts of this business is, the factory owners don’t want the Japanese-Brazilians to reproduce. They don’t want anyone but the upper tier of Japan to reproduce! And they are getting it in spades.
It is hard to have children while living in a 3’x6′ coffin.
I visited the head of the city tax office and asked him what percentage of local taxes were paid by Toyota. I was told he’d never thought to calculate that figure. One can only conclude that he can’t say anything without the permission of the lord of the castle. Thirty-one years ago, Toyota accounted for 81 percent of corporate taxes paid in the city. In 1997, it was 68 percent. And now it’s a secret.
Perhaps it’s become the “city of secrets.”
Just like here. The GOP is demanding more tax cuts in the spend-spend-spend bill. Our corporations are great at tax evading and ditto in Japan. What is going on here? A rush to the bottom? To see who will be worse than communist China under Madame Mao?
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare’s most recent report on the state of Japan’s labor force is not encouraging. According to the report, 6.2% of Japan’s workers are satisfied with their current pace of pay increase, compared to 15.7% in 1990. We also see that since 2001, the proportion of Japan’s workforce categorized as part-time workers has increased from 38% to 44%.
Those reporting seeing an increase in salary fell from 23.7% in 1978 to 6.2% in 2005, while those who found their jobs to be meaningful fell from 30.5% to 16.6% over the same time.
For those workers who are lucky enough to be on salaried status, this summer’s average bonus will be down on the average for the first time in six years, though the decline is only 0.08% to 909,519 yen. In the food industry, however, bonuses are projected to fall 5.38% to 781,057 yen. This might give something of a clue as to how food companies are managing to avoid passing on the full costs of increased production directly to consumers in the form of higher prices.
How sad is this? The despair of living in a grinding system that makes it increasingly impossible to buy a home—no banks will lend anything to any ‘part time’ workers, just for example—start a family or live a normal life! In normal countries, the people would be storming the Parliament and taking over the streets! But not in Japan. They are, instead, killing themselves or sliding into deeper fantasies. Some even refuse to leave their rooms while others join online group suicides.
According to data released today by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan’s “core” consumer prices rose just 0.2% in December as declining oil prices continue to add deflationary pressure. December was the fifteenth month in which core consumer prices rose….
The only category to move out of positive range was “Miscellaneous,” which went from +0.2% in November to flat in December. It’s also worth noting that fuel prices have declined sharply, backing well off from the 8-9% increases seen in August, September and October. Food prices, on the other hand, have been in the 3% increase area for the past six months.
And up until this month, there was inflation in Japan! The Bank of Japan has conspired to keep the interest rate well below the rate of real inflation. The faux depression is now a real depression. Japan’s workers, instead of leading the world out of depression by buying things, are being shoved down this black hole of more work, less pay and less job security. Credit has been utterly withdrawn from them even as it is lent to their oppressors at a ridiculously low rate. And food prices are rising!
This is classic in any peasant society. Food is the main expense after housing. No discretionary income means, slight rises in food and rent to landowning upper elites cause great distress. Real inflation in Japan is raging while wages drop. In the US during the Great Depression, money was hard to get but food was cheaper and cheaper.
In Japan, money is hard to get and food is expensive.
It is important to look at what’s actually happening in terms of data. In December, wholesale prices rose 1.1% year-on-year, a drop off from the 2.8% seen in November, according to data released this week by the Bank of Japan. Wholesale prices rose 4.6% for all of 2008, showing an increase for the fifth consecutive year and the largest yearly increase since 1980.
Where were the rises seen in 2008? Petroleum and coal products saw a 23.6% increase, while steel prices shot up 20.0% and prices for scrap and waste increased by the same amount. In other words, it’s looking as though 2008 was the peak of a boom in wholesale price increases and we are very unlikely to see anything resembling a repeat in 2009. December’s 1.1% increase in wholesales prices was the lowest seen in the past four years, while wholesale sales were down 13.9% last month, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Prices for petroleum and coal products fell 19.1% in December. The strong yen continues to hurt: export prices were down 14.9% in December.
The Japanese elite hate having a strong currency. When they travel, they use US dollars which they have in great abundance. But Japan’s food relies on imports and certainly, oil is imported. The drop in energy prices kept the depression afloat in Japan but prices are now rising again. The Japanese want dearly to have the old system back with well-paid US workers buying goods from poorly-paid Japanese and Asian labor.
Alas, the US is trying to go down the same road to hell.
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Culture of Life News 
The sales of Korean cars are increasing in US
Maybe the next goal is to reduce the wage to Hyundai and KIA levels
Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.
Jefferson
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The videos on the blog are super.
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OK, everybody back in the pool, rally monkey.
This interesting fact about the UAW, sort of a then and now reality: the largest UAW local in Michigan at its highest members number: 80,000. SAME UAW local population NOW: 781 members. This is the “free” market at work.
Wages will drop to Chinese levels and then Indian levels.
work makes you free.
Eventually all manufacturing will be on “barges” (Neutron Jack word) moored
off the Somalia coast. But maybe not. Its all going to go down in the next
year or so. As CNSY used to sing in a song, “we’re finally on our own”. I really
think we have a time-quake coming up. A quiet social/cultural earthquake that
will totally re-shape our interior/mental landscape.
My wife’s friend went to Japan once on a travel agent “Fam” trip. They went to a hot
springs resort. When their group stepped into one of the baths, immediately everybody in there jumped out as if the water suddenly became polluted.
Now THATS racism !
we are going to take our country back, have a jubilee, clean the entire house, bring our armies home and keep them well armed and under our own control so we do not depend on the kindness of asian masters…ever….
“… But many union members voted GOP because they hated hippies.”
I was one of those hippies they hated. I hated them back. They wore their little american flags on their fucking lazy ass sleeves and puffed up their fucking chests in holier than thou fake patriotism.
The Unions took HUGE pay increases during a WAR (Vietnam). So much for sacrifice in war time while others died in a useless war, Hey we got the biggest salary increases in History, yah for us! That is as bad as any war-profiteering scumbag industrialist in management that the ‘noble unions’ were constantly bitching about.
The Unions betrayed the Democratic party and they betrayed their country for the sake of the almight buck.
The fucking American labor unions deserve to die a slow painful death. Fuckem to hell. They are traitors and thieves masquerading as patriots and free men.
This article is disgusting to me. I will make sure to never purchase a Toyota if I can avoid doing so.
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The Japanese are famous for mistreating peasants. During the Meiji period, Japan’s industrialists went to Europe and copied British industrial methods. Then the silk trade took off. For labor, factory owners actually bought peasant farm girls and put them in dormitories where two girls slept in the same bed each pulling a 12 hour shift for seven days a week until their health was broken. Then the worn out women were sent back home to their families to die. This is how Japan initially became an exporting industrial power much of it on the backs of its young women. They haven’t changed their colors much over the years…still abusing the lower classes. Japanese like to project themselves as being a civilized ancient culture, but, in reality, they just walked out of the woods about 600 years ago, and they still have difficulty being civilized to each other. Race purity is everything to them…racists to the bone.
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Of course, we in the US are certainly not the standard of level measurement either. We’re just as bad or worse in some respects. And, like the Japanese, we’ve got some really cold blooded (lizards) sociopaths running our corporations and think tanks. I can easily see these bastards copying the Japanese.
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On US unions…Elaine you said it all. Here in the South, when I was young, I worked in the shop of a Ford dealership. I often heard people talking about those “high paid union Yankees,” and how the unions were ruining this country.
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But what my ignorant dumb ass co-workers didn’t realize was that those high-paid union workers paid taxes that benefited the entire country…with social programs, education etc. So, everyone benefited from those unions, and the nation prospered.
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Corporations are like religions… they are self centered, short sighted and their vision is very narrow. And they have the means of avoiding taxes(accountants, lawyers and bribing politicians).
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So, when all unions are destroyed, and workers are in poverty….no middle class taxpayers left, who will pay for keeping the infrastructure of the nation going? And, as you said, who will purchase corporate products built with cheap labors if the peasants have no money.
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GM, Ford and Chrysler have several problems. The US didn’t restrict foreign trade. Politicians accepted bribes to open the flood gates(thinking about that 2.5 million dollar Reagean speech). The government didn’t support automakers by restricting imports and demanding quality standards from our own automakers. However, these problems were minor.
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American CEOs, managers and investors wanted a huge bottom line, but were unwilling to allow spending on R&D and improved safety, improved fuel mileage and performance,stylish design and long term planning in order to compete when they had the chance. Companies run by old deadheads and young sharks who skimmed all they could and moved on…leaving destruction in their wake. That is why the US auto industry is where it is today…not because of expensive labor or unions.
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I wonder how long it is going to take before average Americans begin to wake up and attempt to understand what is happening.
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I fear it will be too late when they do…and even then, they will be easily led down another path to poverty because of their ignorance.
DOCTERINE OF WEALTH FOR THE FUTEURERER !~ IM RICH SO HES RICH… life is more a puppet show anymore inspired by fear of justice… must not be much justice ‘or they hide it really well with lies’… either way noone cares about prudence only indoctrineation ‘whatever the hell that is’… guess we will pay whatever money is for what we got so that noone cares what we do!… its a two edged sword where do you put it
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EZyFzkUC4c&feature=channel
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why be impersonal lie to them
Global Corporate Leaders have declared themselves the new feudal leaders of the world, with everyone else their subjects.
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Either you bow down to their relentlessly crushed wages, or they bring someone from overseas to take your job, or move your job overseas.
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If any nation attempts to stop this process, the whole factory goes overseas.
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Supra-national organizations like the EU are designed to speed this process along.
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YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN ARE DOOMED TO A LIFE OF POVERTY.
http://www.greenenergyinvestors.com/index.php?showtopic=3285&st=2580
“The “mark-to-market accounting” that assumes that market prices automatically reflect true economic values has been discredited by the illusory profits it created in the credit boom — and should be ignored in valuing bank assets for the new guarantee schemes that governments are rolling out. These schemes should instead use what Ben Bernanke has described as the “hold to maturity” valuations of assets, which use transparent and reasonable economic assumptions about house prices, inflation and so on to assess the long-term probabilities of default.”
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the ‘we cant bullshit anymore’ economic solution hahahaha!!!
David:
Since you read no Japanese, you must have inculcated the bullshit that passes as Japanese history from some Jew scribe; the Jews ,as you yourself have asserted, determine Media content in US. Whether the Japanese chose to “copy” anything is a matter for scholars to dispute; that your Celt ancestors created nothing new and chose nothing but were forced by guys who spoke Latin to obey and work as slaves is a documented fact. The difference between the Japanese and your Celt and German ancestors is very simple: until 1945 Japan had never lost a war or been occupied; your ancestors, on the other hand, have never won a war and were always occupied; Romans and their descendents used your ancestors as pack animals and as targets to draw fire, much like the English used Australians to draw fire at Gallipoli. These facts manifest in differences today between the South and Japan: Japan leads the world , while the South–without foreign capital and technology and federal subsidies–would be a third world country.
It’s not that easy. Don’t get me wrong, I think all the banks should go bust, with no boni for the next 25 years. However, had you let them go bust with no safety net, the induced nuclear derivatives meltdown would have turned the financial world and the attached ‘real’ economy into charcoal.
The problem is, what should the safety net be?
For instance, I do think that many savers should lose their money. How can you be so stupid and give an institution like RBS, HBoS,
http://www.greenenergyinvestors.com/index.php?showtopic=5858
Barclays, or similar a credit (which is what people usually call ‘savings’)? Let them lose some, say, 75%. But then, maybe this too much. So, say, let them lose everything above 30,000? And what would you do to make sure there is credit? I think maybe the government would have to lend to businesses directly.
There is no solution for this problem. Something has to go down. One has to decide what thing.
The thing governments all over the world have now chosen to let go down is the one that won’t fight or protest, i.e. the kids (future generations) and the currency (most people are too stupid to realize what’s going on). Good stuff!
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nah nah nah nah nah… banks shmanks why does government TAX us and draw CREDIT on us… ietahr its not ‘almost leagal’ or entirely unfair
http://www.greenenergyinvestors.com/index.php?showtopic=5858
It’s not that easy. Don’t get me wrong, I think all the banks should go bust, with no boni for the next 25 years. However, had you let them go bust with no safety net, the induced nuclear derivatives meltdown would have turned the financial world and the attached ‘real’ economy into charcoal.
The problem is, what should the safety net be?
For instance, I do think that many savers should lose their money. How can you be so stupid and give an institution like RBS, HBoS,
Barclays, or similar a credit (which is what people usually call ‘savings’)? Let them lose some, say, 75%. But then, maybe this too much. So, say, let them lose everything above 30,000? And what would you do to make sure there is credit? I think maybe the government would have to lend to businesses directly.
There is no solution for this problem. Something has to go down. One has to decide what thing.
The thing governments all over the world have now chosen to let go down is the one that won’t fight or protest, i.e. the kids (future generations) and the currency (most people are too stupid to realize what’s going on). Good stuff!
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nah nah nah nah nah… banks shmanks why does government TAX us and draw CREDIT on us… ietahr its not ‘almost leagal’ or entirely unfair
i need computers with 3 buttons sorry
Elaine, people will make babies anywhere, so long as there is hope for a better life. That low birth rate is due to all those Japanese (and Italians and Germans) of the feminine persuasion saying NO!
Correct, except girls have babies mostly when men want to support them with a home, etc. After all, Muslim women have many babies, for example.
The United Steel workers were the same way as the UAW was with the patriotism line during the Viet Nam war. Steel workers got draft deferrments because they were in a vital industry. And like the UAW today the steel workers are at near extinction numbers. They don’t call it the rust belt for nothing. I really wonder if any of these guys look back and think maybe they should have done things differently. Labor Unions HAVE done a tremendous amount of good, such as the 40 hour work week. They failed to counter their negative opinion numbers among non-union workers. Union members should have tried to rally workers to the union cause more than they did, but union members wanted to keep their own paychecks flying high. This left the battlefield open and organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce filled the void.
We keep pointing to the push from the Unions but forget about the pull where non-US governments subsidised their steel and auto industries because they are strategic industries, try industrialising without them.
Cognitis:
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Japanese watched the British Empire and other Europeans swallow up smaller nations all over the world. They feared being dominated like other nations, and much to their credit, they sent delegations throughout the industrialized world to learn about industrialization, mainly so they could become an industrial power in order to resist colonization.
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Once Japan accumulated wealth and industry, it attempted to expand and dominate other peoples…and was successful until 1945…all good things must eventually end. So, it can be argued from an outside (soto) perspective that Japan attempted to dominate others because it has traditionally feared being dominated by others, and it is probably correct in its assumption. This might be said to be true today because, by dominating US markets, it is throwing off US domination dating to WWII. So, Elaine was right. We in the US have no trade allies. We have trade competitors, and Japan is one of our fiercest competing trading partners.
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It is the way Japanese went about early industrialization that disgusts me, and if Elaine is right in this article, their leaders still have the same arrogant mindset by keeping their workers in perpetual depression. Building great wealth and success on human misery and suffering is no great honor. Building the old South on the backs of slaves was no great honor either and it led to our (Southern) defeat, and becoming a third world area.
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Today Japanese industrialists come here to the Old South to can get cheap, non-union (third world) labor…and they pay poorly…and then their managers whine about US Southerners being fat and lazy….Well, you get what you pay for. If they don’t like it, let them take their Toyota shit and go back to Japan and buy some farm girls to build their cars. No, they want cheap Southern labor so the US will allow imports, but GM, Ford and Chrysler have to pay more for Union labor…So dirty US politicians and Japan are also partially at fault for American car makers being uncompetitive. But, Hey, its competition.
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Now, Cognitis since you seem to have an (uchi)understanding of Japan, do you know what a phantasm is? It is when a nation creates a historical storyline that leads to desirable impressions of itself… All nations use phony phantasms to rewrite history. Japan is particularly adept at doing this. The Confucian obligation system came from China as did Buddhism. Only Shinto and the Samauri system which is really much like Medieval feudal Europe is Japanese
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Do you not agree that Japanese males traditionally dominate Japanese women, except in the home. This apparently is why early Meiji industrialists bought and used unwanted females as disposable factory labor. And what they did was a nasty process by anyone’s standards just as slavery was a nasty process in the old South.
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Oh! Cognitis. My teacher for two masters courses about the Japanese Meiji period previously taught at the University of Yokohama. I don’t think she was Jewish.
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You might think differently, but brutalizing people and winning wars does not necessarily show the true worth of a people in my view. The US is discovering this unpleasant surprise right now. So too is Japan as it’s carry trade collapses.
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Perhaps we need to rethink our value systems to some extent.
Yes that’s very true that the US allowed the market to be flooded with cheap, subsidized imports. Try buying a “Made in the USA” tool from the hardware store. It can be done, but it isn’t easy. The ruling elites have made the destruction of organized Labor a top priority from early on. This is why it is SOOOO puzzling to me that media outlets like Fox Propaganda and talk radio can fool so many people. Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity et al., they preach corporate welfarism. It doesn’t seem to affect viewers of these propagandists that the policies being promoted are PROVEN failures. If you are NOT a millionaire, you have NO logical reason to be a Republican.
David:
Thanks for responding. The Japanese along with all others saw the British Crown acquiring trading rights; they estimated steam engines to be effective and started making them along with everyone else, steam engines that had built by both the Greeks and Chinese centuries before; your need to discern between Japan and other “European” powers demonstrates your vulgar racism, a racism injected into you by those so-called elites;I see no need at all to discern between Japan in 1900 and any other nation contending for rights at that time.
Your portrayal of Japanese women is both inept and perverse. What could possibly be your reason in discerning between male and female Japanese workers? In any case, Japanese women necessarily are more gentle than , say, German or Celt women: Japanese women haven’t been slaughtered and gang-raped for centuries; try reading documents from dem Dreissigjaehrigen Krieg and remember what Swedes and Habsburgs did to Bauer females; rent a copy of “Rob Roy” and remember what Normans did to Celt women; since the most intense experiences create consuetudes or mores of a tribe–including male-female relations–Japanese women do differ greatly from Celt or German women; this continuous raping and slaughter necessarily made those women despise their men, leading to their rather shrill insistence on “equal rights”: slaves demand rights, while masters have no need to in shrill way demand such rights. No doubt Japanese women or men suffer far lower rates of depression than Celts or Germans, and Japanese also no doubt suffer far lower rates of homosexuality and other perversions than Celts or Germans; compare HIV or AIDS rates of Tokyo with those of any US or European city should you have any doubt. In closing, a tribes past experiences make the culture; winners win, and losers lose.
If you use (please forgive me) the end point of suicide, then the Japanese suffer greater rates of depression than the Anglo and Saxon cultures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
(Holy Cow! This list looks like a recommendation for Islam.)
“American Axle strikers in Detroit determined to halt wage-cutting”…
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http://tinyurl.com/apk8gl
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“Anger in Detroit over UAW sellout at American Axle”…
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http://tinyurl.com/cddznl
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“In recent weeks United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger has been an object of media affection for his role in forcing through historic concessions in 2007 with the Detroit Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler LLC”…
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http://tinyurl.com/2xgj5y
Of course the Japanese suffer more from depression than your average Westerner
Warring Period – Gang rape is encouraged
Tokugawa Shogunate Period – Peasants brutally suppressed
Meiji Period – Peasants brutally taxed to make money for the war.
World War 2 and after – Japan plays ugly girl to US fratboy
Now – as Elaine eloquently put it, an inflation regime that brutally suppresses worker’s purchasing power
Cognitis:
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If you are right, and what a people have been is what they are worth and what they will become, then, we are seeing a repeat of what happened during the Meiji period in Japan…using near slave labor (both male and female now) to produce products that can be exported to foreigners to bring excessive wealth to already wealthy Japanese industrialists. And if these Japanese men (how many Japanese women run Japanese conglomerates?)are causing poverty throughout working Japan, how can you claim that historically Japanese men treat their women or women of other nations so kindly (talk about pillaging and rape!).
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Now, as far as our European women are concerned, centuries of Roman rule and Europeans infighting including pillaging and rape was just as wrong as what occurred in Japan’s relations to women. I’m not setting Japan apart except by the fact that they seem to have a lot of trouble acknowledging that what they did was wrong, and in having any intent of changing their ways…no backing up on anything, except in closed sessions with only Japanese (men) present.
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On the other hand, we people of European descent, do sometimes attempt to acknowledge our errors and, if forced to do so, change our ways (witness the equal rights movement, and civil rights movement). Of course some Japanese might view this as a sign of weakness, to be taken advantage of.
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However, I must admit that we in the US are not doing very much good at changing our economic ways right now. I sure hope, for the sake of its working people, Japan is making some changes right now. And for the sake of US citizens, I hope the US will change its economic policies soon and will not keep forcing its working classes into poverty by copying Japanese enforced depression methods.
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When Japan initially looked out upon the world, it discovered that the world was a fearful place and it wanted to keep the world out, as most sane people would like to do. However, necessarily, it had to interact with the world or die just as all people have to do. However, it determined that any interaction would be as limited as possible…and everything Japanese would be preserved, and would be placed above any imported values. In other words, keep foreigners out and look at them with arrogant disdain (tribalism).
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Cognitis, you keep calling me a racist, but, trust me, you do not want me to get going about blatant Japanese racism (they have a fancy word for it, homogeneity, and they actually do computerized genealogy searches to keep “undesirables” out of their race). Then, we will also talk about Russia, Korea, China, the Hinan, guest workers, comfort girls and how Japanese armies advanced against Chinese armies, and several other interesting things. And I repeat, there have never been apologies for institutionalized Japanese racism. Trust me, no nation has immunity from racism. We here in the US do attempt to deal with it somewhat as time passes. We have to. We are made up of many races and ethnic groups like India. Japanese like to preserve it and treasure it so, I ask, are you complimenting me when you call me a racist? (I don’t really think so…I’m just being mean. Please forgive me.)
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Cognitis, I thank you kindly for your challenge and arguments. These have given me new insights into what kind of future we Americans might endure if we roll over and allow ourselves to be dominated by foreign nations, including Japan. Perhaps US leaders should enjoy a debate such as ours, and they would learn a few things, and would perhaps work a lot harder to avoid foreign domination.
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Love ya man.
Interestingly at least one style of popular Karate styke (Kyokoshin) is introducing weapons training.
Karate which has its origins in Okinowa and is strongly influenced
by chinese Kung Fu was developed by the Okinawans who were not allowed bto bare arms. Originally the fighting involved hand to hand combat and combat with farm tools. Tools included grain threshers (num chucks) and staff.
The use of weapons disappeared but now they’re back.
I know they’re back because I do this type of Karate. I’m wandering if this is part of a grass roots attempt at helping people to protect themselves in Japan or to fight back against the tyranny of the LDP.
Maybe I’m reading to much into this. Kyokushin is regarded as one of the strongest Karates. It is a Full Contact bare knuckle martial art. I actually don’t think hand to hand combat would be particularly effective against riot police as they normally ware armour.
hark the dawn
Man that’s just how I feel. Exactly the ffing and swearing.
Thats how I became so disillusioned about marxism and left wing politics. To me unions and the labour party were just a working class ‘land grab’
Middle class hippy people like my mother marched and protested and tried to make a better world for everyone. They made big sacrifices so they wouldn’t live with the hypocracy of their parents. And all they ever got was scorn those guys.
But the other side of the story is that the hippies I think subverted the Labour party from being a pro worker party to a cultural marxist party (ie multi-cultural, more relaxed imigration etc etc). These two stances are completely at cross puposes really.
But yeah a lot of those union guys were real arse holes.
We all need to unite whatever our backgrounds. We can all benefit if we can increase the real wealth of our nations. The real wealth being the items we produce not peices of paper or binary digits which seem to be a colletive proxy for wealth. And this can only be done with proper respect to risk by both lenders and borrowers otherwise it becomes a process of speculation. For every bit of money that gets created must reflect an increase in material wealth right or sevices!!
How strange that we have this industry that could easily clothe and provide transport for every one! Ironicaly its their efficieny that takes the means of production out of more peoples hands
I sometimes wander if workers should buy shares in robots which then do the work for them in factories!!.
“GM is buying out as many union workers as possible and replacing them with cheap labor.”
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As I recall pointing out previously… it’s not a “wage” issue: the hourly pay isn’t much different at non-union vs. union auto plants. It’s the retirement benefits – specifically, the medical benefits – paid to people who can retire at a much earlier age than that are breaking GM. In the early 90s a GM UAW worker could retire at 53 after 10 years of service. Those people are still on the books, and will be for 20-25 more years unless something changes.
That is, in a word, nuts.
Given a goose laying golden eggs, a union will cheerfully kill it, part it out, cook it, and eat it for dinner.
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And then ask, “What the hell happened to all them golden eggs?!”
Most medieval weapons, aside from the sword and the bow and arrow, evolved from farm tools. For example, the Viking axes where for wood-work, not war, originally.
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Power grows out of both the barrel of the gun and ideology. Bin Laden understood military/economic jujitsu and used it artfully against the US.
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The Japanese oppressed females totally after the fall of the Heian dynasty. The pre-warlord Japanese cultural values were very feminine. Like ancient Crete, where women lived in cultural glory, these places fell to the sword and fire and were annihilated by brute force and the women lost all civil rights.
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The elevation of the feminine side is a sign of civilization. Chinese women had more power and civil rights before the Mongolian invasions, for example. A sure sign of maturity of any empire is an increase in civil rights for women.
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The Japanese are very much like the Jews in Israel: they want to have total domination and are filled with a sense of superiority that strangles all other considerations and in the end, kills their culture. Westerners, used to the elaborations of ‘modern’ styles in Europe, during the 19th century with all its ornate designs and tons and tons of things covering every possible surface, was intrigued by the ‘simplicity’ of Japan. Japan’s simplicity was due entirely to the destruction of wealth by the Samurai who slammed the door shut on intercourse with China and Korea hundreds of years earlier.
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Eventually, houses were emptied out of nearly everything except a very few items. Even the Samurai couldn’t have much. It was a very spartan esthetic. Note that the Japanese, when allowed to do this, will clutter up everything just as much as Chinese do, when unleashed from poverty.
Interestingly, (I hope!), Vincent van Gogh was inspired by the brightly coloured and cheap Japanese prints which enjoyed great popularity in Europe in the 1880`s. I remember that his “Waterlilies” painting was sold for the stupendous price of ca. 100 million dollars in the 1990`s (I can`t remember the exact year),to a Japanese buyer..probably an owner of Toyota, or some other corporation. That was the first art auction that “really hit the jackpot”. Mind you, it`s a fxxxing good painting!
“Cognitis” WTF is with you ? Are you the reincarnation of Il Duce ?
Do you want to restore the glories of the Trojan Empire? Its already
been done for you in WA DC, dont you know ? Dont you know it was Celtic
monks that kept your manuscripts alive after your glorious empire
overexpanded itself ?
And your handle itself, “cognitis”.
From looking at your writings, I dont see much use of the Cognitive
area of the brain. All I can see is the Reptilian Cortex
Hard said:
J.Edgar Hoover loved the mob. He had a righteous paranoia of the wicked
commies, and the Mob were to be his reserve troops to fight “communism” in the unions.
This is the main reason why he denied the mob so vehemently for so many years. Of course the secondary reason were the glossy 8X5 photos of Edgar and Clyde doing the wild thing.
“the mob”….ah, there you go. always, good things will be subverted it seems…. and perverted. clyde? barrow???
“it’s not a “wage” issue: the hourly pay isn’t much different at non-union vs. union auto plants. It’s the retirement benefits…”/// Exactly. Don’t think GM (and the other car co.’s) don’t realize this. How do/did they attack this issue of overpaying for benefits? Well these guys are not math or financial geniuses, that much should be obvious, but they DO know this: If the worker–to–retiree ratio goes down enough, as it in fact has, the system can not support itself. And voila! The car companies have solved their funding problem. And best of all: management can say that market forces caused this problem, not any vindictiveness on the part of management. I guess we are supposed to forget that GM (and the others) wouldn’t, couldn’t didn’t compete with the Japanese. Instead US auot execs whine about their labor costs, whine about CAFE standards,whine about fuel emission standards. Then they bitch about OSHA for good measure.
Openly….”Clyde” is not the Clyde Barrow. It is Clyde Tollefson the #2 man in
charge of the Eff Bee Eye. And also the #1 Man for J.Edgar. Talk about
a conspiracy. Back when Public TV actually had its testicles yet, a
show was done about the privates of J.Edgar. A heck of a lot of NY Socialites knew about his proclivities but kept quiet about it for years.
J.Edgar was a staple at a lot of parties. He loved Black Chiffon dresses
and his party “name” was Mary. HAHAHAHAHAHA! So feller union members, we
have a cross dressing thug to blame in part for our demise. You cant make
this kind of stuff up. Reality has surpassed “fiction”.
“Most medieval weapons, aside from the sword and the bow and arrow, evolved from farm tools. For example, the Viking axes where for wood-work, not war, originally.”
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Other than swords and the bow and arrow, what’s left in the medieval armory? Armor, lances, shields, catapults, trebuchets, mangonels, siege-towers… I have difficulty imagining which farm tools those evolved from.
I’ve never been very favorably inclined toward unions, for one simple reason: Why should the compensation and working conditions of workers be dependent upon them being lucky enough to belong to a union? Shouldn’t ALL workers have a reasonable expectation of having safe and human working conditions, and of receiving fair and reasonable compensation for their work?
The whole idea of unions, it seems to me, is to promise members that they will get a better deal than the poor schmucks that are not unionized. Sorry, but I don’t see anything particulary noble about that. Not only does it not occupy the moral high ground, it is also inherently unsustainable. IMHO, it is no accident that it is the unionized industries that have experienced the biggest layoffs, downsizings, and offshorings.
It is not so much that I am anti-union, but rather than I am in favor of something better. First, I think that workers – ALL workers – need to be looking to government rather than to unions as the best way to assure that ALL workers are guaranteed a safe and humane workplace, and to assure that ALL workers are compensated fairly. OSHA has been a good start, but more probably has to be done. Some people think that the government shouldn’t be poking its nose into the way that they run their business. I say that if they are mistreating their workers, then the government damn well should be poking its nose into their business, and forcing them to change their way. I don’t give a damn if that isn’t “the American way”, it is the right thing to do and should be done. As for compensation, instead of regulating pay packages and minimum wages, we should simply apply a relatively high income tax rate on the people getting high pay packages, and a negative income tax for people at the bottom. I am not saying that everyone should end up with absolutely equal after-tax income, but the differential needs to be cut substantially. At my employer, the person at the top makes about three times what the people at the bottom make, and that seems to me to be about right. The idea that the people at the top of any organization should get thousands of times what the people at the bottom make is so grotesque and obsenely evil that I can’t imagine why we continue to tolerate it.
I would also create some government service program like the Civilian Conservation Corps, and operate it as an employer of last resort. There are plenty of useful things in this country that people could be put to work doing, and no one should have to fear being out of work and destitute. If we had such a program, everyone would know that they had somewhere to go where they could earn their food, shelter, clothing, and medical care through decent working conditions. The flip side of this is that no employer would dare treat their employees like crap or pay them too little, or they would quickly find themselves with no employees.
The other thing I would do is to encourage the cooperative form of business organization rather than corporations. The thing with cooperatives is: the owners are also the customers. With corporations, there is a disconnect, the customers are not owners, they are powerless to do anything, so the treatment and compensation of the workers is of no concern to them. It is a different matter with co-ops, the owners are also customers and must interact with THEIR employees face to face. The emphasis is not on making as high a profit as possible, but of simply operating the co-op in a manner that assures that good value is delivered to the patrons for the long haul; there is thus less incentive to try to exploit workers for short-term gain. For many co-ops, patrons also have the option or expectation of working part time, so they become not only owners and customers but also workers. My impression is that co-ops of all types are generally reasonably good places to work.
How would I encourage a shift from corporations to co-ops? Simple, just eliminate the limited liability protection that corporate shareholders enjoy. It is limited liability that allows shareholders to pay so little attention to who is put in charge or how their corporations are run. This is why most corporations today are run by people that make the old time pirates look good in comparison, and why the corporations are destroying the economy and the country. If shareholders were held responsible for their proportionate share of any civil or criminal liabilities incurred through the wrong doings of their corporations, I would bet that very quickly everyone would want to unload their stocks, and that the value of those stocks would quickly drop to zero. Only cooperatives would be economically viable.
The earliest catapult type of weapons evolved from either the bow and arrow or ship systems. Shipping is another field that turned things with ships into weapons systems. Then there is the horse: first, it was food, then it was used to drag stuff around or turn wheels used to grind grain then drag wheels behind it via the chariot. This opened up long-distance warfare tremendously and the Plains Dwellers in Central Asia took off on a 4 thousand year series of conquests.
WNC observer, you sound like a commie. And they, too, have a very poor record of protecting workers. There is no easy, one-time solution. There is a constant struggle for power and dominance. Let down your guard and touche! You get nailed. So we have to always evolve and resolve to struggle for the future, over and over again. And this is good.
Communists believe in state socialism, which I detest. Governments are only good at providing public goods, the moment that you get them into the business of producing private goods, or toll goods, or common pool goods, you are bound to come to grief. The problem is, the notion that the corporations should be supreme and run everything has proven to be just as bad. I’m not so much a Communist or a Capitalist as an Outside-of-the-boxist!
🙂 Good one, there! ‘Out of boxist’. Next: the Boxer rebellion?
here is the thing about unions for me. old timers make about 3 times what people hired later to do the same jobs and the union is fine with that. hell, one factory in town pays the new hires since the 1980’s i think maybe 20% what the old timers make. i am definately pro union, but what kind of union does this. all for one or not at all sez i. and of course for everyone hired after the 1980’s, they get crap benefits too. and i found nothign wrong with “the commie” either hee hee. we think usa needs a real active commie party imho to keep the two big parties honest….jsut call it something else. call it huey long….no ron paul party….or dennis kuchinich party.
bah i already readit… i want to stir up busiess and if there were such a thing and less regulation and mroe free time i wouldnet need unions
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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-53565441845289277&q=nuclear+fision&total=185&start=10&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
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fuk the 70hr work week
Gary writes:
“Dont you know it was Celtic monks that kept your manuscripts alive after your glorious empire overexpanded itself ?”
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Quite right, Gary. When the Western Roman empire collapsed, Ireland became the most advanced country of Europe for a long time. It was the Irish monks who knew how to read and write better than on the continent and who kept the light of knowledge in the beginning of the Dark Ages. And they sent a lot of missionaries to civilize the barbarians on the continent.
“old timers make about 3 times what people hired later to do the same jobs”
Unions are about seniority. It doesn’t matter how well you do your job; the longer you hang on, the more you get paid.
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Which turns logic on its head. Younger, stronger guys can produce more, and if they’re starting families, they also have more need for income.
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But the old farts still rule, for some reason…
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A couple of decades back, when I was a younger man, I thought 50 would be an excellent mandatory retirement age. Get out of my way, Gramp. You’re breathing my air.
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The truly odd thing is that although I’ve aged a bit since then my opinion on that hasn’t changed a great deal.
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