No sooner than I publish my latest story about the economy than the NYT comes up with their own take on this matter which is utterly opposite mine: Sure Cure for Debt Problems Is Economic Growth – NYTimes.com written by this evidently evil woman who is praised to the skies by Jewish organizations that reward lunatics in the economic or media fields. Here is her bio, which is all about how this darling creepy gnomette grew up in Palm Beach, of all places:
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Catherine Rampell writes about economics for The New York Times, where she served as the founding editor of the Economix blog. Under her stewardship the blog was honored with an award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She has also received the Weidenbaum Center Award for Evidence-Based Journalism and is a Gerald Loeb Award finalist. A lifelong theater nerd, she regularly contributes to The Times’s arts coverage, too.Before joining The Times, Catherine wrote for the Washington Post editorial pages and financial section and for The Chronicle of Higher Education. She grew up in South Florida (the New York part) and graduated from Princeton.
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The NYT is the beating dark heart of lies about the economy. The entire staff, working for either foreigners or Zionists, work very hard at hiding the truth. Free trade is NEVER mentioned as a cause of our economic problems. The open borders are to be maintained at all costs. The recent mass murder in Norway has been dropped as a topic there because the killer openly talked about and admired Israel because they have closed borders and won’t let in lots of imports, for example. He was a nationalist minus socialism at least, the kind in Norway where ‘outsiders’ got socialism just like ‘the pure racial people’.
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This woman worked for the world’s foremost warmongering, right wing rag, the Washington Post. The coy part of her bio, ‘She grew up in South Florida (THE NY PART!) is actually Palm Beach’s Jewish community. Insiders reading this (I was Mrs. Levy for many, many years in NYC) know exactly what her bio means. Of course, her fellow tribal members reward her over and over again. There are many Jewish potential recipients she is competing with but her over the top misreading of the economy is the basis for maintaining the present, destructive system.
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It looks as if she and her buddies are truly concerned about our situation! Oy veh. But they are not! Not at all! They LIKE this system, they helped create it and are the richer thanks to it. The US military protects Israel via a mountain of debt and a million wars with nearly every Muslim community on earth at this point. Why change anything?
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…there is, in theory, a happy solution to our debt troubles. It’s called economic growth. No need to raise taxes or cut programs. Just get the economy growing the way it used to. Good luck with that. Growth is in short supply these days…But the structure of America’s federal spending is different now than it was in, say, the immediate postwar decades. Back then, growth helped to erase the debt. But remember that in the 1950s, the United States didn’t have Medicare. The population was younger, and Americans didn’t live as long…These doldrums won’t last forever, but many predict that economic growth to come will be somewhat slower than it was before the recession, for many of the same reasons that our debt is growing so quickly — the aging of the population, for instance.
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She goes on and on about how our aging population is causing this mess. She doesn’t blame the elderly for everything wrong. Just includes the words, ‘for instance’ rather than saying outright, they are the major cause. This is due to her knowing perfectly well, the ‘major cause’ here is our endless wars against half a billion Muslims and possible, a billion angry Chinese creditors, and free trade. She knows how to read charts and graphs, she is very, very well educated.
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So why can’t she read them? It is obvious to me: she doesn’t want to read them. She looks the other way. This way, she and her buddies at the WP and NYT can blame everyone but foreign trade for our problems. We have opened the flood gates to trade and in return, we lost our industrial base, our jobs and our wealth. But we got cheap cars and TV sets! What a deal. This is akin to Jack selling his mother’s cow for a handful of beans only these beans don’t grow a vine to a giant’s castle full of loot.
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Here is balloon graph showing US debt in relation to the rest of the major industrial nations. Note that Japan is off the scale here:
China has many social problems. Bullet trains crash, for example. We can’t crash bullet trains since we don’t have them. If we were in the horse and buggy era and we saw that the Chinese were using modern cars and dying in crashes, we might point out that we are superior. But we are falling behind in technology and industry and this is steepening, not getting better. Our industrial education centers like RPI where I used to work and teach, are hosting more and more Asians and fewer and fewer Americans. There is no jobs here for our own kids. I know of RPI graduates who invented or created things that had to move to Asia to work since the factories are there.
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Or they work for foreigners here in the US. This hollowing out of our system from within is all part of the trade deficit. Americans wait with bated breath for the economy to improve and bring in more jobs and these are not appearing for the simple reason of free trade. Yet, the clown who was hired by her own tribe to trill on and on about how our problems are caused by seniors living too long, for example, cannot talk about this obvious matter. Nope. Not a peep. Much less, rage and calls for changing Free Trade.
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Free trade is sucking us dry. In Japan, free trade with the US was fixed by the elites in two ways: they don’t pay nearly enough taxes themselves while they don’t let in US trade and thus, have great profits. Which is then used to build factories overseas. So there are fewer and fewer jobs in Japan while the elites made more and more money…IN CHINA. So the debt there grew and grew and this wasn’t due to anything unusual except for the most unusual thing on earth: zero interest rates!
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There has never been any time zero borrowing has happened for more than a few months in the past. Running this year after year for two generations is ridiculous. It has made things much, much worse. Since interest payments are nothing at all, the government never had to raise taxes on the rich exporters to pay for things. Now, Japan faces trillions in costs to do something about the tsunami, earthquakes and of course the overall horror of the ongoing and worsening nuclear power mess.
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Let’s pop off to merry England to see today’s headlines and how these are exactly the same ideology in the government there as in Japan and the US, namely, the solution to everything is to kill off the elderly and not tax the rich exporter/importer/banker gnomes: Danny Alexander: 50p tax rate cut would be in ‘cloud cuckoo land’ as the conservatives defend their paymasters who want to live high off the hog while hogging everything for themselves and Lamont backs calls to scrap “uncompetitive” 50p top tax rate as another scared conservative throws fuel on hot fires for see this: Video: Police and protesters clash in London during public sector strikes and there are the elderly who are running Pensions rallies across the UK.
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Who will win this fight? History tells us when the elites become too greedy, when minority religions get too rich, when powerful people are utterly detached from those they rule, when people see their homes, their pensions, their savings, everything vanishing and the rich getting richer, EVENTUALLY there is an eruption. In the US, hopes of winning the lottery or getting rich gambling in crooked casinos is slowly fading as people see no hope and starvation will eventually stop these people from even eating empty calories at McDonalds…then we will see it here, too.
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The ideology of cutting out the elderly and poor is gaining ground here in the US even as we bankroll social services in Israel. I suppose Ms. Rampell thinks that her grandparents can move to Jerusalem and get cared for there. I don’t know what goes through her head. Whatever it is, it is not sane. That is, this frontal attack on the elderly here in the US is going to have consequences. Namely, most young adults have grandparents. And parents like myself who have to take care of grandparents.
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This is a problem for us all: we will lose our own parents when all social services for the elderly are reduced more and more and more until they vanish. A la Russia after the Soviet system collapsed.
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The redemptive belief in the economic “recovery” that is to be orchestrated by the very same power elites who created the leveraged debt crisis – is the opiate of American consumers, who can no longer be called citizens of a participatory democracy, because they have lost the ability to think and discriminate between propaganda and reality.
Here is a 1994 Charlie Rose interview with James Goldsmith Counterpoint by Laura Tyson, Clinton’s chief economic advisor. What makes it important is that it reminds us in spades how those who are “prescient” are never listened to while those who are aligned with and dependent upon economic interests are. Tyson, although history has completely proved her wrong, is still sought after as an esteemed expert. Goldsmith, now deceased, was 100% correct. He demonstrates a tremendous amount of wisdom starting around the 39 minute mark, if you want to ignore the beginning. We have the exact same situation today. The “esteemed experts” fronting for business interests (and that includes congress) get all the air time whereas the iconoclasts who actually understand what’s happening are ignored as outliers.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5064665078176641728
I don’t know which is more amazing: the constant belief in an “economic recovery” or its constant repetition by the media despite it being a complete lie.
How many times can a lie be repeated before people stop believing it? Do we have to go through what Germany went through before we wake up? Does everything have to be burned to the ground before Americans realize that it was all just a big lie?
Good post pointing out the lies and self-serving propaganda spewed out as sound fiscal policy by false and dangerous pundits. Of a piece with our warmongering President’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. Or economists calling this period a “recovery” when unemployment is sharply on the rise and millions, in one stage or another of foreclosure and paying nothing on the monthly mortgage, have yet to hit the streets and the homeless shelters. We live in truly Orwellian times.
I’ve been listening to C-Span all day as Congress debates decades of stolen and misspent resources under the false rubric of “solving the budget crisis.” We are somehow supposed to believe that draconian, immediate “entitlement cuts” will restore a crippled economy, or that “jobs” –never mind what kind or who will offer them — will restore “growth.” The causes of no growth/no jobs are never discussed. Therefore, the problems will not be resolved.
Deficit reduction does not address misallocated resources within a fatally flawed system.Those promoting the Cult of Cuts promise “growth” but this is all based on unsustainably-priced Resource and Labor inputs. We cannot grow our way out of this with a system built on $20/barrel oil, unchecked, out-of-control finance and military sectors, and infinitely falling prices for skilled labor. Oil prices will never return to the glory days; military quagmires lead to bankruptcy. Beggaring the work force does not produce a robust economy — or a contented population.
Elaine is right, the media are complicit — not only in failing to call bullshit on the deliberate misinformation being bruited about these days, but in actively promoting and rewarding pundits who proffer a toxic prescription for the nation.
I’ve been reading more and more articles over at Russia Times, where they seem to pull no punches with respect to how they view us. The China Daily site is boring and uninteresting compared to RT. One article there claims that our politicians are as deluded as Hitler was during the final hours in his bunker. How’s that for some objective insight not controlled by Murdoch?
I did not know that last Thursday was “pizza day” in Congress. Thank you Russia Times! We did not get to see our politicians wandering around holding slices of pizza while they casually said “no” to saving Social Security.
The troops will NOT get paid. It is false promise made after the number one question they all had was “will we get paid”? SS recipients will also not get paid despite millions of calls made by the elderly to their senators. They forgot to leave manila envelopes stuffed with cash, which is hard to do by phone. That is what lobbyists do.
I think it is pretty clear that something bad has happened for these idiots to argue right up to the edge of the cliff. Or, as RT claims, they could truly be delusional at this point and simply hear only their own voices.
@ Elaine, DeVaul: Likely, we will go through nightmare that will be a cross between pre-New Deal U.S., Nazi Germany and Rwanda. All the while not being able to escape the never ending eye, ear and brain pollution of insane end-times born-again Christianity.
Maybe all this is why the Jews call us the gullible goyim?
FDR and the Jews killed Huey P. Long.
America deserves its fate.
Rwanda.
To get the real “scoop” on Rwanda and Paul Kagame’s role in the Tutsi/Hutu genocide, checkout Wayne Madsen’s, Genocide and Covert Opeartions In Africa, 1993-1999.
According to Madsen and other on -site investigators, Paul Kagame’s troops “took out” the plane carrying the Presidents of Burundi and Rwanda.
US covert operatives provided the intelligence, logistics, satellite imagery and the SAM-5 missles that brought down the aircraft. The SAM-5s came from Iraq after the US 1991 terror bombing of Baghdad.
Bill Gates and Paul Kagame are the best of friends. Or is the precious colatan that Gates covets –and Kagame delivers– in the DRC?
http://www.inshuti.org/mckinn11.htm
A lawsuit filed in Oklahoma against Kagame and his assassins describe the “takedown” missle as a SAM-16 type obtained from Museveni’s Uganda.
Both Uganda’s Museveni and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame were “trained” in covert operations at the US Army’s Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri.
http://rwandinfo.com/eng/lawsuit-in-oklahoma-us-district-court-against-rwandan-president-paul-kagame-et-al-full-document/
800px-Kagame_and_Wolfowitz
http://tinyurl.com/3eavn5f
That’s coltan, the precious metal ore used in cell phones.
for the dopes who want a “deal:”, you do understand that any deal with this congress -both sides-is going to involve spending and no increased revenue?
be careful what you wish for.
Interesting perspective from The Nation on how the economic system, whose flaws are now obvious to all, could collapse — and it ain’t necessarily coming from our elected Congressional clowns.
Instead, sudden systemic collapse could come from a precarious industrial supply chain that keeps us in everything from medicine to food to car parts and iPhone batteries. In 2004, for instance, the US suddenly lost half its flu vaccine supply when England closed a single factory. One researcher who has been studying supply chain collapses for over a decade, points to Japan’s earthquake and tsunami as the trigger behind the recent worldwide economic slowdown … the loss of a single factory that made microcontroller chips for cars triggered a series of synchronized industrial shocks affecting jobs, production and demand in every industrialized economy.
Our global corporate system now concentrates manufacturing capabilities in very few hands. So when one part of the system experiences a shock, it affects the whole. Fallbacks and redundancies have been eliminated in the name of Just-In-Time efficiency and cost control, small suppliers have been starved out by Chinese state-subsidized dumping, and now there are no safeguards.
China now controls 100 percent of the national supply of ascorbic acid, a basic food preservative. State-subsidized dumping practices put rare earth mines outside of China out of business in the ’90’s, so now China monopolizes rare earth minerals too, which go into electronics, batteries and weaponry. Cancer researchers are already warning that we are experiencing severe shortages of generic yet critical cancer drugs, because there’s no incentive for corporations to make them — the drugs are off patent, so high profits are off the table,
US corporate leaders now see making things as a cost of doing business, one best left to others willing to use slave labor, pollute the air, irradiate the water and poison the food chain. The more corporate America seeks to push production risk off the balance sheet onto an increasingly fragile global supply chain, the more global multinationals cripple the state so there is no authority that can constrain industry’s worst impulses, the more likely we will see a truly devastating Lehman-style industrial supply shock.
Much of the production for critical products and services that make our economy run is constructed by a domino set-up of suppliers in unstable regions, manned by increasingly restive slave laborers — a supply chain that presents a veneer of efficiency but over which we actually have very little control. One accident or political problem in any number of countries may suddenly deny us food, medicine or critical machinery.
We need to get past K Street politics to recognize that free trade — with manipulated currencies, one-way deals extracting critical technology and knowhow from the country, relaxed antitrust rules and no tarriffs, all topped off with a dishonest system that does not count the true costs of key inputs (such as inflation, or running endless wars to secure a dwindling oil supply) — all these dishonesties are bankrupting the nation,
If we can’t acknowledge and measure the true situation properly, we won’t be able to fix the real problems. And one day, that failure will be fatal. And the wealthy, with their dependency on high-tech toys and their lack of community connection, may be the most vulnerable of all.
All that rare earth ore is still in the ground in those closed mines. When the price for the stuff is high enough to cover the costs of doing business in the USA, the mines will be re-opened. Until then, the Chinese exports of rare earths continue to subsidize the US consumer; likewise their machine tools, and fasteners and all the other stuff with which they subsidize the American consumer’s consumption based lifestyles.
So the question always comes to this: How much extra do you wish to pay for the “made in America” logo on an item. The world was willing to pay that premium for a very few years after the end of WWII. But the quality of “Made in USA” goods fell and the quality of German and Japanese and Chinese and Russian good improved steadily. It is the democratic way, money follows quality and price. Whoever supplies the highest quality at the lowest price wins. For those of you with children or grandchildren, a superb birthday/christmas present for them is Rosetta Stone Mandarin lessons.
Except many countries embracing free trade are not. That is, they embrace ONE WAY trade! So, they may import necessary commodities…but NEVER wish to import much in the way of manufactured goods.
Why is this?
Well, manufacturing is a value-added activity whereby the value of human labor is introduced and therefore MULTIPLIES! This is where capitalism comes in: there is more ‘capital value’ in value-added manufacturing systems.
So, the US mines ‘rare earth’ materials and then SHIPS IT TO CHINA, we get ZERO ‘added value’ that manufacturing gives us. So the Chinese collect the profits from this while we reduce ourselves to a third world supply station for Chinese manufacturing.
THIS is the problem and to protect us from this, we used to use tariffs and barriers to cheap foreign labor. So the value added would remain in the US, not move overseas. This is why our nation is going bankrupt. The silly wars against Muslims and threats against China is merely icing on our red ink cake.
In Germany, for many years, Germans bought German cars. They made expensive German cars and cheap German cars. They did not import American cars. Ditto, Japan. Both then turned around and ravaged our domestic car markets by exporting their cars here while buying nearly no US cars in return. Cheap or expensive: they didn’t want them or let them in.
So we let literally several MILLION foreign cars into America while exporting around zero cars. This is what is killing us. Cheap labor isn’t the only thing, the German auto workers are unionized and not cheap at all.
@EMS:
Actually, the US rare earth mines are not being worked. The rare earths we import are mined in Bolivia and China, processed in China, used in manufacturing in china and imported as magnets or screen phosphors or light flints in finished goods.
As for value added to labour by manufacturing, the government of the USA decided about the time of the coal nationalization attempt of 1946 that having manufacturing in the USA was not a good thing because it encouraged unions and helped raise people out of governmental bondage.
So the government subsidized the rebuilding of Japan and Germany while simultaneously trying to sabotage any development in the USSR and the PRC. They succeeded in the subsidy beyond their fondest wishes. The sabotage appeared to work too — until the Russians and the Chinese went crony capitalist and showed themselves to be better at it than the USA.
Free trade is what individual people and individual communities do, managed trade is what statists desire. In some other thread, a commenter says in passing that poor people pay cash. He is wrong, poor people use food stamps, welfare debit cards and other non cash forms of government bondage, folks with means and the desire for a good deal, pay cash or they barter. When you barter you leave nothing for the government to steal.
Someones wanted to buy those Beamers and Benzs instead of Caddys and Connies and Imperials and DeSotos and Packards. Citizens wanted those VW bugs and buses instead of Valiants and Darts and Larks and other marques the American firms offered. But I will grant you that it would have been fitting if all Americans had had to buy Pintos because your lovely tarrifs made good cars to expensive to import.
As for the Germans not buying any American cars, why would they? The American car makers made nothing that Germans wanted at any price.
@Dupree: For your pleasure, it appears that large deposits of coltan ore have been found in Venezuela. That’s good for the Venezuelans, but—- the ores are located close to the border with Columbia so exp[ect some “domestic rebellion” in western Venezuela along the same lines as the “domestic rebellion” in Libya.
Columbia has claimed to have found significant deposits on its side of the border. This is starting to sound like Iraq-Kuwait redux. Kuwaiti’s slant drilled into Iraqi oil fields for years and got away with it.
Great news for Hugo. Let’s hope he survives the cancer cure.
http://tinyurl.com/3fjbue9
Yes, CK, the rare earth ore is still in the ground, but it takes years to fire up an abandoned mine. When an industry closes down, a lot of accumulated knowledge is dissipated as well. This knowhow is a key asset — it’s what a patent lawyer might call ‘trade secrets’ and what good businesspeople understandd can deliver the keys to the kingdom of competitive advantage. Of course, an economist is at a loss to measure this input correctly. They usually leave it out of their equations altogether, and make simplistic assumptions about “money follows quality” or some such bullshit.
The costs of re-building an abandoned industry are enormous. You can’t just snap your fingers and fire things up again, as anyone who has actually launched or built a business knows. We are living in the real world here, not the world of snap ideas, hardline ideologies and ungrounded concepts.
You said, “free trade is what individuals do, managed trade is what statists desire.” What do you think the Chinese are? — they are statists par excellence, and they have “managed” trade to their own advantage. Because collective action will always outmatch individidual idiots and “free traders” willing to cut one-way deals that line their own pockets at the expense of entire industries and critical national interests. So when the sociopaths are in charge, we all lose. Every man for himself doesn’t cut it when survival is at stake.
Rare earths, a case in point here, aren’t all that rare, they are quite liberally distributed around the globe. Mining them is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Hard for private enterprises to compete with collectivist state-controlled industries bent — for strategic purposes — on putting all competitors out of business whatever the cost.
This is not capitalism, it’s managed trade for purposes of economic warfare. And the communists are winning it.
Word is that restored, cherried-out U.S. cars that nobody’d want to buy in the first place are going for big bucks.
I find the ascorbic acid stuation described hard to believe. ADM tried manufacturing in China several years ago, and were not (initially at least) successful. The best process is one tweaked by Genencor, owned by Danisco, soon to be DuPont; a Genentech process spun off when Hoffman-LaRoche bought into Genentech. If the Chinese do, in fact, control all ascorbic acid, it’s through dumping, because nobody can beat Genencor’s costs. And the starting material is corn sugar.
And Chinese nails aren’t worth a shit.
@Larry: Yup them tricked out pintos be flying off the used car lots.
@Claire V: Yup the knowledge of how to go down in a hole and swing a pick, or how to operate a dragline is not hard to replace. Unlike a manufacturing plant which can indeed have the machinery sold off, the plant repurposed and the employeess spread to the wind, a mine is there whether it is working or just running the pumps to keep the water out. When it become profitable to reopen the Nevada Rare Earth mines, the owners will re-open probably within 100 days. Probably use mexican miners and american operating engineers.
It is never all that hard to compete against the collectivized, it is when the collectivization is removed that things get interesting for the comfortable. It is hard to compete against folks that are more efficient than you, more motivated than you, with newer plant and equipment than you, with more research than you and a newer infrastructure than you. Free trade is stressful and difficult and I fully appreciate that most “capitalists” would rather use force to prevent it from gaining a toe hold. I don’t see why the USA should stop at the national border however, internal tariffs against Georgia Peaches and Washington State Cherries and all car brands made in any state of the old confederacy sound like a fine place to start,
Managed trade is indeed what statists like EMS and the Chinese and IBM and General Motors and the US sugar trust all want and all have.
“This is starting to sound like Iraq-Kuwait redux. Kuwaiti’s slant drilled into Iraqi oil fields for years and got away with it.”CK
Maybe Obama will draw April Glaspie out of retirement–she faded from the scene after the NYT published her role in setting up Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz for the Mother of All Whack Jobs” by the Bush crime family–and send her as an envoy to mediate a border dispute between Colombia and Venezuela should it arise.
April Glaspie has yet to write her memoirs and Tariq Aziz has been “Rudolph Hessed” away;we’ll never know what else transpired between Glaspie, Aziz and the Bush crime family.
I love my country but I hate my government~James A. Traficant
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE5/april.html
@CK “Yup the knowledge of how to go down in a hole and swing a pick, or how to operate a dragline is not hard to replace. Unlike a manufacturing plant which can indeed have the machinery sold off, the plant repurposed and the employeess spread to the wind, a mine is there whether it is working or just running the pumps to keep the water out.”
CK holds quaintly simplistic ideas of these operations, all mixed in with a nihilistic ideology.
Rare earth mining requires processing lots of rock, and sophisticated technology and knowhow is needed to separate the rare earths from thorium, a radioactive element that requires special processing and cleanup. Doing this cost-efficiently is quite a trick — it’s a little more than swinging a pick in a hole.
[This just in: TEPCO just announced a job opening for CK in its Ministry of Toxic Spin Department].
Good news in the rare earth mining front: the California operation that was forced to close several years ago is firing up again, over worldwide concerns about China’s stranglehold monopoly of these materials. The danger of an overly-concentrated supply chain node was made manifest when China cut off rare earth shipments to Japan after a few stray fishing boats sparked an international kerfluffle.
Oh I agree that the separation and processing of the ore from any mine is a bit more of an applied engineering issue. But getting the ore out is still the same old process, bigger machines in some places, more computer buttons to push but basically the same. You conflate extraction which is what a mine does and refining which for rare earths is what a refinery does. Some things are simply explained. But I am glad to see you make my point for me re that california mine. Re-opened because they can make a profit. Funny thing that, monopolies are to economics what censorship is to the internet; a thing that capitalists find an efficient way around. ( I know, simplistic again )
Re toxic spin; a non-sequitur, unrelated to the topic at hand. I have not said anything about TEPCO, it is a government granted and enforced monopoly, why did you expect it to perform any way other than it has? Ineptitude and lying, threats and stealing; that is government work. I don’t think TEPCO would find me a comfortable fit into their ethos. If you haven’t quite understood it yet, I don’t think highly of governments or the parasites that use government power to stifle the economy. Crony capitalism is inevitable in a democracy. I don’t think all that highly of democracy either.
Re Nihilist ideology: Nihilism is a school of philosophy not of political science or ecomonics. If that is a label you are comfortable applying to me, that is your lookout not mine. Although my limited reading doesn’t show much in the way of coherent ideology associated with nihilism.
@DuPree: HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT!!! April was a hero.( snark off ) She conned a no longer useful asset of the USA into slapping around another antsy ally for a while and then the asset was bitch slapped. Noreiga and Saddam. These two names should be enough of a reminder to any nation thinking that the USA is an honourable or moral nation. Noreiga will hever be allowed to talk, he was not allowed to talk while he was held here in the USA, and now he is imprisoned in France and will never be allowed to sell his side of the history.
Mining is NOT the same as manufacturing. The value-added aspect is peanuts compared to manufacturing and all realist capitalists know this. There was basically no capitalism until mass manufacturing suddenly made the value-added aspect much, much, much higher.
Ditto with many commodities: they created far more value-added wealth when machines were added. Cotton is the earliest example of this: the first cotton gin made slavery lucrative in the south because having someone mindlessly crank out tons of cotton instead of huge numbers carefully picking through the cotton boles, taking out the seeds.
This, in turn, revolutionized the cloth industry, a traditional major money maker that had a much lower profit aspect before spinning and weaving machines were connected to water and then steam energy.
We can easily (relatively speaking) restart mines. But then we have to sell this to the manufacturers who are mainly in Asia. So we lose the value-added since we also clamor to buy the manufactured products.
Funny that, even with the transportation costs from here to Asia and back added in ( back for the finished goods ), it is still more efficient to refine crude ore in Asia than in the USA.
Of course that cotton gin reduced the number of slaves necessary to the south, and machines always have a higher educational requirement to run so that slave had to be educated a bit more. The cotton gin made the demise of slavery inevitable in the cotton industry. The Indigo and Rice industries took a bit longer to mechanize and de slave. It is good to add power and machinery and reduce the labour content of any given industry. The flaws show up when the aggregate is calculated. If every industry needs less domestic labour, who buys the industrial output and with what?
Why exporting goods might be necessary to keep the businesses going; but hark is that not a demand for importing goods too? It is tough to sell only and not offset the sales. Eventually you have exported your patrimony and are left with nothing but wads of foreign currency.
ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ
ELAINE: 100% wrong. It increased slavery because there was no machine for harvesting cotton, just slave humans toiling and dying in the hot sun! The first cotton harvester didn’t happen until long after slavery ended.
I realize I left out a sentence at the end of my above posting.
Foreign currencies which, with but the flick of a pen, by the democratically appointed government, can lose their status as legal tender. Gold, silver, platinum, diamonds, rare earth, water cannot lose their intrinsic and international value by democratic or aristocratic or autocratic decree
Beggar the nations that sold to you and took your paper as if it had value. Cheaper than Aircraft Carriers and much more efficient.
If you want an explanation of why the Chinese are not interested in accumulating more merkin currency, and are actively reducing their exposure to same; reread the previous sentence.
As a non-governmental non-parasite, owning tools, real resources and knowledge is all that you have. It is all that you will ever have. It will be helpful to keep your possessions to yourself because as sure as crab apples are sour, governmental drones will attempt to confiscate what you have for the “greater good.” When in doubt remember that if you are productive, YOU can never a part of the greater goodly.
CK- Wants are unlimited, so there is no end to the output as long as you are producing from previous stores of capital. If you can’t improve processes from goods already in production, you have to go out on a limb and produce what you believe the market wants. Whether you make money or not, the rest of the world is better off and has more goods to show for your ordeal.
As Elaine always points out, if you have savings and capital from previous production, you can be your own venture capitalist.
In answer to your question, if in all industries less labor is required, you get mild deflation like in the late 19th century, when everyone with cash in the bank got richer, and everyone’s purchasing power went up as goods became less scarce. The only losers were the banks because they had no inflation to rely on, and debtors who had to pay back loans in a stronger dollar. Back then, there was no unemployment to speak of.
Back then, most Americans and Europeans worked on farms. So they were ’employed’ but most barely eked a survival living this way.
@EMS: Back then, 90% of the american population was considered rural. Rural is not just farms, it is small towns too. Places with blacksmiths and tinsmiths and small foundries and grist mills and such. Way more than a survival living. You know, like living in Berlin NY when it was small and thriving and surrounded by small business and working farms.
@RobP you also get new businesses and new services all of which add labour and capital. Which is why unemployment was low. Folks that wanted to work could get work. Rob you ignore one other loser: Government. There is little need for meddlesome government when the people are employed, and enjoying a rising standard of living. The bankers and the pols understood that mild deflation, rising living standards, and full employment were bad for banking and power grabbing; which explains the clandestine creation of the Federal Reserve and the removal of state legislative appointments of senators.
@EMS: First mechanical cotton harvester was developed and patented in 1850 in Tennessee. GB bought and released its slaves in 1833. Not a lot of cotton plantations or rice plantations or indigo plantations in GB.
@CK
I have done extensive research on my ancestors from Van Buren, Arkansas — a frontier town during the 1800’s. My ancestors were wagon makers, tinners, tanners, town marshals, sheriffs, and constables. They barely survived, and when my great, great, grandfather was gunned down by an outlaw, his family fell into destitution (according to the local newspaper) and stayed there their whole lives.
You do not seem to understand much about American history at all. At no time did my grandfather live above subsistence level living until the late 1970’s and early 80’s. His standard of living collapsed when Reagan lowered interest rates to subinflation levels in the mid-80’s. I remember him complaining bitterly about it. Like all my ancestors, he was as saver, but was fleeced by bankers and politicians anyway despite his attempts to avoid them at all costs.
They barely survived, and when my great, great, grandfather was gunned down by an outlaw, DeVaul
As I recall, he was a traitor (Union sympathizer) feeding “intelligence” to the occupying Union Army in North Mississippi.
@DeVaul:
It must be tough to be the victim son of a long line of victims.
By my math you have at least two familial lines you could research, were all you ancestors along all those lines victims?
As to avoiding bankers and pols, try harder for yourself than your gramps did. First rule is to avoid believing in the sanctity of enforced contracts with pols and bankers. As you are finding out, disability is not a sacred contract even if you were forced to signon to it umpteen years ago.
“Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.”~Nietzsche
“Was mich nicht umbringt, kann mich verlassen am Leben für immer.” ~CK
Touche!
” Was mich nicht umbringt, kann mich ein Flipper Zauberer.” ~P. Townsend
” Was mich nicht umbringt, kann dich töten.” ~Superman
” Was mich nicht umbringt, nicht hart genug versucht.” ~All the survivors.
Thank heavens for Google Translate.
@ DeVaul
Cheer up!
All ancestors were victims: they all died eventually, one way or another. Even if you sat at the top, being knocked off by the Grim Reaper was guaranteed. Kings or peasants: all died.
Ok, Dupree, I don’t really understand what you are saying at all about North Mississippi. A different line of ancestors came from North Mississippi, another line from Arkansas. The line from Arkansas fought for the Confederacy. My great, great grandfather spent most of the war in a Union prison camp, but survived.
Does that disapoint you and CK? It seems that it does.
I feel sorry for both of you. You seem to have no reverence for the suffering and sacrifices that your ancestors made so that you can sit here and make snide remarks that leave people wondering whether you are nazis or not nazis.
My point was clear to anyone who can read: there was no Golden Age in America. Not one time was there ever one except for the super rich, who are enjoying yet another Golden Age.
If you must make snide remarks about my ancestors while missing the point of my comment, well, that says more about you than me.
And DeVaul sayeth: “You seem to have no reverence for the suffering and sacrifices that your ancestors made so that you can sit here and make snide remarks that leave people wondering whether you are nazis or not nazis.”
Ancestors strut and fret their hours upon the stage and then they are gone. Down the halls to dusty death, they trod the boards for good or ill and exited stage left.
To be followed by another newer set
and so on
and so on
and then we get to strut and fret our hours upon the stage and then we will be gone; to ancestorhood.
To be followed by a crappy bunch of amateur thespians trying to match our strutting and fretting and doing a damn poor job of it. For yeah verily, we were giants upon the earth and our forebearers were but poltroons next to our shining victimhood; and our stunted progeny mere ritalin addicted, scenery chewing statists crying for a money teat to suckle after the wet nurse nanny has run out of thin gruel to squirt into their lazy mouths.
It was indeed springtime for Hitler and germs many; those halcyon days of yore. Somewhere a voice is calling, a bell is tolling, a tolling cookie is baking, and a theory lies moldering in its whole hole. Somewhere, but not here, an ghost is pissing into the wind, but ghost piss is not wet; a failed son is tugging on superdad’s cape but it is not felt, somewhere mighty ancestors has stuck out.
( A nod to Lewis Carrol who would be considered a paederast today and Lewis Thayer who would be forgotten. )
This site is filled with racist, anti-Semitic screed. Can you have a political
point of view without attacking Jews?
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