At the same time, our country has shed "useless", low-technology job after job to China and most recently to India and Brazil. In 1987 or so, I used to argue at Rutgers and with my father about how the US economy was shedding those jobs because "who needs these harmful and mind-knumbing industries anyway?" My father told me that these were jobs Americans were losing and I said, "yes, but, they will be replaced with new technologies."
He was right and I was wrong
Oh, How wrong I was...
Sadly, when my father and I were battling over this, it was at the time when the Reagan mantra of "governmnet IS the problem" was taking hold. This was the time when suddenly confronted with a collapsed Soviet Union, our hubris overcame us and instead of using our so-called "peace dividend" to reinvest in America's then-crumbling infrastructure, we continued along the same path that had been blazed by Reagan: we cut taxes, cut taxes, demonized government and deregulated banking and Wall Street.
The core of my naivety, if it had been supported by spine-less politcians, would have resulted in a powerful, sound and booming American economy. We would have been glad to have had China take up those "meaningless" jobs for us; to produce our doilies, thingamajigs and whatjamacallits. Harmful manufacturing would have been their domain and life-advancing technologies would have been ours.
Sadly though, with the deregulation came "quick return addiction (QRA)." In 1925, when taxes were cut for the owners, they plowed much of this money back into the sprawling American infrastructure/manufacturing base. WWII made the US economic power we all knew and loved entering Vietnam and the heralded profits were invested all over the US and world for the sole benefit of the United States tax base.
Reagan was fed on this belief, of American economic greatness, and his belief was for the most part a real one. Yet, the Republican tendency then as it is now, was to say "screw the poor and working poor." If you can't make enough money to support yourself in this "booming America" then you must be lazy or weak and so you must suffer the consequences. If you aren't supporting yourself then you are simply not working.
Well, things have really changed since those axioms were applicable to our nation: China changed, India changed, Asia changed.
Boom Times
When Clinton came to town and boom times came shorly afterwards, the anti-government movement was alive and well. Tax cuts were a reality and record ones were enacted by W (whilst waging a two front war, nonetheless). Now, here is the difference between 1925 and 1995: then the super wealthy had places in America to invest in to make crazy returns, today there is nowhere to invest to make crazy returns but in crazy, unregulated and scantily-taxed Wall Street ponzi schemes.
The super rich, with freshly-minted tax cuts in hand, realized that the hyper-saturated US market demanded ever larger and larger initial investments (entry costs) in order to get even fair returns over many years. The conclusion drawn from the Reagan "revolution" is that it was an anti-America one. It has denied America a future and made the military industrial complex our only advancing and old-fashioned American industry which employees millions--directly or indirectly. The seeds for a banana republic were planted under Reagan and have been harvested under W. If we are not invading and waging war or selling war, than we have almost nothing left to offer.
The Reagan, anti-regulation, me-first revolution rewards myopic corporate decision-making all so the quarterly profits--not annual, not 5-year--can be maximized. How do you maximize a quarterly profit? Don't invest in your workers or your infrastructure or make really low-quality products. The quick-return-addiction has decimated our economy.
This QRA has led so-called patriot, American businessmen to relocate all of their businesses to China or India. This means that the jobs are there also. This means that the second largest employer after the military industrial complex is Wal-Mart! Wal-Mart: the purveyor of low-quality crap, bad meat and processed foods; literally, everything that is wrong with America today can be summed up in one word: Wal-Mart.
If we combine all retailers, then most Americans are working in some capacity for large, box-stores. And, the Chinese are pumping out the endless streams of crap to fill those stores. We have become drones to their whims.
The Danger of China
The worst thing for the Chinese government is to have unemployed Chinese people. The Chinese love to work and when not working, they are not eating. And a hungry mass of 100,000,000 unemployed is enough to send the Chinese government packing and then hanging from trees. So, what they do? They lower the value of their currency and order the factory bosses to start churning out even cheaper shit than before!
The struggling American worker who cannot buy Christmas gifts suddenly realizes that things this year are cheaper than a mere 3 months ago; and, by as much as 20%! Yes, Christmas will be had this year! Who can blame this family? Not me! They have kids and the kids expect Christmas.
Because the Chinese are producing these luxuries at below-cost prices and so cheaply, no American business, big or small, can possibly ever compete! Meaning that the no new job will be created because the Chinese have taken our principles of capitalism and "manufacture and conquer" and are now today enacting them better than we are.
President Obama has come to town promising to make our government more progressive, more pro-active in solving many of these problems. He wants to and has tried to launch an economic revolution based on the investment in green technologies. These technologies would take us off of our dependency for foreign gas and oil. It would permit us to create millions upon millions of new jobs all throughout our nation.
These jobs would offer careers to people, to families. These would be the kinds of jobs that father and mother would pass to son and daughter--precisely the kinds of jobs that over the past 20 years have been replaced by retail jobs, service-industry jobs. Stuck in this hyper-consumption model of economic development, if we want a modicum of economic well-being, then all Americans are forced to consume, consume and consume 24/7.
And even now, formerly a day when stores were closed for family, rest and relaxation, Thanksgiving has become yet another day to feed the family processed foods so as to make it to the front of the line at the Best Buy or Wal-Mart before other T-Day revelers can awaken from their turkey-induced naps. The cult of consumption not only has destroyed our formerly inherent American ingenuity, it now threatens one of our last and most truly national of all holidays.
Perhaps more tax-cuts will do the trick--NOT
Republicans will tell us that the problem with our nation is that goverment spending and taxes are killing us. Their medicine for making our nation less retail-oriented and more, in this case, focused on starting a green revolution, is to cut taxes for the super rich. The added money in their pockets will permit them to invest in the new technologies.
What's wrong with this formula? Look at the 4000 and rising dead fighting men and women in Iraq. Chosen by Cheney and his coterie of pug-uglies to supply our troops with the means by which they would carry out the illegal invasion of that sovereign nation, these companies chose to sell the most expensive, highest-margin items which the troops--in interview after interview confirmed--didn't need. The low-margin stuff like body-armor was deemed by the boards of directors and Cheney as "unnecessary."
And, this attitude toward our nation's troops, all hid in bunting and draped behind words of "Praise Jesus," was at a time of the greatest tax-cuts in our history--run through by the GOPCON Congress under the precedure we now know as "reconcilation:" Dems never had a chance to stop the theft from our nation's future!
Big Business, when granted more untaxed returns than ever before did what? Nothing. It did not invest in new technologies, it did not create new jobs for Americans but instead gave out larger bonuses, invested in super-high-return derivatives and watched as our nation plummeted. Today, the only player who can be counted on for investing in our nation's future, in an infrastructural grid which will enable us to become not just competitive again but the world's economic leader is the Federal Government.
Yet, while they accuse Obama of bankrupting our nation, the dumbing-down of our nation, the retail-oriented approach to economic growth, the budget-busting tax-cuts which are actually more "hidden" spending--called opportunity cost--than anything Obama has done to date, all happened on the watch of Republicans and Conservatives.
It is time to stop thinking all Americans should be drones in a retail-store saga playing the roles of consumers by day only to step into a phonebooth and come out again as workers by night in that same Wal-Mart. The desertification of our national industrial work base must stop. President Obama and the Democratic Congress must fight the good fight and direct our dwindling national wealth toward the following:
Wind-technologies, grid development which will make it affordable for getting wind and sun energy into cities and communities that need it, inexpensive and safe batteries for electric cars, solar panels for homes throughout the nation (the panels will be made where...in the USA!), no-tillage technologies for farming, high-speed rail systems, to name a few areas. If federally backed today, within 5 years there will be over 10 million jobs directly created and another 15 or so indirectly created. America will be booming for another 100 years or so and we will be doing good for the environment.
However, in order to do these things, we must fight the ingrained powers of yesterday: big oil, big coal (undoubtedly the NRA will be opposed to this approach), Republican ideas of less government and no taxes and sheer stupidity as our nation has come to believe that a $30 big-screen TV is better for us than capturing the suns rays and lighting your home so you can watch that TV.
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