Came across this in Counter Punch.

Tomasky discusses the myths that Obama needs to dispel during his party’s upcoming convention.  One in particular caught my attention:  the idea that the President needed to confront the myth that he allegedly believes that jobs comes from government.

What’s wrong about that? In one sense, it is a myth:  to the extent that jobs are an outgrowth of sales, which are a function of aggregate demand, it is wrong to say that the public sector per se creates jobs.  But demand (and, by extension, sales) is more robust when employment rates are higher and, in that sense, it matters not to the restaurant owner, or the engineering firm, whether the source of that demand comes from a private or public sector job.  The teacher’s cash is just as good at the cash register as the accountant’s.

So why does the president even need to disparage the notion that good jobs and vocations cannot come from public employment in order to prove to American voters that he’s not some kind of radical Marxist?

The USA used to value the idea of public service.  Remember, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”?  That was the essence of much of the idealism underlying the Kennedy era.  Peace Corps, not leveraged buy-outs; public works, instead of credit default swaps. This was before the beginning of the neo-liberal onslaught that evolved in the late 1970s into the vapid and rabid belief that self-regulating markets would deliver the highest wealth to all of us. The privatisation and deregulation accompanied that mantra, much of which is the source of our present misery and income inequality, as public goods have rapidly become converted into private rents.

Which brought up a bitch I have had for a long time with the private sector. Not only their disdain for those of us who have worked in the public sector as some how being inferior but the whole idea that if you are not performing some task or creating something or producing something for personal profit, you are some how not serious about what you are doing.

How the hell did the idea that those who are “Only in it for the money” are superior to everyone else come about ? Talk about sanctimonious arrogant horse crap.  The truth is that those in the private sector are only serious about one thing. Making as much money they possibly can and they do not give a wet slap how they do this.

Wall Street and the banks are the perfect example how the private sector really does not want to provide a product or service  for their money unless force to. And if they can manipulate the law to steal it, they will.

Men on Strike - flickr

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money. Cree Indian Proverb

With all the reading I have done and all the history and news there is one overwhelming message that stands out.

Food gets people’s attention.

From the pickers to that packers to the delivery trucks to the servers to the sellers to the processors and on and on, the food industry has the lowest payed people with some of the longest and most horrendous working conditions. And very few – if any – benefits.  And yet the rich are wholly dependent on it.  The lower classes have had to learn to help one another in this way and find some other ways to get food at times.

A large scale strike of all who are involved in the food industry as workers I think would attract some attention.  And if we could get the small local farmers on our side, they could help those who are effected that are not part of the …um…problem.

It would have to be well coordinated but I think that this is one area that would cause more than a bit of a stir even on Wall Street.

Something to think about, I believe.

He turns the republican meme that the rich are job creators completely on it’s head.

Here is the transcript of the speech.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a “circle of life” like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me.

So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it’s a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it. In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn’t just inaccurate, it’s disingenuous.

That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

Not a long speech, but it says it all.

It’s been rather cold and rainy here in Cleveland so I thought I would spend some time doing some research. I was thinking about the unemployment situation and OWS and why the economy was still slowing going down hill. Or so it seems to be, regardless of what the official line from Washington is.

The common meme today is that we here in the US of A don’t make anything anymore. This seems to be an accepted fact and by what one sees on all the stores, at least appears to be true. But is it really. I decided to check this out. Certainly here in Cleveland it seems to be the case. With the area around the Cuyahoga river, that was once alive with steel mills and manufacturing looking like some abandoned waste land now. And all those old, empty, rusting factories that I saw on my trip up to NYC a few years ago.

I began by using Google Maps and did a search on manufacturing in my new state, Ohio. Here is what I came up with.

These little red dots are smallish manufacturing companies. Each one – and I checked a lot of them – make some particular item and mostly for commercial, industrial or government use. Few produce for the consumer market directly. Of the ones I checked, most had only around 50 employees or so and most were automated. Quite a few highly so. These are not companies that you would find on the NY Stock exchange. They are small privately own companies. Most making particular things. Some even do mostly design.

And I checked Pennsylvania and Indiana and Illinois and Montana and Wisconsin. And it was pretty much the same with few variations. Quite a few had company employee pictures. You could easily count the number of people in each. One in Montana made among other things a really nice looking drill bit set with various screw driver and nut driver bits as well. One that I would like to get for myself.

So what’s the deal ? Well the deal is that from farm implements to toilet seats and plastic cups to sprocket gears we simply do not need as many people to make stuff as we used. More and more is getting automated with the design work that use to require a floor full of engineers with slide rules and calculators and draftsmen now being done by only one or two on a computer using cad software and their designs being printed out only for hard copy reference. The actually design data being fed into automated manufacturing units. We are putting ourselves out of a job.

Most of what is left is low level unskilled employment in the shipping and servicing areas. As well as low level administrative.

One company I looked at made particular electronic components for data gathering but would also make printed circuit boards for you as well. I am guessing they needed some outside work to keep their in-house PC board area busy.

I myself could easily design a solid state RF amplifier on my computer, send the design off to a board house to make – some will even populate it with the necessary components – have it sent back and then all I would need to do is mount it in the case ( that I just got from the case manufacturer to my specifications) and ship it out. By the hundreds, assuming I could sell that many.

We just do not require a factory full of assemblers and inspectors etc. any more. And I seriously doubt that moving the manufacturing of all those electronic tinker toys that are being sold at Best Buy etc. over here would make any kind of dent on the employment situation.

The capitalistic system that we hang onto with such a death’s grip was designed for a time when it took many people to make anything. It is as outmoded now as the slide rule and hand drill.

Yet we keep churning out engineers and chemists and physicists and what not by the boat load into a world where their expertise is needed less and less. A world that will require a few computer programmers and technicians and lots of janitors and yardmen.

Cross posted at http://www.kgblogz.com

An excellent question. Douglas Rushkoff asks if maybe our reason for working is not out of date.

We can blame a right wing attempting to undermine labor, or a left wing trying to preserve unions in the face of government and corporate cutbacks. But the real culprit — at least in this case — is e-mail. People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps.

New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures — from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.

We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.

And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs — as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.

I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?

After all we produce more that enough to feed, clothe and house every man, woman, child and pet in this country and even the world.

According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, there is enough food produced to provide everyone in the world with 2,720 kilocalories per person per day. And that’s even after America disposes of thousands of tons of crop and dairy just to keep market prices high. Meanwhile, American banks overloaded with foreclosed properties are demolishing vacant dwellings to get the empty houses off their books.

Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff — it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.

Historically the concept of a Job was not known before the Renaissance. People worked for themselves and trade between themselves and this all worked out really well.  But it was the aristocracy that created the idea of working for someone else.

The only ones losing wealth were the aristocracy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the chartered monopoly. By law, small businesses in most major industries were shut down and people had to work for officially sanctioned corporations instead. From then on, for most of us, working came to mean getting a “job.”

The Industrial Age was largely about making those jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we’re in the digital age, we’re using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

This situation will only continue with more and more being done my computers and less and less by humans.  So what is the answer ?  The distributive wealth approach doesn’t work that well and the libertarian approach of every man for them selves will only lead to chaos,  revolt and blood shed.

The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

Make all the basic necessities a human right and direct our energies to other uses.

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do — the value we create — is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another — all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

or invent new things or maybe even seriously engage in exploring outer space. Hey that’s an idea, actually do something truly useful and imaginative.

This might have someting to do with it.

Companies that are looking for a good deal aren’t seeing one in new workers.

Workers are getting more expensive while equipment is getting cheaper, and the combination is encouraging companies to spend on machines rather than people.

“I want to have as few people touching our products as possible,” said Dan Mishek, managing director of Vista Technologies in Vadnais Heights, Minn. “Everything should be as automated as it can be. We just can’t afford to compete with countries like China on labor costs, especially when workers are getting even more expensive.”

Vista, which makes plastic products for equipment manufacturers, spent $450,000 on new technology last year. During the same period, it hired just two new workers, whose combined annual salary and benefits are $160,000.

Two years into the recovery, hiring is still painfully slow. The economy is producing as much as it was before the downturn, but with seven million fewer jobs. Since the recovery began, businesses’ spending on employees has grown 2 percent as equipment and software spending has swelled 26 percent, according to the Commerce Department. A capital rebound that sharp and a labor rebound that slow have been recorded only once before — after the 1982 recession.

With equipment prices dropping, and tax incentives to subsidize capital investments, these trends seem likely to continue.

“Firms are just responding to incentives,” said Dean Maki, chief United States economist at Barclays Capital. “And capital has gotten much cheaper relative to labor.”

Indeed, equipment and software prices have dipped 2.4 percent since the recovery began, thanks largely to foreign manufacturing. Labor costs, on the other hand, have risen 6.7 percent, according to the Labor Department. The rising compensation costs are driven in large part by costlier health care benefits, so those lucky workers who do have jobs do not exactly feel richer.

Corporate profits, meanwhile, are at record highs, and companies are hoarding cash. Many of the companies that are considering hiring say they are scared off by the uncertain future costs of health care and other benefits. But with the blessings of their accountants, these same companies are snatching up cheap, tax-subsidized tractors, computers and other goods.

“We had an opportunity to buy equipment at a very discounted rate,” Mr. Mishek explains of his decision to make bigger investments in equipment than in workers. “Now that the economy has turned around a little bit, it made sense to upgrade.”

Hiring has some hidden costs, as well as the expenses of salary and benefits, Mr. Mishek added.

“I dread the process we have to go through when we want to bring somebody on,” he said. “When we have a job posting these days, we get a flurry of résumés from people who aren’t qualified at all: people with misspellings on their résumés, who have never been in the industry and want a career move from real estate or something. It’s a huge distraction to sort through all those.”

This is going to become more and more and more the way it is. As technology, automation and robotics advance – people, per se will become more and more a liability to employers.
it’s clear to me that our current capitalistic system will create more and more poor, pissed off, desperate people. Who will feel more and more like they have nothing too loose and everything to gain by going after the the oligarchs and elites. A very dangerous situation since historically this has nearly always lead to bloody chaos.  I hesitate to recommend what exact action need to take place. But clearly we need to remake our culture/society/economy so to take better advantage of the resources we have. Also looking toward space as well. This would create more jobs and prepare for the inevitable task of colonization.