The Semantics of "Good"

I've pretty much gotten beyond taking the San Francisco Chronicle seriously for anything other than the comics. (On the positive side my wife still has good thoughts about their sports reporting and commentary.) Occasionally, however, there is amusement beyond the "funny papers," as such. On Sundays I tend to check the back page of the Insight section to see what counts as the past week being "good" or "bad."

Today was a case of the Chronicle not being able to make up its mind and erring on the side of optimism. One of the "good week" items was:

BayArea home prices rise to their highest point since 2007 peak: $661,000 median.

This counted as a good week for home sellers. Perhaps it will be. It remains to be seen whether or not the current economic crisis in China will become the next full-fledged global economic crisis; but, on the basis of past history, that is the sort of transition that can take place very abruptly. (Given how divided our nation has become, one can even imagine moneyed interests hastening such a catastrophe, just of the sake of leaving a black mark on Obama's record before he leaves office.) So anyone thinking this would be a good time to sell might consider that any real estate transaction that does not take place today will be far from certain in its outcome.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle was perceptive enough to realize that good news for those with a home to sell does not necessarily translated to good news for anyone else. That sentence quoted above was followed by another:

Affordability crisis persists.

In other words, even if you make a killing selling your home, you may not be able to buy a satisfactory replacement for it. So much for this being a good week in the world of real estate.

Is ISIS a Product of the Failed Arab Spring?

I can appreciate the decision of the author of "The Mystery of ISIS," scheduled for the next issue of The New York Review of Books and currently available on their Web site, to remain anonymous. The article is rich with both historical background and analysis, yet it never draws any conclusions as to why ISIS should be recruiting so many followers on such a broad international scale. I would like to suggest that the author may have overlooked the role that may have been played by the Arab Spring, not so much in terms of any immediate impact that happened, fizzled, or backfired but with regard to the motivating forces behind protest. Those forces had so much in common that, as I observed in August of 2011, they could be found in Israel as well as its many Arab neighbors.

The writer that seems to have been most aware of those forces was Fareed Zakaria, whose analysis on the Time.com Web site argued that those who gathered in Tahrir Square were there because, regardless of how much education or training they had, they could not see a future for themselves in Egypt as it was in early 2011. Indeed, such a social context would suggest that the Arab Spring inspired not only Israeli youth but also the subsequent Occupy movement. Perhaps the most important consequence of globalization is that, practically everywhere in the world, there is now a generation of educated young people who see absolutely no prospects for a viable future. That future has been withheld from them by the tyrannical forces of an "economic elite," the top 1% of the tope 1%, if you will, that understands the world only in terms of balance sheets and returns on investment.

In any individual country this would be a desperate situation. On a global scale it is an invitation to catastrophe. Through skillful manipulation of the "consciousness industry," surpassing that of both the Nazis and the economic elite, ISIS has been able to circulate its message to those who feel, rightfully so, that there is nothing they can do to bring any satisfaction into their lives. Moralists can wax indignantly that ISIS should try to deceive so many vulnerable individuals, but do they give any thought as to why those individuals were so vulnerable in the first place?

Think about it. Through globalization the economic elite has create a world in which even the basic premises behind governance have gone onto the rocks, smashed by the domination of marketing over legislation and jurisprudence. "Rational man" may be justified in declaring that the efforts of ISIS to burn down the whole house and replace it with their caliphate are "barbaric;" but are they any more barbaric than they ways in which the "wise men [sic] of Davos" have all but obliterated the middle class in any economic society? The world may ultimately be divided between those who waste away out of their own helplessness and those who rally to ISIS for the simple reason that they have nothing better to do with themselves.

The Latest Round of Ignoring History

Last week the Facts & Arts Web site ran, "A Greek Morality Tale," an analysis by Joseph E. Stiglitz of the damaging effects of austerity that was almost painful to read. Unfortunately, much of the pain came from the conclusion:

One hopes that those who understand the economics of debt and austerity, and who believe in democracy and humane values, will prevail.

Ironically, the leading beneficiary of the sort of judgment that Stiglitz counsels is Germany, through the planned recovery it experienced following the Second World War. Unfortunately, Germany is now the leading "austerity hawk."

Actually, Stieglitz himself does not take Germany to task. Rather, he lays the blame on what he calls the "troika" of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. These are all institutions of the rich and mighty getting richer and mightier than they are in narrowing that enormous gulf between extreme wealthy and abject poverty. In such organizations "humane values" are no longer part of the mindset. The days when the filthy rich could cleanse their souls, so to speak, through philanthropy are long gone; and no one of any import seems to regret their passing.

Meanwhile unemployment has reached crisis proportions in just about every corner of the world. As I wrote back in 2011, this has become the age of "youth without future," brought upon by those whose incessant fixation with the immediacy of the "bottom line" has led to a willful ignorance of history. Is it any wonder that such youth, feeling abandoned by those who should know better, are attracted to the lure of extremists, most of whom can only be counted upon to make matters worse?

Political Citizenship at the Expense of Social Citizenship?

In the new issue of The New York Review of Books, Gordon S. Wood concludes his otherwise positive examination of Danielle Allen's Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality on a critical note. He observes that the equality that Allen is defending is a political equality and suggests that political equality may have been achieved at the price of a more social approach to citizenship, arguing further that the latter took priority in the minds of the Founding Fathers. It is easy to see how the combination of the Internet and the specialization of media channels has created a more level playing field for the expression of political opinion. The problem is that, on that level playing field, every voice now has a megaphone; and ultimately the loudest voice prevails.

On the social side of the balance, Wood says the following about the Founding Fathers:

The confidence that Jefferson and the other revolutionaries had in society alone flowed from their assumption that every person, regardless of rank or education, had a natural social or moral instinct that tied them by affection to their fellow human beings. This social and moral sense, this natural feeling of affability and benevolence, became for the revolutionaries a modern substitute for the austere and martial conception of virtue that had sustained the ancient republics.

In the world the Internet has made (and is making), it is hard to find many instances of nouns like "affection," "affability," and "benevolence," all of which seem to have been briskly swept away by a sense of values in which the marketplace is all that matters. To be fair, that vision of "Jefferson and the other revolutionaries" did not fare very well after the French Revolution; but one of the unanticipated consequences of globalization appears to be that the globalization of trade has been accompanied by a globalization of "uprisings of rage." The result is that, on a global scale, we are no longer "concerned citizens," in either the political or the social sense. We are just rabidly self-centered consumers, wanting to make sure that we "get ours;" and all others be damned.

Not Done Paying for Broken Pottery

Hopefully, there are some out there whose memory of history is not so myopic as to have blocked out General Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn" reasoning about Iraq ("You broke it; you pay for it.") Many seem to be of the opinion that the new rise of insurgency in Iraq is simply a sign that the United States never finished paying for the broken pottery. What is interesting, however, is that there appears to be a sizable number of Iraq veterans who share that opinion. Thus, today ABC7News, the local ABC affiliate here in San Francisco, ran a story in which they interviewed some of those veterans. One, Emily Yates from Oakland, did two tours as a Public Affairs Specialist. Now, distanced from her past public relations obligations, she can speak for herself:

This is a mess that the United States has created, but it's not a mess that the United States is going to be able to un-make.

Yates may be right in concluding that it is going to take someone else to clean up the broken pottery, but she was discrete enough not to make any suggestions as to who that could be. The question will be whether or not there is any other party willing to respect the priority of the Iraqi population, particularly when that priority should override more selfish interests. In this brave new "globalized" world, I am not sure such a party can be found.

The Global Pissing Contest

I suppose I should not be surprised that so much of today's half-hour news telecast on BBC World Service Television should have been consumed by the fireworks displays in countries where it is already January 1. Since I live on the West Coast, I am used to being among the last to enter the New Year; and it has never bothered me very much. Perhaps that was because I was in Hawaii on December 31, 1999, meaning that I was among the very last to greet 2000.

This time, however, I was particularly struck by the determination of Dubai to set a world record for number of fireworks released. I suppose I should have accepted this as an inevitable corollary to the fact that setting up the most elaborate Christmas lights on your home has now become the latest reality television competition. It would appear that the ambitions of globalization have, indeed, been fulfilled. It almost seems as if the entire world's population has been reduced to competitive consumerism in that game where "he who dies with the most toys wins." This is absurd enough on its own; but, when we realize how many of those toys provides ways in which to escape reality (as opposed to other objectives for recreation), the absurd degrades further into a condition which an alien culture might classify as pathological.

Happy New Year!

A Pope Who Knows His Priorities

I do not know how many spin doctors prepare Papal addresses. However, those driven by dogma are probably wringing their hands in agony when Pope Francis decides to go "off script" and start improvising. Consider some of the off-the-cuff remarks he made to the faithful today in Sardinia (where the youth unemployment rate happens to be 51 percent), as reported by Al Jazeera English:

I find suffering here... it weakens you and robs you of hope.

Excuse me if I use strong words, but where there is no work there is no dignity.

We don't want this globalised economic system which does us so much harm. Men and women have to be at the centre [of an economic system] as God wants, not money.

The world has become an idolator of this god called money.

Now regular readers should know by now that I am a "devout atheist." However, that is just the point. None of the above text says anything about turning to the Catholic Church or any other organized religion. The Pope just decided to be "frank and open" about the current state of poverty and how the world got into it. Perhaps it is time for him to say a thing or two to the World Economic Forum.

Our Government's Priorities

Jeff Madrick's latest post to NYRblog, "America's Jobless Generation," injects a major shot of reality into any punditry about the unemployment crisis. Nevertheless, in his efforts to be rational about the crisis, I think he failed to rake up some of the muck that really matters. Consider one of his most important sentences, which actually occupies most of the fourth paragraph of the post:

Many aspects of our current employment crisis have less to do with technology or globalization than with the administration’s failure to adopt policies to strengthen the labor force, and more precisely, those parts of the labor force that are most crucial to the nation’s long-term social and economic health.

This is true enough, but some speculation of the cause of the failure would not have hurt the piece. After all, many of those who voted for Barack Obama did so because they expected him to adopt such policies. What happened?

What happened was that Obama had to choose between dancing "with the one that brung him" and "with the one that paid to get him to ball," so to speak. Obama may have instilled hope among those members of a declining middle class at a time when they had pretty much lost all hope of ever getting their heads above the waters of debt. However, once he occupied the Oval Office, he had just as much sympathy for bailing out all the foolish risky moves by the financial sector as his predecessor had exhibited. In other words the Presidency is as much enslaved to the financial sector as is the Congress and the 99% of the American population. The fact is that the financial sector does not care who the President is as long as they maintain their grip on the controlling strings.

What is the aim of all of that control? It is nothing more than a steady parade of quarterly reports of growth. Whether or not the reports themselves, or the numbers behind them, are nothing more than fictions of convenience, where exchange is concerned, all that matters is having the right numbers in the right places. (Remember what happened when a single cell in an Excel chart turned out to be erroneous.) Unfortunately, well-choreographed numbers have never benefited the labor force. There is no reason for us to assume that this time will be different.

"Official" Confirmation the Burma as Rejoined the "Global Community"

This morning BBC News reported that Coca-Cola has opening a bottling plant in Burma. This marks their return after a 60-year absence. There are now only two countries whose citizens cannot consume a Coke: Cuba and North Korea.

GEVALT!

As reported on the BBC News Web site, the winning word at this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee was "knaidel." Apparently, English is no longer sufficient to sort out the quality spellers. The winner, by the way, was Arvind Mahankali, whose relatives live in Hyderabad, India.

Tom Paxton is Still With Us

One of the more memorable songs to come out of the Sixties protest movement was Tom Paxton's "Daily News," a hilarious tribute to yellow journalism with the memorable phrase, "don't try to change my mind with facts." That could easily have been an alternative title for Paul Krugman's latest contribution to The New York Review of Books, whose actual title is "How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled." The reason I propose my alternative title is that, while the logic behind that case for austerity has, indeed, been pretty thoroughly decimated, those who espouse it have not yet been swayed from their position.

Krugman not only recognizes this sad truth but also offers an explanation for it:

Everyone loves a morality play. “For the wages of sin is death” is a much more satisfying message than “Shit happens.” We all want events to have meaning. 

When applied to macroeconomics, this urge to find moral meaning creates in all of us a predisposition toward believing stories that attribute the pain of a slump to the excesses of the boom that precedes it—and, perhaps, also makes it natural to see the pain as necessary, part of an inevitable cleansing process. When Andrew Mellon told Herbert Hoover to let the Depression run its course, so as to “purge the rottenness” from the system, he was offering advice that, however bad it was as economics, resonated psychologically with many people (and still does). 

By contrast, Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn’t a morality play—that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared that “we have magneto trouble”—i.e., the economy’s troubles were like those of a car with a small but critical problem in its electrical system, and the job of the economist is to figure out how to repair that technical problem. Keynes’s masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is noteworthy—and revolutionary—for saying almost nothing about what happens in economic booms. Pre-Keynesian business cycle theorists loved to dwell on the lurid excesses that take place in good times, while having relatively little to say about exactly why these give rise to bad times or what you should do when they do. Keynes reversed this priority; almost all his focus was on how economies stay depressed, and what can be done to make them less depressed.

In other words people prefer to embrace a narrative with strong moral implications over a dispassionate analysis based on nothing more than mathematics. This should not be too surprising. Most people can follow a morality play far more easily than mathematical reasoning, and even those who know the math may still prefer the idea of judgment based on some form of divine judge over the outcome of a totally objective process. Look at how quick so many people are to dismiss the hard evidence of fossil records in order to reject the theories of Charles Darwin.

Krugman then observes that the only people who benefit from this irrational rejection of Keynes are (you guessed it) the rich. The austerity debate has provided the 1% with yet another way to stick it to the 99%. Furthermore, the assumption by the 1% that the Occupy movement would run out of steam seems to have come to fruition. So the rich will continue to live in a world of comfortable assets and benefits while the now-globalized world economy hurtles off a cliff, taking the rest of us down with it.

Are We Still Worrying about Rain?

Back in the Dark Ages, when, as a result of my role as a Silicon Valley researcher, I was an early adopter of DSL to my home in Palo Alto (which took SBC about a year to get working, leading my wife to call them "The Stupid Solutions People"), I soon discovered that my connection would get flaky whenever it rained. (These were also the early days of globalizing customer support. So I had my first experience of dealing with a help desk that had no idea what weather conditions were like outside my window, working from a script that he preordained that such information was irrelevant.) Today the Bay Area is getting its first major rainfall (much to the consternation of Giants fans); and, almost as if like clockwork, Yahoo! Mail is exhibiting regular drifts off into Aristophanes' cloud cuckoo-land.

So, as we get besieged with television commercials telling us about the mass proliferation of cell towers, do we need to ask how much of our "advanced" digital technology rests on the foundation of a decades-all infrastructure that still cannot stand up to a little rain?

Straight Talk about Globalization from Tim Cook

When Steve Jobs used to appear at the D: All Things Digital conference, he could dazzle his audience with his blue-sky visions, just as he would any other audience. However, as Andrew Nusca observed in his report from the conference for Between the Lines on the ZDNet Web site, Tim Cook has never pretended to live in a world of visionaries. Rather, he deals with harsh realities; and one of the realities he has come to understand best is that of supply chain management.

He thus used his slot at the conference to address the “made in America” question, explaining why Apple, and just about every other major company with a product, bases production on a globalized supply chain and why, as a corollary, there really is no place for the United States in that chain. Nusca’s summary of his remarks is well worth reading. Most important is that it teases out all of the down-side consequences that Tom Friedman either could not or would not put on the table back when he first started riding his globalization hobby-horse.

For those who like to cut to the chase, here is the crux of the argument as to why American manufacturing cannot play in the world of the global supply chain:

The reason: there’s a very real tradeoff between what’s good for workers and what’s good for business. When push comes to shove, business wins — which is why Apple’s American employees enjoy comparatively nice perks while employees of its supply chain partners live in 8,000-strong dormitories, ready to be woken up at midnight to start a 12-hour shift making new parts for an iPhone that received last-minute design changes from California. 

Imagine trying to do the same with an American worker. Unions would never stand for it, obviously, and chances are the rest of the family unit wouldn’t, either. 

My point is not to illustrate the benefits and drawbacks of unions, or even what’s fair; rather, I’m trying to illustrate a landscape in which American companies can go overseas for greater flexibility, lower price and sheer speed. So long as there are nations in this world willing to do work others aren’t, outsourcing will exist. In the capitalist system, businesses can’t win in the free market unless they exploit every advantage.

We happy few who still have a sense of history will probably have trouble reading those paragraphs without hearing a chorus singing “The Internationale” in the back of our collective heads. Written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, it was probably the first song to state explicitly that “exploit every advantage” always meant exploiting labor to the benefit of both management and shareholders. The basic idea was that workers around they world must group together (“Groupons-nous”) for the “final struggle” (“la lute finale”) between the humanity of those workers and the objective interests of capitalism.

“The Communist Manifesto” echoed the vision of “The Internationale.” All that ensued, however, were new governments, mostly totalitarian. The new boss was the same as the old boss, and the workers were still the “damned of the Earth” (“damnés de la terre”). Several generations of new bosses have now come and gone in both political and manufacturing sectors. The state of the workers has not changed; and the sad truth is that, if the Internet empowers anyone, it is the shareholders for whom return-on-investment matters more than quality-of-product, let alone anything as intangible as worker quality-of-life. Meanwhile, “The Internationale” echoes as a faint memory, even less memorable than “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

As an afterthought, it is worth noting that Nusca’s perspective extended beyond Friedman to one of the other great visionary hucksters, Richard Florida. This seemed appropriate since I noticed that Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class, is about to be “revisited” in a revised tenth-anniversary edition (as if a new edition could possibly add value to the first one). Here is how Nusca took on Florida:

Manufacturing is a powerful driver of the American economy, but it’s just one part of it. Whatever happened to the concept of a creative economy? (Answer: we realized we can’t win on creativity alone. There needs to be some elbow grease, too.)

In other words the workers figure in creativity, too. Read the stories about the Manhattan Project or the building of the first programmable digital computers. (Yes, I am beating the drum about history again.) You will find plenty of warrants for that claim in those accounts. Our would-be “visionaries” have forgotten about the workers; and, from that point of view, they are no better than heartless shareholders and may even be significantly worse.

A Yummy Centennial

Much of my Examiner.com writing this season has been occupied with centennials.  The first half of 2012 is also the second half of the Centennial Season of the San Francisco Symphony, which gave its first performance on December 8, 1911.  However, a celebration closer to my personal interests is that 2012 is the centennial year of the birth of John Cage on September 5, 1912.

In this austere context it may seem a bit frivolous to celebrate the centennial of a cookie, but 1912 is also the year in which the first Oreo cookies were baked by Nabisco in their Chelsea factory in New York City.  (The Wikipedia entry does not give a specific date.)  It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Oreo is no more an ordinary cookie than to call Cage an ordinary composer.  When my wife and I moved to Singapore in 1991, expatriates were still telling stories about the enormous line that formed outside Jason’s when this goodie first went on sale there.  It is therefore no surprise that BBC News has reported celebrations of the Oreo Centennial not only by flash mobs in the United States but also by (presumably more subdued) celebrations in China, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.  Considering the current global tensions, one would think that the Oreo should be seriously investigated as a vehicle for world peace.  That would probably bring a beatific smile to Cage’s face, were he to be informed of how his anniversary was being shared.

"humans are cheaper"

I have already cited Robert Greenwald’s 2005 documentary The High Cost of Low Price as a source for viewing the “new dark side” of manufacturing as a sign of the impact of the “Wal-Mart economy” on manufacturing in this brave new world of globalized supply chain management.  Apparently, Chi-Chi Zhang from CNN managed to interview a Foxconn employee to put a human face on just how dark that side is.  The employee is known only as “Miss Chen” for purposes of anonymity.  I suppose she was willing to speak because she knew she would not have a future at Foxconn.  She went there for the month of Spring Festival because she needed the money (making me wonder on the side just what Chinese students must think of spring break in the United States).

She quickly learned the motto adopted by Foxconn line workers, which is that “they use women as men and men as machines.”  This provided Zhang’s motive for the conclusion of the interview:

When asked why humans do machine-like work at Foxconn, she responds, "Well, humans are cheaper."

To some extent this reflects the outlook of the South vis-à-vis the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the North in the years leading up to the Civil War.  However, in the wake of the North’s victory, it also reflects the slave-like conditions endured by those who then had to work with machines, a theme that dominated Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  Sinclair’s book probably led to the rise of that joke about eating sausage without knowing how it is made.  Now, however, the joke is about pretty much every piece of technology we face;  and it is getting harder and harder to laugh at it (unless you are in that comfortable 1% whose only concern is return-on-investment).

Davos Needs Descartes!

Today’s report from Davos by Tim Weber, Business Editor for the BBC News Web site, can be boiled down to a single sentence summary:

Everyone attending the World Economic Forum is worrying about youth unemployment.

My guess is that most of us 99% folks in the real world will respond to this with the immortal line from Rocky Horror:

No shit, Sherlock!

Even those whose knowledge of history is pathetically myopic probably realize that unemployment may well have been a more significant motivating factor behind the Arab Spring than the more idealistic quest for democracy.

So, having been blessed with a flash of insight into the obvious, what are the folks in Davos doing about it?  Given the length of Weber’s article, it is clear that a lot of people are doing a lot of talking.  Then there is this photograph that gives some indication of what else they are doing:

 

I used to attend meetings where diagrams like this emerged.  They are supposed to be a product of free-for-all brainstorming, drawn by a “facilitator,” who tries to summarize the results of the meeting in a diagram that is as informative as it is attractive.  It is clear from this photograph that Weber’s camera could not fit the whole diagram.  This is a bad sign.  If you cannot go away from a meeting with an image that “fits the mind’s eye,” you are likely to lose your grip on the whole affair.  Unfortunately, the reason this particular diagram is so crowded is that it is filled with platitudes, all the usual content-free phrases that you learn in business school to “keep the conversation going” without sounding like a dummy.  If the 1% are trying to convince the 99% that they are actually trying to do something about the most serious problem on the table, then Weber’s report seems to indicate that they have managed to invest a day in nothing better than shooting themselves in the foot.

It’s time for a modest proposal to break this logjam.  The problem with brainstorming at Davos is that everyone there has pretty much the same mindset.  Put another way, there is some fundamental set of propositions (which could probably fit on one of those whiteboards) that are simply accepted as axiomatic by all conferees.  What is needed, then, is a strong injection of Cartesian doubt.  For René Descartes reasoning began with the capacity to doubt everything and accepting as truth only that which withstands the challenge of doubt.  Thus, if one can create a whiteboard of “Davos axioms,” one should also be able to run each one of them through a wringer of doubt, driven by the likelihood that no individual axiom is necessarily shared by everyone in the room.  If those axioms can be brought down like a house of cards, then there would be at least a fighting chance that the Davos conferees could shift their attention to finding solutions, rather than drawing a big pretty picture of the problem.

Redirecting the Attacks on Apple

This morning Larry Dignan used a post to the Between the Lines blog on ZDNet to give “equal time” to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in the face of the beating that Apple has been taking from two extended reports in The New York Times by Charles Duhigg, the first co-authored with Keith Bradsher and the second with David Barboza.  The good news is that Dignan definitely got it right in shifting the focus from Apple to the broader issue of the impact of globalization on supply chain management.  He probably even got his punch line right:

The bottom line here is we enable a supply chain that has a lot of warts. We want to examine those warts, but not really. This flap about worker safety isn’t about Apple, the tech industry or any other vertical. It’s about us.

However, there is still a need to establish a context for this broader view;  and, for me, the best way to set that context is by recalling two movies that, by all rights, should have had greater impact.  The one most relevant to the case Dignan made is Robert Greenwald’s 2005 documentary The High Cost of Low Price, which is basically a systematic study of the consequences that have evolved from the “Wal-Mart economy” that has consumed our culture’s attitude towards just about any commodity.  However, if we also wish to focus on the consequences of brutal working conditions (for which Dignan offers an inadequate gloss on viewing supply chain abuses “through the Western lens”), then we need to turn to Richard Linklater’s 2006 docudrama Fast Food Nation and the book by Eric Schlosser on which it was based.

There is a subtext in Duhigg’s reports based on the old joke that everybody likes to eat sausage, but nobody wants to know how sausage is made.  Upton Sinclair investigated that “inconvenient truth” in The Jungle, which Schlosser acknowledged as a major source for his own writing.  The thing is that, while Schlosser made the case that things have not changed very much for sausages, there has been a change in that the sausage is now a metaphor for the iPad.

Dignan asserts that “the buy American movement never quite worked.”  He has good warrants for this claim;  but, after yesterday’s stake in the ground at Davos, I would suggest that his vision is dangerously narrow.  We now view the global supply chain as a potential risk to “homeland security,” from which we conclude that we need a strategy to protect it (which would mean protecting all of those abusive work practices that make the whole machine tick).  However, if we were really serious about homeland security, we would be strategizing to restore a level of self-sufficiency that started to go down the tubes when we first got bitten by the bug carrying the infection of profits-through-global-outsourcing.  (I would love to single out Tom Friedman as the infecting agent, and he may well have been the first bug to deliver an effective bite.  However, we have to be fair and realize that he was just the messenger of a message whose consequences he could not fathom.)

Ultimately, this is a matter of dueling propaganda campaigns.  The party line of the consciousness industry is the one that Dignan accepts as an axiom:  We are addicted to consumerism and demand to satisfy our addiction through low prices.  The fact that Apple has become a “drug kingpin” for this metaphor is purely incidental.  One way to reject this propaganda is through an alternative campaign that promotes self-sufficiency.  This may be what Barack Obama originally had in  mind by making “Yes, we can” a campaign slogan;  but in all likelihood he had sold out to the consciousness industry even before he had won the election.  We, as a culture, need to believe that we can restore self-sufficiency without retreating into isolationism.  The 1% do not want us to believe this, but we need to see whether or not the 99% will embrace such a vision and decide to move towards it.

The US Priority at Davos: The Global Supply Chain

A BBC News dispatch from Davos that arrived last night (our time) gives some indication of where our country’s priorities lie with respect to the agenda of the World Economic Forum.  Here is the one-sentence summary of the story:

The US has unveiled a strategy at the Davos World Economic Forum to protect the global supply chain in the event of a terror attack or natural disaster.

Apparently this is a policy that has been approved by President Barack Obama and was the basis for the speech given to the Forum by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.  As the BBC observed, there are definitely virtues to this policy:

The supply chain includes provision of food, medicines, fuel or any goods that underpin the American way of life.

The strategy would plan for worst case scenarios, enabling the government and industries to respond quickly to disasters that could disrupt access to vital commodities.

Unfortunately, the virtues of freely-flowing food and medicine may turn out to be a Potemkin village cloaking issues that are less likely to impact the majority of American citizens (if not the whole 99%).

Once we get past the blue-sky side of the story, we read the following:

Ms Napolitano cited a 2010 incident in which al-Qaeda operatives in the Arab Peninsula plotted to send explosive devices into the US via cargo planes that were thought to be carrying printer toner cartridges.

"That really brought to the forefront of my own recognition that we need to have a sense of urgency about the importance of the global supply chain,'' Ms Napolitano said as she addressed a crowd at the World Economic Forum.

However, the free flow of toner cartridges is just the tip of the iceberg.  The real iceberg can be found lurking in what has become an often-cited analysis piece by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, which appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times under the headline “How U.S. Lost Out On iPhone Work.”  Since Obama is being credited with this new supply chain protection strategy, it is appropriate to recall the opening paragraphs of this Times article:

When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president.

But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The rest of the article explains the logic behind Jobs’ depressing observation;  and, at the core of the lengthy (not to mention disconcerting to the point of harrowing) argument lies the critical role of the global supply chain.  The bottom line is that just about all American manufacturing is dependent on global supply chains, basically because one would not be able to impress shareholders with dazzling profit margins without them.  Put in the bluntest possible language, America has become a country in which just about any production of goods (and often services) has no substantive use for the American worker.

Obama is certainly right that the protection of global supply chains is currently of significant interest to “homeland security.”  However, excessive dependence on such supply chains should also be treated as a matter of homeland security.  It amounts to having a business culture in the throes of an addiction whose withdrawal could well be disastrous.  If our President were really interested in domestic security, he should be thinking about weaning that business culture away from the debilitating effects of globalization and rebuilding that culture of self-sufficiency that served us so well during the twentieth century.  Such self-sufficiency would require putting more Americans back to work.  This, of course, is what the Occupy movements have been crying for;  and Napolitano’s Davos speech makes it clear that the 1% are doing a good job of hanging tough in ignoring such matters.

Government by Shareholders?

It would appear that Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, as self-appointed representatives of the rich and mighty, have managed to scuttle plans for a Greek referendum on the proposed European Union bailout package.  The most positive reaction to their action appears to be significantly positive responses in both European and American stock markets.  The Asian markets apparently closed before receiving this latest news, so we shall have to wait to see what happens when they reopen.

At least we know who is really in charge in the brave new world of globalized economies.  All Prime Minister George Papandreou wanted to do was to give the Greek people the opportunity to respond to the proposal through the ballot box, rather than through yet another major protest on the streets of Athens.  This was apparently intolerable for those who acquire and maintain their wealth through those stock markets, and the result is that the representation of their interests counts for more than that of the Greek population at large.

Meanwhile, things are not much better on our side of the pond.  New York City got its first taste of winter snow, turning Zuccotti Park into a latter-day Valley Forge.  Like their Revolutionary forebears, the members of Occupy Wall Street are determined to stay through the winter if necessary;  and theirs may be the most significant battle of wills in the interest of the 99% they are representing.  However, right now Oakland seems to be receiving more media attention with a move to shut down the nighttime activities at the Port of Oakland.  While this began as the latest peaceful march, it appears that the police did not want to see things that way;  and things started to get ugly after midnight.

I would like to think that those in Cannes for the G20 summit are following this news very carefully.  I would like to believe that more and more news about these events will oblige them to give more thought to the issues behind the protests.  I just worry that the only thoughts that will emerge will have more to do with the well-being of shareholders, rather than the issues the protestors keep trying to raise.

The Rich and Mighty are not Getting the Message

Yesterday’s decision by Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou to submit the European Union (EU) bailout package to the Greek voters as a referendum item threw panic into world markets and thoroughly upset the applecart for the G20 summit that is about to begin in Cannes.  This is an absurdity that only seems to be appreciated by comedian Colin Quinn, who once asked why the World Economic Forum meets regularly in Davos when, if they really wanted to know about the health of the economy, they would learn so much more by meeting in Haiti.  The fact is that Papandreou was experiencing the “Occupy Wall Street” effect long before that movement had established itself.  Syntagma Square has witnessed both rallies and marches, all concerned with the devastating effects of austerity on the general public.  Now the EU wants Papandreou to sign up for more of the same;  and Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel have summoned him to Cannes to strong-arm him into accepting the deal.  Here we have two leaders of major European democracies meeting with the leader of the country where democracy was born;  and the message they are giving him is that, in the interest of the “greater good” of “economic well-being,” the only course of action amounts to “The public be damned.”

Of course it is more than just the Greek public being condemned to damnation.  The G20 is a painful reminder of the extent to which the global economy is at the mercy of an elite sector of the rich and mighty concerned with little more than maintaining their personal wealth and political power.  The problem is that the power of political position is not the power that will lead to recovery from the current economic crisis.  That power can only be grounded in the consent of those being governed for whom living conditions have become most dire.  To ignore those voices is to play the same confidence games that have sustained financial reasoning for all of the history of the very concept of money.  However, what the “Occupy” movements have taught the general public is that they are always going to be the losers in those games;  and, as the saying goes, they are not going to take it any more.

Sarkozy and Merkel are running scared.  They are scared because current economic conditions have exposed the Eurozone as a house of cards.  There is now a wind blowing in from Greece that can turn that house into a pile of rubble (and, as no end of pundits have observed, that wind is likely soon to be coming from Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or even Italy).  This would clearly be a bad thing for the world at large, but is there no leader ready to accept the fact that this wind will not vanish?  The problem is not one of building walls to shelter that house of cards.  The challenge is to build a stronger house at a time when the alternative is likely to be having no house at all.  Do we really expect that anyone enjoying the comforts of Cannes will raise this proposition at the G20 summit?