U.S. not "trying that hard" on exports according to GE's Immelt - Balance of Trade and economic weakness

Reuters recently ran an interview with GE's CEO Immelt in which he laid out a case that the U.S. economy is weak because the U.S. is not trying hard enough to raise exports.  The basic idea is that it's other countries who are building actual products for export, and that the countries who export actual products are the ones earning revenue.  The U.S. manufacturing has been weakened by decades of globalization moving what used to be U.S. manufacturing to other countries.  I'm sure that General Electric has done their share of offshoring and moving manufacturing overseas, so this is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

"We're not trying that hard," Immelt told a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event in New York on Monday. "We haven't really tried as hard as we can to compete, educate and sell our products around the world, and I think we can do better."

Immelt is a CEO of a major corporation, a life-long Republican, and a top advisor to the Obama Administration on Jobs and the Economy.  Hence what he has to say carries some weight.  He's also part of the 1% right?

The nation's economic malaise, now in its third year, has left many Americans angry and frustrated, Immelt said, and people in power need to empathize.  "Unemployment is 9.1 percent. Underemployment is much higher than that, particularly among young people that don't have a college degree," Immelt said. "It is natural to assume that people are angry, and I think we have to be empathetic and understand that people are not feeling great."

Immelt offers a poorly stated plan for a solution to this:  "The only way to solve this specific problem is growth," Immelt said. "If unemployment comes down, people will feel better. If unemployment goes up, people will feel worse, no matter what goes on Wall Street."

Ah.. if only it were that simple.  Growth!  Right!

Uh.. the reason the U.S. manufacturing is weak is because of offshoring production into a globalized economy.  Sorry, Immelt, but I think your suggestions deserve to be ridiculed.

See:

U.S. not "trying that hard" on exports: GE's Immelt

Arrests of OccupyWallStreet protesters in Boston, arrest threats in Seattle ...

The OccupyWallStreet movement is the latest happening thing in America.  To me it seems like some memes from the "Arab Spring" touched nerves in the U.S. and became this outrage at Wall Street.  What's happening is in cities across the U.S. (maybe it's spread to other countries?) clusters of people have formed, camping out in their downtown areas (e.g. in San Francisco they're camped out on the sidewalk in front of the SF branch of the Federal Reserve) demanding ..something..  It's one thing to have outrage, it's another thing to focus the outrage into meaningful change especially when there's so many opinions of just what change there is to make.

It's also interesting to view this process through the different lenses available.  These popular uprisings have happened in several countries this year, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and now the U.S., and in each country events have unfolded in different ways, and it's been portrayed differently.  There's a way ones perspective or point of view changes how you interpret these things.

In the U.S. we're seeing Officialdom responding to protesters camped out downtown with police force and arrests.  In NYC a couple weeks ago hundreds of protesters were herded onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where they were arrested for blocking traffic.  We see below that in Boston a hundred or so protesters were arrested in a 1am raid with police attacking a group named "Veterans for Peace".  Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino has expressed sympathy for the issues expressed by the protesters, saying that corporate fraud and greed are issues he's worked on his whole political career, "But you can't tie up a city" in defending the arrests.  In other words he's saying that the functioning of the city is more important than the protest/ers?

In Seattle the protesters were told the city was not at that time planning to commit any arrests.  However the location of their encampment, Westlake Park, is supposed to close at 10pm each night and the city officials are demanding that protesters obey that regulation, and are threatening arrests.  Further police there are banning people from carrying umbrella's; it's Seattle, everyone carries umbrella's, but protesters who want to stay outside for days at a time and stay dry will rely on umbrella's, so by banning umbrella's it's a sneaky way to make it hard on protesters to do their thing.

I'm sure the Mayor of Cairo had similar thinking last Jan/Feb with the thousands upon thousands of protesters camped out in the center of that city.  I'm sure he woulda said something like "But you can't tie up a city."   The throngs of Egyptian protesters had huge international positive press coverage, with throngs of people around the world rooting for them.  I'm sure it was inconvenient to the Egyptians to have their city blocked up by protesters, with Officialdom in part simply desiring to restore "order".  The Egyptian protesters could have complied with "you can't tie up a city" and kept their protests limited enough to let the city keep functioning, but they didn't.  They had a political regime to change, a society to remake into a positive format, converting it from brutal dictatorship to one that treats its people humanely.

The job of the Mayor is to keep the city running, right?  One could argue that a Mayor who lets protesters run rampant and disrupt things isn't doing his/her job in keeping order.  Even if in the greater scheme of things, the protesters are advocating for positive and worthy change, in the process they're disrupting order.  It's the job of the Mayor or Governor or whatever Officialdom, to work to keep the population orderly and functioning smoothly.  In other words "you can't tie up a city".

On the other hand creating change does mean interrupting the current order of how things are done, so things can be changed into a new/different order.  You can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs.

You might think that in the U.S. we don't have as dire a situation as they had/have in Egypt.  That our situation in the U.S. isn't as desperate as the Egyptian's or Libyan's.  But, maybe our situation is as dire, or more so, and maybe our situation is part and parcel of their situation.

The Occupy<City> movement has identified "Wall Street" as the culprits.  What they're be pointing to is the corporate-greed-control complex that has subverted the political systems not just in the U.S. but around the world.  In the U.S. a symptom has been the rampant fraud in housing mortgages - Almost a quarter of all home mortgages today are currently underwater, 2 million homes are in the foreclosure process – and at least 5 million homes have already lost to foreclosure since 2007.  A lot of it due to corporatists who set up a fraudulent system to defraud these millions of home owners out of their homes.

But the same corporatists are committing other financial sins all around the world.   "Globalization" means that it's the same global-elite-power-corporatists everywhere.  They are dominating not only the U.S. but the whole world economy.  The issues faced in Egypt in part are the same issues we have in the U.S.  In both cases our political systems have been subverted by the global power/money/elite structure, and many rightfully see e.g. the economic meltdown etc as a symptom of the looting and fraud behind the banking chaos.

 

 

Boston Police Attack Veterans for Peace by @haveyoumetter for @DigBoston

Boston’s mayor: “Civil disobedience will not be tolerated”

The worst OWS moment so far

Seattle pressures protesters to relocate

Jubilee 2012?

Review: The Economics of Happiness

A new movie to burst on the scene, The Economics of Happiness, gives one the opportunity of an hours contemplation on the role of local economies, global economies, the mad rush of modern life, the simplicity of rural traditional villages, happiness, contentment, feelings of well-being and connection with our fellow travelers through life, etc. Does globalization make us happy or unhappy, give us security or insecurity, etc? Do all the gadgets and gizmos of modern life bring happiness, or are they a false panacea leaving us wanting more?

One major theme the movie revisits over and over is the people of Ladakh, in Tibet. The main narrator explains she's been working with the people there for a couple decades. When she first arrived the people were happy, they all had plenty of food, plenty of free time, large houses, etc. Then the Chinese built a subsidized road to their area, brought in subsidized food in subsidized trucks with subsidized fuel, and the local economy collapsed to become subservient to the global economy.
In essence that's what has happened everywhere over the last 500 years beginning with the European colonization of the world. That colonization led to the giant mega transnational corporations we have today and today's demand for deregulation and globalization is simply a lather-rinse-repeat cycle of the global economic powers subverting local economies and entrapping the people into global economic relationships.

This is how the movie makers interpret e.g. the colonization era. In the colonized nations, whether they were African or South American or Asian etc, there were local self-reliant communities, world-wide. Each were able to feed themselves and each had local cultural practices and languages which fit the local conditions. But the colonizers purpose was to build global economic power systems, just as todays transnational corporations still work to build and maintain global economic power systems. What's different are the mechanisms and scale, but it's the same pattern.

The movie makers suggest that this pattern is bad in many ways. It destroys local connections, local values, local self reliance, and so on. It makes us unhappy, breeds insecurity, accelerates climate change, destroys livelihoods, etc.

Globalization is defined as: 1) The deregulation of trade and finance in order to enable businesses and banks to operate globally; 2) The emergence of a single world market dominated by transnational companies. It is said to be the most powerful force for change in the world today.
Globalization would not be so horrid if it weren't for the massive scale world-side shipping industry that can whizz stuff around the world in a flash. A bit of ridiculosity the movie discusses is some of the globalized transactions that seem utterly ridiculous. For example Tuna that's caught in the U.S., shipped to China for processing, then shipped back to the U.S. Or Apples grown in England, shipped to South Africa to be waxed, then shipped back to England.

Because of this transportation system we're now sitting in each others laps. One reason traditional local economies worked is due to the inefficient transportation of former times. But as transportation became global, especially over the last 20-30 years, it would naturally affect local economies. Transportation technology is what puts us in contact with our brethren on the other side of the world.
The last third of the movie presented many leading figures in the relocalization movement talking about the value of local economies, local food, local culture, and so on. Many of the people preaching relocalization came to it via peak oil or climate change, but the movie discussed it as a reawakening of traditional culture.

What does humanity lose when it loses a local tradition, or a local language? Just as biodiversity helps forests etc be more resilient, so too would cultural diversity help our global society be more resilient. In theory. What are we losing by heading towards a monoculture where every place is the same as every other place?

The Economics of Happiness is on a world-wide tour at this time, and local screenings are being arranged around the world. Visit the web site for more information.

Links: 

http://www.theeconomicsofhappiness.org/

Interview - Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Interview with John Perkins author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" - This is a very important set of information to hear and understand to get an inkling of what's really going on in our world. You may think the war in Iraq or Afghanistan is about some people who attacked a building in NYC a few years ago. Nope. It's part of a global game of controlling the resources of the world.

The interviewee is the author of an important book (linked at right) that exposes the line of work he used to hold.

An "economic hit man" is an especially placed person inserted into companies by a secretive group who uses both government and businesses to maintain the economic empire the global elite is using to control the world.

The work of an economic hit man is behind the scenes, producing slanted reports and otherwise pulling strings of control. The result is control over the worlds resources to benefit the rich.

Scroll down to find a pair of youtube video's with an extensive interview with John Perkins

Mega Giant Corporations Are Very Bad for America | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

This is a tale of globalized megacorporations gone awry. I want to say at the outset that I believe the current state of deregulated globalized megacorporations comes about because the government has been weakened to the point it cannot rein in corporate excesses. Corporations have proved over and over they cannot be counted on to behave according to enlightened self interest, instead corporations have proved over and over they are willing to lie, cheat, steal, poison, and otherwise act to destroy their customers or employees. Corporations have proved over and over they have no ethics and no compunction about anything in the pursuit of profit. This despite the fact that corporations are made up of people, people who are making the horrendous decisions that lead to unethical business practices.

The story is about Walmart - the great bugaboo hobgoblin of the progressive. I myself immensely dislike that corporation and never set foot in one despite passing by their store quite regularly (it's across the street from the Whole Foods). The story in this article just cements my opinion about them.

When you have a corporation that "delivers at least 30% and sometimes more than 50% of the entire U.S. consumption of products" that corporation holds an inordinate amount of power. Namely: Walmart.

A few years ago a pet food quality scare opened up knowledge about bad stuff in the food industry. It was learned an Ontario-based company named Menu Foods was producing a massively large proportion of all pet food sold in the U.S. They delivered pet food under at least 150 different brand names from the high-end, expensive brands like Iams and Hill’s Pet Nutrition Science Diet to more pedestrian ones like SuperValu. Then double clicking on this food source it became known that essentially all production of wheat gluten had come to be controlled by China.

It isn't just wheat gluten and pet food at issue. It's that Chinese companies have gained complete control over production of various essential product components.

The issue isn't about China, it's about the risk inherent in putting control over essential resources in the hands of any other country. For example the U.S. is entirely beholden to OPEC countries for oil imports, a fact which puts the U.S. at risk to being controlled by those OPEC countries. As was proved during the mid 1970's during the fake oil crises of that era, if a country were to control supply of vital materials, that country can wield economic warfare against other countries.

China in particular has managed to gain a really strong position over the rest of the world through control over production of all sorts of things.

For those Americans who believe in what we were taught in civics class and Econ 101, the most disturbing revelation was not even the fragility of our food systems, but that some of our most cherished beliefs about how the U.S. economy works appear no longer to be true. We are told that companies are engaged in a mad scramble to discover exactly what we the U.S. consumers want and to devise perfectly tailored systems to supply those want as efficiently as possible. We are told that our economy is characterized by constantly chaotic yet always constructive competition and that any American with a better product and bit of gumption can bring that product to market and beat the big guys.

The true situation we have is nowhere near the wide open competitive paradise we seem to have. Instead we have stores full of basically identical products whose differ only in the color choice on the labels. It's all the same crap inside each one of the products.

Until we elected Ronald Reagan president, both Democrats and Republicans made sure that no chain store ever came to dominate more than a small fraction of sales in the United States as a whole, or even in any one region of the country. Between 1917 and 1979, for instance, administrations from both parties repeatedly charged the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, the chain store behemoth of the mid-twentieth century that is better known as A & P, with violations of antitrust law, even threatening to break the firm into pieces.

Then in 1981 we stopped enforcing that law. Thus, today Wal-Mart is at least five times bigger, relative to the overall size of the U.S. economy, than A & P was at the very height of its power.

A walk down the aisles of a megastore like Walmart may make it hard to believe there is no real choice. The dizzying array of brand names and product choices certainly looks like a huge variety of choice. But the truth is that megacorporations own the majority of the brand names, they enter into fake competition between their own brands, and in any case outsourcing means the source materials behind each product is the same.

Article Reference: 

Mega Giant Corporations Are Very Bad for America | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

Technosanity #42: contemplating the cost of making tea

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Making tea is such a simple thing isn't it? Or, is it? Where do the tea leaves come from and what is the environmental impact of growing the tea? Where does the paper for the tea bag come from, what is the environmental impact of that? What about limited water resources? Is the tea shipped across the planet?

Many tea makers attempt to appeal to green consciousness with fair trade practices, or claiming to grow the tea sustainably, etc. All that is laudible, but then they ship the tea thousands of miles and the environmental impact of the globalized shipping probably destroys several times over the gains from the sustainable farming practice.

Technosanity #42: contemplating the cost of making tea

Links: 

Making Tea (on youtube)

Ed Markey, chairman, House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming - - POLITICO.com

“It is vitally important that we show we are no longer turning a blind eye to the problem of climate change,” Markey told POLITICO. “The Obama administration will be able to say to the world, ‘We are no longer going to preach temperance from a bar stool; we are now ready to begin to make a commitment.’” Still it is possible Markey and dozens of other House members would be no-shows, if their presence was needed on Capitol Hill to vote on the health care bill. But if he makes it to Copenhagen with his colleagues, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Markey said, “our message will be that the Congress is committed to partnering with the Obama administration toward the goal of passing historic energy and climate legislation.”

Article Reference: 

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30066.html

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

URL: 

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

Description: 

Established in 1964, UNCTAD promotes the development-friendly integration of developing countries into the world economy. UNCTAD has progressively evolved into an authoritative knowledge-based institution whose work aims to help shape current policy debates and thinking on development, with a particular focus on ensuring that domestic policies and international action are mutually supportive in bringing about sustainable development.