It’s once again time for the obligatory “predictions” for the upcoming year. With the world being a crazier and more chaotic place than ever, such an exercise is inherently masochistic. However, being a good sport, I’ll peek into my own crystal ball and attempt to decipher my vision for the future.
In keeping with tradition, I must first review my predictions for 2010 (here’s where the masochism comes into play). As I attempt to “explain” how and why the world did not unfold as I predicted one year ago, two themes come into play: in one respect, I simply overestimated the speed at which events would progress in 2010; while in the other, I grossly underestimated the human capacity for stupidity.
More Here..I expected civil unrest in the U.S. in 2010 (as did the U.S. government when it illegally deployed a unit of the U.S. Army on American soil) due to the widespread recognition that the “U.S. economic recovery” was nothing but a propaganda hoax. Instead, placid American sheep went through all of this year still acquiescing to the delusion that the U.S. economy is “growing”.
Part of the reason I expected the non-existent U.S. “recovery” to be acknowledged is that I considered this the only way that the U.S. government would be able to justify throwing “more than $1 trillion” at the U.S. economy, in attempting to reanimate this corpse. I was wrong here. While the Obama regime threw $800 billion at the U.S. economy (in extending tax-cuts for fat cats), and Bernanke threw another $600 billion at the economy (via more “QE”), these two colossal frauds did so while managing to avoid admitting that all of their rhetoric about a “U.S. economic recovery” was nothing but shameless lies.
Everything ok as Obonzo visits GE today to inspect turbines manufactured for ........
ReplyDeleteYeah; that;s right - our dear friends in India
They will use then to make stuff
That they will ship
Here
We are no longer interested in this very outdated midset.
Corporate America and Pa. Ave are alive and prospering
I guess the rest of us can just go to hell.
3:14 You can tell Obama has no business sense or background.
ReplyDeleteIf he had, he would want to know why we were exporting these highly effiecent, state of the art Turbines? Cannot we put them to good use here mfg. textiles, shoes, furniture, plastics
These "big" sales of our latest technology to India, Japan, China, Brazil look great until you realize they all do the same thing; copy the technology and then produce everyday need goods at 1/2 price.
So that today, you have entire industries that are never coming back = like shoes
Try and buy a pair of shoes or boots or athletics that are made here ! Try it ! You will wear yourself out. WTF ! This is basic - the very thing we put on everyday to get from point A to point B and we cannot make them here?
It is the job of these elected officals to see that A) we do and B) we continue & they have failed miserably on both counts. Opting instead to lead us into foreign entanglements we have no business in and all encompassing bills of 2,500 pages for health care when it's already the envy of the world and ass deep legislation on every stupid special interest that can figure out how to sink it;s claws into our manufacturers ( for their own good you see )
We all see where this is going - I do not no the time, but I do know you cannot run a country on a service sector driven economy - you have to make stuff - everyday stuff people use
Like shoes
Today I found a propane tank at Sam's Club, proudly made in the USA! Wow, golly!
ReplyDeleteMy wife, many years ago was a slave in a sweat shop in Honduras. She was paid $.24 (twenty four cents) per hour to operate an industrial sewing machine, making Osh Kosh jeans for export to the good 'ol USA.
The denim was placed outside and sprayed with poison to keep the bugs from eating the fabric. The rolls were then brought in and the patterns were cut, many layers at a time with a bandsaw. The poisoned fabric dust was in the air and the girls were alway sick. The poisoned fabric was handled with bare hands, so the poison was always in contact with the workers skin.
There was no concern for worker safety, if a worker cut off her hand or finger with the band saw, she was fired. The company was not responsible for her injury.
My wife started working there when she was 14. A 6th grade education is all you get in most third world countries and if you are a girl, you're expected to work in a garment factory or similar.
At $.24 per hour, that totaled to $39.00 US monthly. Wages are low, but prices are not. If a pound of rice was $1.00 in the USA, it was the same price in Honduras. There was never any extra money for luxuries, like make up, perfume, a nice hair brush, for the girls. Forget about ever drinking coffee or soda or fruit juices, they were just not affordable.
I figured that the total cost of materials, labor and export to the USA, of one pair of Osh Kosh jeans, was less than $5.00. We see these same jeans in retail stores for $30-40 dollars. All companies are allowed to make a profit, without profit they would go out of business, but is extreme profit really necessary? I believe one reason Nike shoes are so damn expensive is because Nike pays superstar athletes millions of dollars to promote their shoes. Nike no doubt sponsors many athletic events costing millions and for this, they have to sell a made in Vietnam shoe (that cost 3 dollars to manufacture), for $89.00. I do not own a single pair of Nike's.
I love Made in the USA, Diamond Gusset jeans. You can buy made in El Salvador, Levi's for $48.00 or you can buy Diamond Gussets for $50.00. Perhaps you have never heard of Diamond Gusset? I'm sure they don't have a multi-million dollar advertising budget. They rely on word of mouth advertising.
We can bring manufacturing back to America. We need state governments that are business friendly and will promote manufacturing in their states. It can happen. It really can.
I just heard that 71% of the people polled DO NOT WANT Congress to raise the debt ceiling. I hope you have all learned by know, that if the People appose something (Obamacare) Congress will vote for it. We the People mean nothing to Congress. That's all the more reason to shut them down and lock them up.
Me thinks the fools on Congress and that undocumented worker, currently occupying the White House, think they can continue to push us closer into the corner. Makes me think of Shay's rebellion, or the rebellion of the surfs in England. Those boys were mad enough to cut the King's head off!
Several good points above and I think that the one overiding factor of America today is greed.
ReplyDeleteAnd we always seem to take things to the extreme
No, we don't need little girls making 40 bucks a month sewing caustic materilas for osk kosh
But damn -it we cannot have union employees making 45 bucks an hour while farming out every job they get 40 - 50% and expect to be competitive
We seem to have the lost the ability to find some middle ground
As the demand grows for GE turbines in India they will shift production there. The US is only a stepping stone to a growing market in the developing third world. The USA is done. face it.
ReplyDeleteI refuse to sit on my hands and tell myself, "the USA is finished, and there is nothing I can do about it".
ReplyDeleteThings will have to get much worse, before they get better. If we have 25% true unemployment, that also means that 75% of the working class do have jobs and as long as they can still make the house payment, rent payment, car payment, they will spend all their free time in front of their 60" HDTV's where the evening news will tell them "all is well", "the economy is on the rebound". When you informed ones try to tell them things are bad and getting worse, they will tell you, you're wrong, because they saw on the news that things are getting better and better all the time.
When the collapse comes, and I believe it will by the end of March, unless Congress raises the debt ceiling, all those people who said you were wrong about things, will come to you for help.
Congress WILL raise the debt ceiling.. write it in stone.
ReplyDeleteThings can, are and will get much, much worse before they get better because everyone from corporate america to the prez is lying to us all pretty much about everything.
You state 75% of the working class; but do you know what that number really represents?
The latest census states 308.7 million
SSI mails out almost 60 million checks a month
24.3% of the 308.7 are under age of 18 ( 74 million)
The number of people recieving food stamps will likely reach 50 million this year - these are hardly people with high paying jobs buying your large screen T.V's that you mention.
So with all your underemployed, illegal, dope growers, underground, black market, lives in a tent, and 100 g a year pensioners - we're pushing 200 million that are basically on the dole and will be for life as once you get on there are so many damn programs they just kick you from one handout to the next ( it's in job interest, more recipients, more tax dollars to fund)
Say that leaves you with a whopping 110 million and 75% are gainfully employed
Oh boy! we got less than 90 million people in this entire country funding the whole fucking thing !
Now it gets real interesting; out of those 90 million how many do you suppose actually make something and thereby turn a profit and how many do you suppose are " service sector"
Yeah buddy !
Deep shit?
Most cannot even begin to fathom how deep.
5.00
ReplyDeleteAnd his family has had it seems, some life experience of real world economics, in both the Third and First worlds .
Capitalism, competitive “Free trade” and the dollar hegemony system promised ‘development” but has failed humanity as in Honduras.
Indeed most of the worlds people are forced to subsist on a couple of bucks a day.
Things are different in the First world where a lot of the wealth consumed is transferred one way or another from the third world.
It is a lie that it costs less to live with a decent standard of living and good food in the Third World. Food monopolies and speculators using cheap money from the Fed
dictate the world price of food and the price of oil, fertilizers ,etc.
As 5.00 points out prices are tough in Honduras.
America and capitalist neo-colonialist economics has turned it into a low waged export of cheap labor created wealth to the West economy. There is no basic food security as the local small farmers ,say corm farmers , have to compete with often subsidized mass produced even genetically modified imported grains from the first world .
This drives desperate Hondurans into the cheap labor foreign owned factories.
“At $.24 per hour, that totaled to $39.00 US monthly. Wages are low, but prices are not. If a pound of rice was $1.00 in the USA, it was the same price in Honduras. There was never any extra money for luxuries, like make up, perfume, a nice hair brush, for the girls. Forget about ever drinking coffee or soda or fruit juices, they were just not affordable.”
Right now the US in conducting a currency war against the third World peoples by exporting cheap near interest free money, printed bailout money .
These banksters do not invest much of this free Fed money as loans to re-build American industry or on personal credit, except at high usury interest rates on mortgages and credit card debt.
Ordinary capital cannot compete now with interest free money, so this free money dominates the markets
As america prints its profits for the banksters.
Unproductive of real profit high waged services workers in America only received high wages and got to buy cheaply jeans from Honduras or Haiti ,China and the like , from export of wealth economies ,where the workers are only paid near slave level subsistence wages.
Highly paid but debt ridden Americans in a
de-industrialized services economy now worry that they cannot afford these cheap labor commodities and increased prices for food either now the dollar hegemony and credit supply system has began to fail.
So the dollar hergemony “free trade”system despite all its wars and bailouts to keep it going ,is now failing to deliver for Americans too.
I saw that GE man was appointed, how sad
ReplyDeleteI've wondered by time this is all in full swing we may see 60% unemployment/underemployment..underemployment meaning less hrs less pay partime no benefits, just lower standard of living, which is the continuous trend so maybe not hard to imagine.
considering the above not hard to imagine, so to get worse..well it'll be ugly
a time of tribulation such as the world has never seen
To supplement 5:54's comments. I know a Texas woman who is in Honduras, she takes unwanted newborns, infants and children and does her best to raise them properly. Before you spout off about how Honduras is a Catholic country and the church forbids contraception and that's the root cause of the problem, I'll remind you of what has already been said, do you think the average working class citizen of Honduras could even afford any form of contraception? Do we just tell them to keep their zippers up at all times? Will you do the same and then tell us how hard it is to suppress a natural thing called a sex drive?
ReplyDeleteThis same woman tells me that there are no food shortages in Honduras, yet 90% of it is for export to the USA. The poor guy harvesting pineapples all day can't afford to buy a single one! Who owns all the plantations? United Fruit, Dole, Green Giant and all the other USA corporations.
"Will you do the same and then tell us how hard it is to suppress a natural thing called a sex drive?"
ReplyDeleteThere is something called masturbation. Despite many not wanting to talk about it or admit it, 99% of humans do it on a regular basis. That's how you can get off. In real life even married people don't do it enough to where they won't at some point need to masturbate.
What a stupid point. Well, it isn't a point because it doesn't match reality. I'm sure if I'm single I can just walk out the door and find plenty of women waiting to have sex since they can't control their sex drives any other way.
By the way, Progressive Elites long ago came up with the idea that your sex drive can't be controlled. But it can, that's why we have minds.
Maybe if the people in Honduras and other countries similar were to stop using drugs and accepting prostitution then they'd have less bastard babies and could maybe reduce the amount of diseases in their country. But it's far too difficult to suppress what's natural. Keep the diseases and fatherless children coming please!
Seems the real point was that US corps basically own Honduras and they sit back and do nothing to stop the exploitation of the work force, all in the name of greater profits for their companies.
ReplyDelete