stewie wrote:I've been away for a few weeks and have only skimmed this discussion.

However, I don't think anyone has mentioned the fact that whenever a racist wants to make a racist comment, they preface it with, "Ya know, I'm not a racist, but...".

Gotta love that eternally useful disclaimer.

True, but unfortunately non racists sometimes feel it necessary to add this disclaimer to statements that are not racist but could be interpreted as such.

It is fairly common these days for someone criticising Israel to be accused of anti semitism. It's a handy tool to try and discredit anything someone has to say on a subject.

Andrew L. wrote:

And your throwback to the good old days of labor is ridiculous. Do you deny you are a reactionary? Own that shit, Bob. Marx and Engels were unequivocal in their belief that capitalism created opportunities and opened up spaces for better ways of living, different relations. You have a romanticized notion of American capitalism c. 1902 (or whenever) when industrialists, railroads, and robber barons still held sway over financiers ('jew bankers')--the grand old days of honest, unimpeded Social Darwinism. Your glory days of American labor is a time when British fucking capital and the market speculations of Jay Gould, Rockefeller, JP Morgan, the Astors and Vanderbilts ruled the day. Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 with a 100 millions dollars to his name.

What do you think "labor relations" were like in 1877? Get a fucking clue. And shut the fuck up with your "when workers were paid a wage commensurate with their contribution to producton." This has never happened. Ford introduced the 5-dollar day-wage in 1914 in reponse to insane labor turnover (and the Ford Motor Company was, of course, the last of the big 3 to unionize; I think in the early fifties(?))). The Ford Sociological Department and Ford English School attempted, through a process of coercion and consent to indoctrinate immigrants as Americans (ie, Fordist workers). The 5-dollar wage was pitched as a "profit sharing" instrument. Complete bullshit. It's 2006. There are libraries full of economic history books and case studies. Stop perpetuating this reactionary capitalist propaganda, please.

I was going to leave, but this has to be answered.

Why are you setting the rewind button for 1877-1903?
Why don't we just compare the last 25 years of US labor history to the Roman Empire?

After WWII, the soldiers returned home and took union jobs and the middle class grew and union wages grew and other than the fake OPEC oil scares, the economy grew, and the rich still ate well and the poor classes could at least get a real job besides McDonald's as long as they made it out of high school, and then we come to the part of the story where globalized trade policies and outsourcing and temping and unchecked immigration and union-busting administrations started peeling off the middle class lifestyle like a banana peel, one section at a time.

Compare where we are today to where US labor was at its peak, not some other dusty miserable era that suits your argument.

And I swear to God, if you come back with some "US unions got fat and lazy so we had to discipline them by making them compete for their jobs with Koreans so we could simultaneously raise the living standard of Korea", I'm coming to Alberta and taking your copy of Das Kapital and giving it someone who can understand it.

clocker bob wrote: After WWII, the soldiers returned home and took union jobs and the middle class grew and union wages grew and other than the fake OPEC oil scares, the economy grew, and the rich still ate well and the poor classes could at least get a real job besides McDonald's as long as they made it out of high school, and then we come to the part of the story where globalized trade policies and outsourcing and temping and unchecked immigration and union-busting administrations started peeling off the middle class lifestyle like a banana peel, one section at a time.

Compare where we are today to where US labor was at its peak, not some other dusty miserable era that suits your argument.

And I swear to God, if you come back with some "US unions got fat and lazy so we had to discipline them by making them compete for their jobs with Koreans so we could simultaneously raise the living standard of Korea", I'm coming to Alberta and taking your copy of Das Kapital and giving it someone who can understand it.

To be fair Bob, the post-WWII boom was largely fuelled by immense military expenditure and massive exporting. The former is not sustainable without further conquest of territories for resource. The latter reason has a flipside, which is that if you wish to export with impunity, your own market is fair game for more efficient importers. Your dating of globalisation to after this golden age appears off to me.

I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but the forces that the US (and to a lesser extent the UK, with financial services) benefitted from post-war are the same that exist today. Trade moves faster, communication is instantaneous, but the forces are the same. Only the boot is on the other foot.

To be honest, thinking about these arguments from this perspective, I actually feel more favourable to the current system, though not enough to like it. There is a measure of what goes around comes around.

EDIT for afterthought: The last point reflects a sort of perverse glee I get from developing countries (hateful term!) starting to beat the old powers at their own game. It's off, of course; the poor sods being laid off didn't do anything wrong. But, there is an undeniable redistribution of wealth from West to East aspect to these trends.

sparky wrote:To be fair Bob, the post-WWII boom was largely fuelled by immense military expenditure and massive exporting. The former is not sustainable without further conquest of territories for resource.

Further conquest and further destruction; as you say, if the strongest economies are coal-burning locomotives, with the coal being war and war preparation, then you must always be moving down the tracks like a shark.

sparky wrote:The latter reason has a flipside, which is that if you wish to export with impunity, your own market is fair game for more efficient importers. Your dating of globalisation to after this golden age appears off to me.

No, but I think that the repercussions of rebuilt Europe and rebuilt Japan were not felt by the US labor market all that severely until the '70's; then it was like the dike broke, and our trade position seesawed down to where it stands today.

sparky wrote:I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but the forces that the US (and to a lesser extent the UK, with financial services) benefitted from post-war are the same that exist today. Trade moves faster, communication is instantaneous, but the forces are the same. Only the boot is on the other foot.

I personally think the boot has been worn by the same foot for a long time, and the goal of the boot has been to put downward pressure on an expanding middle class, no matter where in the world the boot finds it.

sparky wrote:To be honest, thinking about these arguments from this perspective, I actually feel more favourable to the current system, though not enough to like it. There is a measure of what goes around comes around.

Absolutely.

If the US is the economic bully of the world, we are long overdue for our punch in the nose, but the consequences of any punching will not be felt by the wearer of the boot- if capital is like blood and an economy is like a lung, the capital will rush to whichever lung can give it the most oxygen. If central banking is the vascular heart of first world finance, there is always a strengthening lung ready to replace a weakening lung.

sparky wrote:EDIT for afterthought: The last point reflects a sort of perverse glee I get from developing countries (hateful term!) starting to beat the old powers at their own game. It's off, of course; the poor sods being laid off didn't do anything wrong. But, there is an undeniable redistribution of wealth from West to East aspect to these trends.

I wish there was no hill and no king of the hill, because the boulders of income redistribution tumble downhill from just above the heads of the middle classes, never from the peak.

Really hard to imagine our trade deficit with China ever shrinking any time this century even if these numbers rise at an optimistic rate. $0.57 an hour? Hard to even think of a US made product a Chinese worker could buy on that wage.

From an article by Paul Craig Roberts, ex-Reagan cabinet, ex-Wall Street Journal- the article begins with a depressing account of US employment stats, but I chose to excerpt a portion related to China's labor market.

Life in the Bush Economy: Fat, Drunk and Broke

A Nation of Waitresses and Bartenders

The huge excess supply of labor means extremely low Chinese wages. The average Chinese wage is $0.57 per hour, a mere 3% of the average US manufacturing worker's wage. With first world technology, capital, and business knowhow crowding into China, virtually free Chinese labor is as productive as US labor. This should make it obvious to anyone who claims to be an economist that offshore production of goods and services is an example of capital seeking absolute advantage in lowest factor cost, not a case of free trade based on comparative advantage.

full article here

This is a masterpiece of satire; if the jokes were packed in any more tightly, it would explode.

Illegal Immigrants Returning To Mexico For American Jobs

May 3, 2006 | Issue 42•18

the Onion

MEXICO CITY—As dozens of major American corporations continue to move their manufacturing operations to Mexico, waves of job-seeking Mexican immigrants to the United States have begun making the deadly journey back across the border in search of better-paying Mexican-based American jobs.

"I came to this country seeking the job I sought when I first left this country," said Anuncio Reyes, 22, an undocumented worker who recrossed the U.S. border into Mexico last month, three years after leaving Mexico for the United States to work as an agricultural day laborer. "I spent everything I had to get back here. Yes, it was dangerous, and I miss my home. But as much as I love America, I have to go where the best American jobs are."

Reyes now works as a spot-welder on the assembly line of a Maytag large-appliance plant and earns $22 a day, most of which he sends back to his family in the U.S., who in turn send a portion of that back to the original family they left in Mexico. Like many former Mexican-Americans forced by circumstance to become American-Mexicans, Reyes dreams of one day bringing his relatives to Mexico so that they, too, may secure American employment in Mexico.

Despite the considerable risk illegal immigrants face in returning across the border, many find the lure of large U.S. factory salaries hard to resist—at 15 percent of the pay of corresponding jobs in America, these positions pay three times what Mexican jobs do.

Still, the danger is very real. When 31-year-old illegal Arizona resident Ignacio Jimenez sought employment at an American plant in Mexico, he was shot at by Mexican border guards as he attempted to illegally enter the country of his citizenship, pursued by U.S. immigration officials who thought he might be entering the country illegally, and fired upon again by a second group of U.S. Border Patrol agents charged with keeping valuable table-busing and food-delivery personnel inside American borders.

"It was a nightmare," Jimenez said. "Many became disoriented and panicked, and some were mixed in with immigrants going the other way across the Rio Grande and ended up swimming to the wrong country."

He added: "My cousin almost drowned. They fished him out and sent him back to wash dishes at T.G.I. Friday's."

Many say the trip across the border as illegal Mexican-American emigrants offers them a chance to land the American jobs in Mexico they never have been able to get as illegal Mexican-American immigrants in the U.S.

"It has always been my goal to have a good American job," Johnson Controls technician Camilla Torres, 27, said. "Many Mexicans now see Mexico as the land of opportunity. Mexicans will not stop trying to get here, no matter how much the Mexicans wish we would not."

Indeed, the trend of illegal re-emigration is causing great resentment among the local Mexican population, and tension between Mexicans and illegally re-entered Mexicans—dubbed repatriados—continues to build.

"I hate these Mexicans, always coming back here to Mexico from America and taking American jobs from the Mexicans who stayed in Mexico," said 55-year-old former Goodyear factory manager Juan-Miguel Diaz, who lost his job to a better-trained repatriado last March. "Why don't they go back to where they went to?"

Still, Jimenez, Reyes, and hundreds of others say they have no choice.

"The American Dream is alive and well in Mexico," Reyes said. "If I work hard, save my money, and plan well, I will be able to send my children to a good school—and who knows? If they study hard, perhaps they will get jobs someday at the new plant General Motors is building in China."