Americans have given up

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 04:06
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SECOND

Friday, March 25, 2016 9:46 PM

The biggest threat to American workers is slowly starting to go away
http://wpo.st/fRgN1
By Matt O'Brien March 21, 2016

It turns out that the end of history was really the end of workers' bargaining power.

In other words, it wasn't just capitalism that won when the Berlin Wall came down. It was capital itself. That's what adding a billion new workers to the global economy all at once will do. Suddenly CEOs had the leverage to keep wages down in rich countries since they could always threaten to move jobs someplace cheaper like China—which they did.

And that's really what we're talking about when we talk about globalization. Sure, Latin America, eastern Europe, and southeast Asia have all become key cogs in the world economy in the past quarter century, but China has remade it. Manufacturers have moved their factories there, suppliers have too, and this whole ecosystem has helped pull more people out of poverty than at any other time in human history.

The flip side of this happy story, though, is that it's very much come at the expense of American workers. Now, I know: ask any economist, and they'll tell you that this isn't the way things work. That people who have their jobs outsourced will, for the most part, find new ones that pay just as much if not more. And, to be fair, that was a pretty accurate description of the world for a long time—but not right now. Economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson have found that, between 1990 and 2007, the American communities most exposed to Chinese competition saw their manufacturing workers pushed into persistent unemployment, their non-manufacturing workers pushed into accepting lower wages, and everyone pushed into relying on the safety net, whether that was welfare, disability, or food stamps, more than before. In all, trade with China alone was responsible for about a fifth of the manufacturing jobs we lost during this time—or 1.5 million to be exact.

The truth is that nobody knows why trade has hurt so much more now than it did before. Maybe it has something to do with low-skill workers being the hardest hit. Or maybe, as economist Adam Ozimek says, it's that people either can no longer afford or fathom moving somewhere else for work, so they get stuck in dying towns. Or maybe the simplest explanation is the right one: it's just that China is big. As in really, really big. The global economy has never seen a shock like China's rise, and never will again.

Now wait a minute. Don't Africa and India both have a billion workers who have or about to enter the wider economy themselves? Why yes, yes they do. What they don't have, though, is what has turned China into the workshop of the world. That's a single market, a single set of rules, and basically a single language. But maybe more important than all of that is that China has a government has invested in the infrastructure it needs to be integrated with the rest of the world. Think about it like this. It doesn't matter if you have the workers and the factories if you don't also have the roads and bridges and air and seaports to connect with the other parts of the global supply chain.

China does and these other countries don't. And the that fact that it does means that companies have not only moved their operations there, but the companies that supply those other ones have as well so they can give them what they need faster. It's what Paul Krugman calls the economics of agglomeration: specializing in a small thing can cause big changes, since companies that sell things to companies that sell things to companies that sell things to American customers will all cluster together. And that closeness will create cost advantages that pile up. So you end up being a lot better at something because you started out being a little better at it.

What we're saying, then, is that China had so many more workers and so much more infrastructure than any other country that has or possibly could join the global econo

JO753

Saturday, March 26, 2016 10:26 AM

Uv course, that conclusion iznt taking 2 major factorz into account - droidz and essentialz depletion.

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DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

AURAPTOR

Saturday, March 26, 2016 7:09 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

We people seem exhausted from fighting with our elected representatives and getting nowhere.

" It takes a long time, to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people. " - John Dingell ( Democrat )

SECOND

Saturday, March 26, 2016 9:50 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:

" It takes a long time, to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people. " - John Dingell ( Democrat )

I have no idea who Dingell is, but I know AURaptor and I know there is more to that quote than what was included. To listen to the whole quote will only take a second:

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

THGRRI

Sunday, March 27, 2016 2:55 AM

Yep, knowing rappy and his agenda type posting. Nice post TWO

JEWELSTAITEFAN

Sunday, March 27, 2016 3:42 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:

" It takes a long time, to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people. " - John Dingell ( Democrat )
I have no idea who Dingell is, but I know AURaptor and I know there is more to that quote than what was included. To listen to the whole quote will only take a second:

Do you keep your head in the sand, in order to remain oblivious to those taking away your rights like Dingell?

SECOND

Sunday, March 27, 2016 4:19 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

Do you keep your head in the sand, in order to remain oblivious to those taking away your rights like Dingell?

You mean your right to die without health insurance. Because that is the right you're talking about. I have gotten to see that death up close and personal with people who had no insurance. The Emergency Room can't save them in the last few hours of their life, even though I have heard repeatedly from Republicans that nobody needs Obamacare when there is always an ER that must take the indigent patients. Medical science does not work the way Republicans keep claiming it works and doctors can't save them at the last second, when they haven't been to a doctor in years because they had no money.

For that quote from Dingell, Dingell was being questioned in 2010 about why Obamacare would not cover anybody until 2014. I can remember the Republicans in Texas in 2010 claiming that Obamacare would destroy American Medicine. Didn't happen, did it? I apologize to AURapture and JewelStaiteFan (by which I mean I feel sorry for you) if this is too hard for either of you to understand . . .

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Sunday, March 27, 2016 8:35 AM

Quote:
The biggest threat to American workers is slowly starting to go away

The reason why jobs are going away is because capitalists want them to go away. There was a study that came out recently that anyone who earns $20,000 or less per year has an 80% chance of losing their jobs due to automation.

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

REAVERFAN

Sunday, March 27, 2016 8:40 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I disagree. All of the progress that was ever made in the USA ... and that goes back to FDR and before... was made because people were less stupid - and less cowardly- then. The reason why FDR came up with his patchwork of social security programs wasn't because he was a good-hearted guy who felt sorry for the populace, but because less-stupid, less-cowardly people were fomenting revolution. If he hadn't saved capitalism from itself, it might have been destroyed by the less-stupid people.

The last gasp of the less-stupid was the antiwar movement.

But we're now at the bread (government assistance) and circuses (iPhones/TV) stage, and people are content to ignore the world as long as they're in their comfy mental bubble, and wait for the building catastrophes (there are at least three or four pending) to come crashing down on them.
Good that you mentioned FDR. Churchill ought to be included. I think a better description of what happens now is “A generation of failed politicians has trapped the West in a tawdry nightmare”.

In one of his last interviews, the historian Tony Judt lamented his “catastrophic” Anglo-American generation, whose cossetted members included George W Bush and Tony Blair. Having grown up after the defining wars and hatreds of the west’s 20th century, “in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political”, these historically weightless elites believed that “no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences”.

A member of the Bush administration brashly affirmed its arrogance of power in 2004 after what then seemed a successful invasion of Iraq: “When we act,” he boasted, “we create our own reality.”

The reality it made is mayhem in Asia and Africa now reaching European and North American cities.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/01/generation-failed-politi
cians-elite-liberal-values

What can change that?

SIGNYM

Sunday, March 27, 2016 9:48 AM

Quote:
What can change that?

What "that"?

That politicians no longer respond to the people?

That people have given up trying to get these totally propagandized and corrupted politicians to do what they should?

That people have been totally pacified?

All of the above?

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IMHO, people in THIS culture (even TPTB) are short-term thinkers who only focus on their immediate and individual gratification: the very antithesis of a society. So assuming that you're asking about "all of the above", the only thing that will change the momentum is a complete economic breakdown that goes on and on until all of the current paradigms are burned out of people's psyches.

Most people seem to be struggling (if they are struggling) for pretty narrow-sector gains: the environment, gay rights, black lives matter, getting the Republicans (or Democrats) out of office, or what-have-you. What they don't seem to realize is that they need to fight the powers that be: remove their puppets from office, remove their levers of control. And in order to do that they need to work TOGETHER, not ameliorate a symptom but cure the disease.

How about simply seeing Hillary- that witch of international capital- indicted? Let's start with that, and make HER sing about who's pulling her strings, and work up from there.

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If you think that sounds bitter and angry, you're right.

I listen to NPR, that ever-faithful purveyor of the Democratic central committee, and they have their "foundations" remind us who's paying for the programming ... The Dunkypink Foundation, doing good for 35 year.

Wow, 35 years? But nothing has changed!

All of those do-gooder organizations ... religious, left-wing, right-wing, it hardly makes a difference. What has changed in the past 35 years?

Or what about those political Dem and Repub Punch and Judy shows that we're treated to every few years? For all of the sturm und drang - all of the drama and stress - has any mainstream politician ever done anything to move the needle in a positive direction?

For all of the chipping away at various causes, has the needle really moved on anything important, except as a one-way ratchet for the wealthy?

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

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