Tag: trade

  You are starting to see a lot of news articles talking about “reshoring”.

 “There is evidence here of reshoring because of transportation costs and lead times,” Mr Bergmann said. “The global supply chain allows you to chase lower cost of labour, but the total costs are reflected in the decision on where you produce for a given geography.”

 The decline of the American middle class have finally reached the point that American workers can compete against Chinese peasants. Victory is in sight!

 With any luck our corporate masters will soon be installing suicide nets outside our factories.

   Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega spilled the beans on Monday when he committed the cardinal sin of telling the truth.

 “We’re in the midst of an international currency war,” Mr. Mantega said. “This threatens us because it takes away our competitiveness.”

  “The advanced countries are seeking to devalue their currencies,” he said, mentioning the United States, Europe and Japan in the context of what he portrayed as an intensifying trade competition.

 All over the world nations are in a race to the bottom with their currencies. The objective is to gain trade advantage over competitors. In other words this is a global trade war, one that is being done by destroying people’s savings.

  In all, about 2/3rd of the global economy is in the process of debasing their currencies. Nothing has happened like this since the 1930s.

 It’s a return to global beggar thy neighbor economic policy that proved so hopelessly flawed in the Great Depression.

On July 14th, Green Change announced the campaign for a Green New Deal, a 10-point program to create economic prosperity together with ecological sustainability.

Since then over 100 candidates for elected office at all levels have joined the Green New Deal Coalition.

The Green New Deal Coalition will cut military spending, create millions of green jobs, and revive the economy by protecting the planet we depend on.

Green Change is inviting all candidates, individuals and organizations that support a prosperous, sustainable future for America to endorse the Green New Deal.

Read the call for a Green New Deal and sign on today.

To date, 11 candidates for governor, 11 candidates for US Senate, and 33 candidates for US House of Representatives have joined the Green New Deal Coalition.

All agree on the need to cut military spending, fund green public works, ban corporate personhood, pass single-payer health care, restore progressive taxation, ban usury, enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax, legalize marijuana, institute tuition-free public higher education, change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental and safety standards, and pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms.

These candidates represent a clean break with the failed policies of the past that have led America down the road to economic and ecological disaster.

The Green New Deal promises a brighter tomorrow for America – one that combines the New Deal’s promise of freedom from economic hardship with decisive action to protect our planet.

You can help build the movement for real change by endorsing the Green New Deal today and asking candidates for elected office to join you.

In response to our nation's vast economic and ecological problems, Green Change has launched a campaign for a Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal is an ambitious program to create economic prosperity together with ecological sustainability.

We are building a coalition of candidates, individuals and organizations to support the Green New Deal – starting today.

Join the Green New Deal Coalition now.

Here are the ten policies you endorse by joining the Green New Deal Coalition:

1) Cut military spending at least 70%;

2) Create millions of green union jobs through massive public investment in renewable energy, mass transit and conservation;

3) Set ambitious, science-based greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax to meet them;

4) Establish single-payer “Medicare for all” health care;

5) Provide tuition-free public higher education;

6) Change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental, consumer, health and safety standards;

7) End counterproductive prohibition policies and legalize marijuana;

8) Enact tough limits on credit interest and lending rates, progressive tax reform and strict financial regulation;

9) Amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish corporate personhood; and

10) Pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms.

Will you help us turn these ideas into reality?

Sign up for the Green New Deal Coalition now.

The first step is to agree on these ten priorities. The next step is to push for specific policies to make them happen.

We need your help. Share your ideas about a Green New Deal on the Green Change network.

I’ve been a fan of Chris Hedges ever since I first noticed him.  The guy is simply tuned in.

But this recent piece of his can leave you staring at the ceiling, wide awake, when you should be sleeping.  

The American Empire Is Bankrupt

Here’s a small sample:

To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.

“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”

The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.

“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism … there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”

The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities-think Enron-for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.

Well hello everyone, and welcome to a new edition of the Manufacturing series! For those new to the Manufacturing series, I try to cover anything related to the topic at hand regarding new developments like green manufacturing. Our industrial base has been neglected, its foundations eroded due to short-sightedness.  Thankfully, though, America (and our friends up North) have learned to survive in this new mad environment.  American manufacturing is always transforming, counted out by many, the assembly-line man and woman in this country have shown they not only could get the job done, but often better!  

Been ill again, so haven’t kept up.  Rest assured, I’m in somewhat top form now.  But enough about me, we got manufacturing stuff to talk about! Some interesting news out there, but first, of course the Numbers!

Greetings, Mister President, congratulations on your recent electoral victory and inauguration.  I, like many others, voted for you in the hopes that our nation would be steered in a new direction.  Normally, I try and put out a blog piece highlighting certain news and tidbits in regards to manufacturing in this country.  It’s not one of the best blogs in the world, nor one of the worst.  I’m no one of great importance either, just another blog writer among many who hope to voice an opinion or two or highlight something.  Trust me, there are much better bloggers out there.  Chances are you will never hear of this blog, or series, or entry.  Still, in the slight hope that you may hear about this or even read it, I wish to bring something up, that well to me at least, is of great importance.

(Cross-posted from Daily Kos)

Our economic situation has been all over the news. Banks are failing, credit is contracting, the auto industry is crying for a bailout. Clearly, the U.S. economy has gotten derailed, and we’re now faced with the unenviable task of getting it back on track. The trouble is, we don’t know which track is the right track.

Or do we?

Suppose there exists a valid interpretation of economic forces and outcomes, one that explains our current situation, yet one that no one will acknowledge, even to knock down.

About 12 years ago I picked up Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life by Jane Jacobs (better known as the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities) at a used bookstore in upstate New York. Jacobs wrote this book in 1983, in response the emergence of stagflation. As an informed and educated layperson, she examined economic history with a critical eye and an urbanist’s heart, looking for the laws that explained what was going on — which the economic theories of the time did not.  

Happy Monday, folks, I do hope you all had a good weekend!  Welcome to another installment of Manufacturing Monday!  Now things are looking bad out there, as many of you probably already know.  We start out with more dire jobs news at GM. Turning to some good news, it seems economic forces that made us “costly” has now turned the tables of sorts, with ironically the biggest pusher of China, Wal-mart (or is it Walmart?  I’ve seen this store both ways.) forcing suppliers to look domestically.  Lastly, we got Honda moving more work to North America. But first, as is par for the course, we get to the latest economic info related to manufacturing.  So without further adieu…

Labor union officials and some liberal activists were seething Tuesday over Barack Obama’s choice of centrist economist Jason Furman as the top economic advisor for the campaign.

The critics say Furman, who was appointed to the post Monday, has overstated the potential benefits of globalization, Social Security private accounts and the low prices offered by Wal-Mart — considered a corporate pariah by the labor movement.

LA Times

We all support Obama against McCain.  And many of us support the labor movement also.  Our support of Obama is not the kind of support that believes he can do no wrong: that’s for those who support Bush.  

Labor leaders are rightly critical of Obama’s choice of Jason Furman as

the economic policy director.  While I continue to support Obama and work for his election, I must speeak out here.  This is the wrong direction.    

More after the fold.

Amid the Chinese government stepping up claims that the Dalai Lama wants to foment a violent uprising in Tibet – including allegations today that they discovered an arms cache in a Tibetan monestary (link: http://www.reuters.com/article… ), the Dalai Lama gave a forceful reply last Friday.

He didn’t call them the Evil Empire. He didn’t say they were members of the Axis of Evil.

He said, “we are not anti-Chinese”.

The full interview can be found at MSNBC’s website here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21…