Vada a bordo...!

I've learned a new expression today. It is Italian.

"Vada a bordo, cazzo!"

Google it.

I think it should be a new motto for us all...Italians, Americans, Europeans...all of us...

It is what we need to snarl at our supposed leaders...the men and women who have so often betrayed us for their own selfish gain...

BoA

Like everyone else I've been watching the slow disintegration of Bank of America with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief. First the bank imposes new fees on its customers for the use of debit cards and then, when faced with an overt customer revolt, basically does nothing except have its CEO issue a statement to the effect that BoA will do in what is in BoA's best interests, thank you very much, and if the customers don't like it, well, tough darts.

What strikes me most forcefully, though, is that this does not say good things about the general competence of BoA's management. Let us walk through the situation: in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, when nearly 10 per cent of the American people are out of work; when depositors are already rolling pennies to buy food; when the public's general impression of bankers is that they're unprincipled scum …

What does BoA do?

It happily plunges into a PR disaster and never even seems to notice.

Interesting.

Let's just say I'm not buying any BoA stock in the near term.

Does A Bear....?

Saw the article the other day by Dave Johnson on how the very wealthy caused our current, massive deficit and by extension our current Recession and joblessness. His argument, which is buttressed by an amazing number of statistics, is that the mega-rich (what I call the 1%) forced the government to stop taxing them at anything like reasonable levels.

But, they and everyone else (but mostly them) continued to demand social services. The result was a government that supported itself by borrowing, hoping against hope that when the bill came due there would be money from somewhere to pay it off..

So, now that day is here, but our fairy godmother has declined to show up with magic wand and debit card.

The result? The 1%ers continue to insist on No New Taxes…for them. Meaning the cost of their decades of irresponsibility is shifted to us, the middle class. We pay for it with joblessness, higher prices, and the general decline in our standard of living.

Did the mega-rich cause the deficit?

Well, let's see, they forced the government to stop taxing them at anything like reasonable levels, but then demanded that the government provide them with social services, and so Washington had to borrow like mad, and, now, here we are, with the wolf at the door…

So, did they cause the deficit?

Does a bear sh— …er…seek a moment of solitary contemplation in the woods?





Source: huffingtonpost.com/dave-johnson/did-the-rich-cause-the-de_b_786062.html?ir=Business

More on the 2%

While we're at it, here's another fun little news item.

You know how the Fed is bending over backwards (and then some) to make cheap money available to big corporations so that they'll finally start spending and investing and hiring and maybe get Americans back to work?

Well, according to a recent article on Bloomberg, the aforesaid big corporations and are (wanna guess? Huh? Wanna?) investing it outside of the US. The cash is flowing in a major gauge pipe right overseas.

Right.

Is it just me? Or does that feel a little like somebody just shoved a knife between our shoulder blades?

But, of course, it is a well-made knife, with an excellent bone handle, and a blade of the finest Swedish steel.

Nothing but the very best for the 2%.


The article: Not Made in America Prevails as Fed's `Cheap Money' Finds Its Way Overseas

To Top 2%

I've heard it said that most of the nation's resources are now controlled by about 2% of the population. (Yes, the middle class, as you knew it, is gone. We're all peons, now.)

Well, here's an interesting an article by Robert Scheer on someone in that top 2%, Sandy Weill, former head of Citigroup and the man credited with arranging the legislation that deregulated the banking industry....and got us into our present kettle of fish.

So, if you're wondering what to expect from our new masters, read the piece to which I've linked below. It's all about Mr. Weill's nifty new mansion, purchased while people all over the country are being kicked out of their homes by robo-signers.

Makes me feel just all warm and fuzzy.

Or maybe that's nausea. Hard to tell. Well, six of one.


Here's the piece: The Man Who Shattered Our Economy

A few words about robots

Hi, Everyone,

Well, I'm going to post here another one of the oped pieces I'm submitting to newspapers around the country. It's kind of a fool's errand 'cause, let's face it, newspapers are in pretty deep trouble at the moment. They've got way more pages than they've got ad revenue to support them, so farming out a few hundred words to a non-staffer (even if the aforesaid non-staffer is giving his stuff away for free) is a non-starter.

Still, because I'm stubborn, and not too damn bright, I keep trying.

This week I'm showing you something that I've been sending around only to newspapers in New England. That's cause I've given it a New England slant. But, frankly, that's a bit of a scam. What I say about New England here is true for the whole country.

Here's my schitick: I'm convinced that America is in serious trouble. I mean, BIG time trouble. I think that if we don't do something, and something dramatic, then we're in for very hard times.

I think MOST of our problems (but not all) stem from the economy. I think that we have basically lost the capacity to pay for our own needs.

Why? Two major reasons. Energy is number one. So long as we keep importing oil, and so long as oil keeps going up in price, everything gets a little more expensive every day. We are, in effect, slowly bleeding to death.

But problem number two, every bit as bad, is "de-industrialization"—that is, the process by which our economic elites moved all our industrial production overseas, and left the rest of us to rot.

I'm very serious about this. I am convinced that de-industrialization was the worst thing to happen to us as a society since the 1930s. Oh, we've had foreign wars that have been more destructive in terms of loss of life. But, if we restrict ourselves to just internal developments, then the loss of our industrial capacity (and the pay checks that went with it) is pretty darn awful. I'd say that in recent history, only the Great Depression can match it. And before that? Perhaps the Civil War.

Oh, and by the way, if things keep going as they are now, I'm not sure that the last Civil War will be the only one we'll ever fight.

So, I'm writing articles and oped pieces in which I try to encourage people to do what I think needs to be done to save the country. I know that sounds alarmist and fantastically arrogant, but…I'm saying it all the same.

And in particular I'm saying that we need to develop new, cheap forms of energy. I don't know what those will be (I'm a big fan of fusion myself, but I could be wrong), but whatever it is, we need them, and we need them very soon.

The other thing I think we need to do is re-industrialize. We need to build factories again.

Yes, I know that sounds insane. And I know also that when and if we build them, they probably won't employ as many people as the old, smokestack industries did. In fact, I suspect they won't employ many people at all. They'll be automated. We'll invest heavily in industrial robots.

But even so, automated industries will give us something to stand on. They'll provide the foundation on which the rest of our so-called "post-industrial" businesses will base themselves.

At least that's what I believe. For more of my logic and my arguments, I offer the piece I've pasted below.

Once you've read it, if you like, tell me what you think.

mjt




[head] The New New England and the Post-Post-Industrial Economy

[by] Michael Jay Tucker



I'm about to say something crazy.

Here it comes: New England can and should lead the nation in re-industrialization. Moreover, we should automate and invest massively in robots.

I warned you it would sound crazy. But, bear with me.

Everybody knows that America was once the leading industrial nation of the globe. Everybody also knows that it isn't any more. It was cheaper and easier to offshore. Which was fine because we thought we'd still have employment via service-based businesses. We thought everyone could be a white-collar worker in the post-industrial economy.

Except…now, it looks like we're in the post-post-industrial economy. Service businesses aren't hiring much and those that are aren't paying particularly well. Worse, as anyone who has ever called tech support can testify, we've found that service-based employment can itself be offshored.

So what do we do about it?

Answer: Re-industrialize. We build factories again…automated factories…using as many industrial robots as possible.

Why? First, because the technology is now available. Where, before, there was something a little bit science fiction about it, now we know how to automate plants to the nth degree. Japan has been using industrial robots to compensate for its aging workforce for decades.

Second, robots provide the ultimate in low-cost labor. They don't take raises and they don't want benefits. They would allow the nation to successfully compete with any labor force on earth, no matter how underpaid.

Third, because every time a robot manufactures something here, that's an item that's not manufactured overseas. So, the money required to produce it stays here, in the United States. That's a little mercantilist, yes, but, at the moment, we need every dime we can get.

Fourth, because while it is true that automated factories do not hire many people, they do hire some. More, they provide a foundation for the rest of the economy. They become or create clients for service-based businesses—everything from PR firms to design shops.

And, finally, now is the perfect time for it. A generation ago, mass automation would have been impossible. Unions would have quite rightly objected. But, now, most of our factories are already gone. The people who worked in them are already unemployed. We have nothing left to lose.

So, the time is now for America to become, again, a manufacturing nation.

And New England is where it should start. We already have expertise in the profitable production of robots, as witness I-Robot, Kiva Systems, and dozen recent startups in the field. And, we have the brainpower necessary. There are robotics labs in schools from Maine to Rhode Island. Given all of that, New England can and should take the lead.

Besides, it's fitting. New England was where industrialization began in America. And it was here, too, where America first de-industrialized, as mills fled to cheaper climes.

Now New England should guide the nation back…to industry, and to prosperity.

We've got a tradition to uphold.



#



Author's Bio



Michael Jay Tucker has been writing about science and technology since the early 1980s. He was on the staffs of such magazines as Mini-Micro Systems, Computerworld, UnixWorld, SunExpert, and Datamation. Today, he teaches English and History at Northeastern and Cambridge College.



Copyright © 2010 Michael Jay Tucker

What Isn't Being Said

Hello, Everyone,

I'm shopping a shorter version of the material below to op-ed pages at various newspapers. So far, no one has taken the bait. But, you never can tell…

In the meantime, here it is, submitted for your approval.



[head] What isn't being said

By Michael Jay Tucker





It is what they don't say that freaks me out.

I mean the debate in Washington (and everywhere else) on the current Recession. Like you, and probably like everyone else in America, I've been watching while Right, Left, and Center battle about it. It's rather awe-inspiring, really. Economists and scholars and pundits and people who look really, really good on Fox TV are slugging it out big time, and all of knows exactly What Is To Be Done.

But, have you noticed? They all disagree with one another, very loudly. Some of them invoke Ayn Rand, others Baron Keynes, but no matter what their ideological orientation, they are united on a single premise. To wit, they hold the Recession is (for lack of a better word) a managerial issue. Their underlying assumption is that the crisis was brought about by unwise policies on the part of someone in office—the Republicans under George W. Bush by failing to properly police Wall Street, or the Democrats under Barack Obama through deficit spending (which seems somewhat improbable, given that Recession began before Obama's election, but that's beside the point).

But, this is followed by an equally fascinating corollary—i.e., that having been created by one set of policies, the Recession can be made to go away again by the imposition of another, wiser set. Once we reduce taxes or increase them, introduce more regulation or less of it, things will "get back to normal."

In other words, everyone in the debate—everyone!—seems to hold that our current crisis is subject to bureaucratic pressure, and that the proper group of experts could end it by changing the regulatory environment of the economy.

That's comforting, because it seems to give us the power over our situation. We just keep trying to various solutions on offer—Republic, Democratic, Tea Party, Socialist Workers, whoever—until one of them works. And surely, they can't ALL be wrong. Can they?

But…what if they are? All wrong, that is.

What if the Recession has nothing to do with policy? What if it in fact reflects material, structural problems in the nation as whole? And nothing we can do—no matter who's Chairman of the Fed, no matter how much we fiddle with capital gains or impose new regulations on Wall Street—is going to change things? What if, in short, we're screwed?

For instance, let's talk about energy costs. There are other problems as well (like de-industrialization) but, for the moment, let's just stick with energy.

It doesn't take a genius to notice that energy costs have been going up consistently for the last half century.

Which is a problem, because our society is based on fuel. Consider food. Any time you eat, you eat fossil fuels. You were able to ease your hunger because our society has the oil, gas, coal, or whatever to power the pumps that irrigate our fields, the tractors that harvest our crops, the trucks and trains that carry that food to our cities, and the freezers and stoves that we use to preserve and cook it. Oh, and by the way, once we've eaten it, we need still more pumps, and still more energy, to carry it all away again…or else we drown in our own sewage.

Which means, in turn, that each time energy costs go gone up, so too does the cost of everything we use that energy to produce, refine, transport, or prepare. Which is pretty much everything. And, so, every time energy costs go up, we get a little poorer.

And, it has only just begun. You can argue about whether we've reached "peak oil production," but what is undeniably true is that we've pumped out all the oil that was easy, safe, and convenient to get. From now on, we're going to get our fuels from places that are hard to reach, politically unstable, or just flat out dangerous. Oil is going to go get more expensive, and everything else is too.

And there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Not…that is… until we can push energy prices back down.

I'm not sure how we're going to do that. Maybe we'll invent a 100% efficient solar cell. Maybe we'll get clean nukes. Maybe we'll finally get fusion power up and running. But, until we do, things are going to be hard. We will only know the sort of prosperity we knew in the 1950s and the 1960s when the cost of energy is, again, measured in fractions of cents, rather than multiples of dollars.

Which is what scares me. Nothing I've said here is a secret. We all know this.

But, have you heard anyone say it? I mean, among the People Who Know Best? Our Leaders? Our elites? Have you heard any of them say, "Here's the grim reality: if we are to survive, we must invest in alternatives to fossil fuels. It is going to take time and money. We will have to develop basic technologies and build considerable infrastructure. We will solve the problem eventually, but it may be twenty years before we even start to see results, and over that period there were be far fewer resources to do other things. It isn't going to be pleasant, but that's the choice we've got."

No. We haven't heard them because they haven't said it.

I certainly haven't heard them say this. And that scares me to death. Because someone…some man or woman among them…needs to say these things to us, and needs to say them soon.

The alternative, and I fear it is all too likely, is that we awaken one morning to discover that the sun, in fact, has not arisen. And we are condemned, forever, to that famous darkling plain, wondering only which ignorant army will claim us next.







Copyright © Michael Jay Tucker 2010