Nbadan
05-20-2005, 04:14 PM
A Reputation in Tatters
George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America’s reputation. It is likely to stay destroyed, because at this point the only way to restore America’s reputation would be to impeach and convict President Bush for intentionally deceiving Congress and the American people in order to start a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the United States.
America can redeem itself only by holding Bush accountable.
As intent as Republicans were to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, they have a blind eye for President Bush’s far more serious lies. Bush’s lies have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, injured and maimed tens of thousands more, devastated a country, destroyed America’s reputation, caused 1 billion Muslims to hate America, ruined our alliances with Europe, created a police state at home, and squandered $300 billion dollars and counting.
America’s reputation is so damaged that not even our puppets can stand the heat. Anti-American riots, which have left Afghan cities and towns in flames and hospitals overflowing with casualties, have forced Bush’s Afghan puppet, “President” Hamid Karzai, to assert his independence from his U.S. overlords. In a belated act of sovereignty, Karzai asserted authority over heavy-handed U.S. troops whose brutal and stupid ways sparked the devastating riots. Karzai demanded control of U.S. military activities in Afghanistan and called for the return of the Afghan detainees who are being held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Abundant evidence now exists in the public domain to convict George W. Bush of the crime of the century. The secret British government memo (dated July 23, 2002, and available here), leaked to the Sunday Times (which printed it on May 1, 2005), reports that Bush wanted “to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. . . . But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. . . . The (United Kingdom) attorney general said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defense, humanitarian intervention or UNSC (U.N. Security Council) authorization. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult.”
This memo is the mother of all smoking guns. Why isn’t Bush in the dock?
Has American democracy failed at home?
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
/American Empire | print | permanent link | writebacks (27)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, May 13, 2005
More Jobs Hype
Careless journalists and commentators are hyping the 274,000 new April payroll jobs as evidence of the health of the U.S. economy. An examination of the details of the new jobs puts a different view on the matter.
April’s job growth is consistent with the depressing pattern of U.S. employment growth in the 21st century: The outsourced U.S. economy can create jobs only in domestic nontradable services.
Of the 274,000 April jobs, 256,000 were in the private or nongovernment sector, and 211,000 of these were in the service sector as follows: 58,000 in leisure and hospitality (primarily restaurants and bars), 47,000 in construction, 29,200 in wholesale and retail trade, 28,000 in health care and social assistance, 17,300 in administrative and support services (primarily temps), 11,700 in transportation and warehousing, and 8,800 in real estate. A few scattered jobs in other service categories complete the picture.
Americans regard themselves as “the world’s only superpower,” but the pattern of American job growth in the 21st century is that of a Third World economy. The U.S. economy has ceased to create jobs in high-tech sectors and in export and import-competitive sectors. Offshore outsourcing of manufacturing and of engineering and professional services is dismantling the ladders of upward mobility that made the American Dream possible. Not only is the U.S. economy creating Third World jobs, according to analysis by Edwin S. Rubenstein (vdare.com, April 2, 2005), it is creating the jobs for Hispanic immigrants. Rubinstein examined job growth by ethnicity and found that Hispanics (13 percent of the workforce) are gaining 60 percent of the new service jobs.
Rubinstein’s findings are consistent with the racial composition one observes on construction sites, in fast food restaurants, in waste services and among hospital orderlies.
Until recent years, American jobs had nothing to fear from low-wage foreign labor. Americans’ high pay reflected their high productivity from working with the most capital and best technology.
The collapse of world socialism and the rise of the high-speed Internet forced Americans to compete head-to-head in the same global labor market with low wage foreign labor working with identical capital and technology. When U.S. and European corporations move their manufacturing, research and development offshore or contract with offshore producers to supply the products and services that they market, the jobs and associated incomes are also transferred abroad.
Americans and Europeans cannot compete in labor markets with Chinese, Indians and Eastern Europeans, because the cost of living in North America and Europe is so much higher. In addition, there is a vast excess supply of labor in China and India that overhangs the labor markets there and keeps wages low.
The claim by outsourcing’s proponents that outsourcing creates new and better jobs for Americans is pure fantasy. This claim can find no support in job and income data. Moreover, the same incentive to outsource that is sending so many jobs abroad applies equally to any new replacement jobs.
The only American jobs that are safe are in domestic nontradable services that cannot be outsourced, and even in these domestic services, such as schoolteachers and nurses, foreign workers are being imported via work visa programs.
Outsourcing’s proponents claim that it benefits corporations and their shareholders. This is true only in the short run. The substitution of foreign labor for American labor allows executives to reduce costs and increase profits, thus producing large bonuses for themselves and capital gains for shareholders. The long run effect, however, is to destroy the U.S. consumer market and to reduce U.S. corporations to a brand name with a sales force selling foreign made products to Americans employed in Third World jobs.
Offshore outsourcing is a new phenomenon that has received little attention from economists, who mistakenly view offshore outsourcing as just another manifestation of the beneficial workings of free trade and comparative advantage. In fact, offshore outsourcing is the flow of resources to absolute advantage. Economists have known for two centuries that absolute advantage does not produce mutual gains. Unlike the operation of comparative advantage, absolute advantage produces winners and losers.
China and India are winning. America is losing. It is as simple as that.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
/The Economy/Jobs | print | permanent link | writebacks (2)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Whither America?
What is America’s future? Prediction is no one’s strong point. A century after the fall of Rome, no one could have predicted that Roman armies would reappear to reclaim for the Empire “that which was lost to neglect” and destroy the Ostrogoths in Italy and the Vandals in Africa. Neither could anyone have predicted that Justinian the Great’s restoration of the Roman Empire would be undone in the following century by the rise of an obscure people united under the banner of Islam.
It is easier to note that which America is losing to neglect than to predict the consequences. Failings are everywhere apparent. President Bush has led us into a gratuitous war that has destroyed America’s soft power and demonstrated the limits of its hard power. In the name of fighting terrorism, Bush has eroded already weakened civil liberties. President Bush’s “war on terror” has inflicted greater costs on America than that inflicted by the terrorists themselves.
The opposition party does not oppose. The Bush administration has given Democrats more opportune targets than President Clinton’s sexcapade with Monica Lewinski provided Republicans. But the Democrats are too weak to capitalize on the political opportunities.
The failures of Democrats and Republicans offer chances to libertarians. But libertarians are politically impotent. Their ideology and abstract commitments are perceived as taking precedence over the well-being of their fellow citizens. Libertarians cannot differentiate between the comparative advantage case for free trade and labor arbitrage based on absolute advantage that is destroying the jobs and hopes of Americans.
America is so fractured by diversity, multiculturalism, organized special interest groups and race- and gender-based legal privileges that the concept of the public interest has simply disappeared.
America’s intellectual camps have become boosterish echo chambers that dismiss out of hand any contrary thought. Preaching to the choir while demonizing others is a path to intellectual impotence.
The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of regulators and prosecutors, who interpret the law to suit their careers and agendas, and by the rule of plunder in torts.
Faced with these grave challenges to America’s integrity, the political energies of the American left are focused on gay marriage and abortion; that of the American right on the opposite. Twenty million evangelical Christians, who once focused on saving their souls, now seek an avenue to heaven through war in the Middle East, which they believe will bring on Armageddon and the Rapture.
A once-independent media are now highly concentrated and speak mostly with a single voice in behalf of the interests of advertisers and a new aggressive American nationalism. To save its existence, even National Public Radio feels pressured to partake of the Karl Rove spin.
Democracy struggles under the best of circumstances. When the people are woefully uninformed on almost every subject and totally dependent on spun news, success must rest on outside events and the failure of others.
Was America’s 20th century pre-eminence the result of democracy and free trade, or was it the result of two wars, which devastated Europe, and the rise of communism, which set back the clock in Russia and Asia for decades?
It is very easy to be pre-eminent while every other economy must recover from ruin.
Today, America is failing, while Asia rises as the economic powerhouse and Europe seeks to unite.
America’s once-powerful manufacturers are today little more than brand names with sales forces. Some still assemble foreign-made parts, but many simply market products of foreign innovation, design, engineering and manufacture. As more and more of America’s economy is outsourced, America’s engineering and design professions decline, as does the value of a college education. In the 21st century, America has been unable to create jobs in export and import-competitive sectors.
America’s financial pre-eminence is based on the dollar’s role as reserve currency, a role threatened by the dollar’s long downward slide in value as the result of trade and budget deficits.
America’s strong communities and neighborhood schools are gone, destroyed by an ideology that used bussing to break them apart.
Feminism has put great pressure on families by weakening women’s commitments to children and marriages with the new commitment to career and independence.
Parents cannot discipline children without risk of government intervention through Child Protective Services. Acceptable standards of behavior decline, and children become sexually promiscuous and partake of alcohol and drugs at earlier and earlier ages.
Shame is a lost concept.
University students are stressed to find a major that cannot be outsourced. Students are discovering that outsourcing and work visas have closed many occupations to them.
America’s borders are not protected against legal and illegal immigration that long ago dispelled any pretense of assimilation. Disparate interests, races and values have overwhelmed the abstract basis of American unity. Patriotism is being destroyed by the government’s indifference to, if not preference for, immigrant invasion. Patriotism’s place is being taken by a dangerous nationalism.
Will the Republican Party’s neo-Jacobin ideology reunite the country in an aggressive nationalism against the world, or will America’s Asian bankers cease to finance the empire of red ink?
Does America still have an edge, or is America in retirement, living off past accomplishments?
Whither America is a question that deserves a lot more attention than it gets.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Chronicles Magazine (http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/roberts.cgi)
Very interesting and refreshing to read the comments of intelligent real conservatives in response to the article. I wish more of them would get involved. They know we've all been had just as liberals and progressives do. They are also horrified at what has been done in our name.
George W. Bush and his gang of neocon warmongers have destroyed America’s reputation. It is likely to stay destroyed, because at this point the only way to restore America’s reputation would be to impeach and convict President Bush for intentionally deceiving Congress and the American people in order to start a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the United States.
America can redeem itself only by holding Bush accountable.
As intent as Republicans were to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, they have a blind eye for President Bush’s far more serious lies. Bush’s lies have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people, injured and maimed tens of thousands more, devastated a country, destroyed America’s reputation, caused 1 billion Muslims to hate America, ruined our alliances with Europe, created a police state at home, and squandered $300 billion dollars and counting.
America’s reputation is so damaged that not even our puppets can stand the heat. Anti-American riots, which have left Afghan cities and towns in flames and hospitals overflowing with casualties, have forced Bush’s Afghan puppet, “President” Hamid Karzai, to assert his independence from his U.S. overlords. In a belated act of sovereignty, Karzai asserted authority over heavy-handed U.S. troops whose brutal and stupid ways sparked the devastating riots. Karzai demanded control of U.S. military activities in Afghanistan and called for the return of the Afghan detainees who are being held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Abundant evidence now exists in the public domain to convict George W. Bush of the crime of the century. The secret British government memo (dated July 23, 2002, and available here), leaked to the Sunday Times (which printed it on May 1, 2005), reports that Bush wanted “to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. . . . But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. . . . The (United Kingdom) attorney general said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defense, humanitarian intervention or UNSC (U.N. Security Council) authorization. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult.”
This memo is the mother of all smoking guns. Why isn’t Bush in the dock?
Has American democracy failed at home?
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
/American Empire | print | permanent link | writebacks (27)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, May 13, 2005
More Jobs Hype
Careless journalists and commentators are hyping the 274,000 new April payroll jobs as evidence of the health of the U.S. economy. An examination of the details of the new jobs puts a different view on the matter.
April’s job growth is consistent with the depressing pattern of U.S. employment growth in the 21st century: The outsourced U.S. economy can create jobs only in domestic nontradable services.
Of the 274,000 April jobs, 256,000 were in the private or nongovernment sector, and 211,000 of these were in the service sector as follows: 58,000 in leisure and hospitality (primarily restaurants and bars), 47,000 in construction, 29,200 in wholesale and retail trade, 28,000 in health care and social assistance, 17,300 in administrative and support services (primarily temps), 11,700 in transportation and warehousing, and 8,800 in real estate. A few scattered jobs in other service categories complete the picture.
Americans regard themselves as “the world’s only superpower,” but the pattern of American job growth in the 21st century is that of a Third World economy. The U.S. economy has ceased to create jobs in high-tech sectors and in export and import-competitive sectors. Offshore outsourcing of manufacturing and of engineering and professional services is dismantling the ladders of upward mobility that made the American Dream possible. Not only is the U.S. economy creating Third World jobs, according to analysis by Edwin S. Rubenstein (vdare.com, April 2, 2005), it is creating the jobs for Hispanic immigrants. Rubinstein examined job growth by ethnicity and found that Hispanics (13 percent of the workforce) are gaining 60 percent of the new service jobs.
Rubinstein’s findings are consistent with the racial composition one observes on construction sites, in fast food restaurants, in waste services and among hospital orderlies.
Until recent years, American jobs had nothing to fear from low-wage foreign labor. Americans’ high pay reflected their high productivity from working with the most capital and best technology.
The collapse of world socialism and the rise of the high-speed Internet forced Americans to compete head-to-head in the same global labor market with low wage foreign labor working with identical capital and technology. When U.S. and European corporations move their manufacturing, research and development offshore or contract with offshore producers to supply the products and services that they market, the jobs and associated incomes are also transferred abroad.
Americans and Europeans cannot compete in labor markets with Chinese, Indians and Eastern Europeans, because the cost of living in North America and Europe is so much higher. In addition, there is a vast excess supply of labor in China and India that overhangs the labor markets there and keeps wages low.
The claim by outsourcing’s proponents that outsourcing creates new and better jobs for Americans is pure fantasy. This claim can find no support in job and income data. Moreover, the same incentive to outsource that is sending so many jobs abroad applies equally to any new replacement jobs.
The only American jobs that are safe are in domestic nontradable services that cannot be outsourced, and even in these domestic services, such as schoolteachers and nurses, foreign workers are being imported via work visa programs.
Outsourcing’s proponents claim that it benefits corporations and their shareholders. This is true only in the short run. The substitution of foreign labor for American labor allows executives to reduce costs and increase profits, thus producing large bonuses for themselves and capital gains for shareholders. The long run effect, however, is to destroy the U.S. consumer market and to reduce U.S. corporations to a brand name with a sales force selling foreign made products to Americans employed in Third World jobs.
Offshore outsourcing is a new phenomenon that has received little attention from economists, who mistakenly view offshore outsourcing as just another manifestation of the beneficial workings of free trade and comparative advantage. In fact, offshore outsourcing is the flow of resources to absolute advantage. Economists have known for two centuries that absolute advantage does not produce mutual gains. Unlike the operation of comparative advantage, absolute advantage produces winners and losers.
China and India are winning. America is losing. It is as simple as that.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
/The Economy/Jobs | print | permanent link | writebacks (2)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Whither America?
What is America’s future? Prediction is no one’s strong point. A century after the fall of Rome, no one could have predicted that Roman armies would reappear to reclaim for the Empire “that which was lost to neglect” and destroy the Ostrogoths in Italy and the Vandals in Africa. Neither could anyone have predicted that Justinian the Great’s restoration of the Roman Empire would be undone in the following century by the rise of an obscure people united under the banner of Islam.
It is easier to note that which America is losing to neglect than to predict the consequences. Failings are everywhere apparent. President Bush has led us into a gratuitous war that has destroyed America’s soft power and demonstrated the limits of its hard power. In the name of fighting terrorism, Bush has eroded already weakened civil liberties. President Bush’s “war on terror” has inflicted greater costs on America than that inflicted by the terrorists themselves.
The opposition party does not oppose. The Bush administration has given Democrats more opportune targets than President Clinton’s sexcapade with Monica Lewinski provided Republicans. But the Democrats are too weak to capitalize on the political opportunities.
The failures of Democrats and Republicans offer chances to libertarians. But libertarians are politically impotent. Their ideology and abstract commitments are perceived as taking precedence over the well-being of their fellow citizens. Libertarians cannot differentiate between the comparative advantage case for free trade and labor arbitrage based on absolute advantage that is destroying the jobs and hopes of Americans.
America is so fractured by diversity, multiculturalism, organized special interest groups and race- and gender-based legal privileges that the concept of the public interest has simply disappeared.
America’s intellectual camps have become boosterish echo chambers that dismiss out of hand any contrary thought. Preaching to the choir while demonizing others is a path to intellectual impotence.
The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of regulators and prosecutors, who interpret the law to suit their careers and agendas, and by the rule of plunder in torts.
Faced with these grave challenges to America’s integrity, the political energies of the American left are focused on gay marriage and abortion; that of the American right on the opposite. Twenty million evangelical Christians, who once focused on saving their souls, now seek an avenue to heaven through war in the Middle East, which they believe will bring on Armageddon and the Rapture.
A once-independent media are now highly concentrated and speak mostly with a single voice in behalf of the interests of advertisers and a new aggressive American nationalism. To save its existence, even National Public Radio feels pressured to partake of the Karl Rove spin.
Democracy struggles under the best of circumstances. When the people are woefully uninformed on almost every subject and totally dependent on spun news, success must rest on outside events and the failure of others.
Was America’s 20th century pre-eminence the result of democracy and free trade, or was it the result of two wars, which devastated Europe, and the rise of communism, which set back the clock in Russia and Asia for decades?
It is very easy to be pre-eminent while every other economy must recover from ruin.
Today, America is failing, while Asia rises as the economic powerhouse and Europe seeks to unite.
America’s once-powerful manufacturers are today little more than brand names with sales forces. Some still assemble foreign-made parts, but many simply market products of foreign innovation, design, engineering and manufacture. As more and more of America’s economy is outsourced, America’s engineering and design professions decline, as does the value of a college education. In the 21st century, America has been unable to create jobs in export and import-competitive sectors.
America’s financial pre-eminence is based on the dollar’s role as reserve currency, a role threatened by the dollar’s long downward slide in value as the result of trade and budget deficits.
America’s strong communities and neighborhood schools are gone, destroyed by an ideology that used bussing to break them apart.
Feminism has put great pressure on families by weakening women’s commitments to children and marriages with the new commitment to career and independence.
Parents cannot discipline children without risk of government intervention through Child Protective Services. Acceptable standards of behavior decline, and children become sexually promiscuous and partake of alcohol and drugs at earlier and earlier ages.
Shame is a lost concept.
University students are stressed to find a major that cannot be outsourced. Students are discovering that outsourcing and work visas have closed many occupations to them.
America’s borders are not protected against legal and illegal immigration that long ago dispelled any pretense of assimilation. Disparate interests, races and values have overwhelmed the abstract basis of American unity. Patriotism is being destroyed by the government’s indifference to, if not preference for, immigrant invasion. Patriotism’s place is being taken by a dangerous nationalism.
Will the Republican Party’s neo-Jacobin ideology reunite the country in an aggressive nationalism against the world, or will America’s Asian bankers cease to finance the empire of red ink?
Does America still have an edge, or is America in retirement, living off past accomplishments?
Whither America is a question that deserves a lot more attention than it gets.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Chronicles Magazine (http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/roberts.cgi)
Very interesting and refreshing to read the comments of intelligent real conservatives in response to the article. I wish more of them would get involved. They know we've all been had just as liberals and progressives do. They are also horrified at what has been done in our name.