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Today's
Stories
Febrauary 16, 2006
Paul Craig Roberts
Their Own Economic Reality
February 15,
2006
Brian Conacnnon,
Jr.
Haiti's Elections: Chaos, Supression
and Fraud
Dave
Lindorff
Democrats Shoot Their Own, Too
Saree Makdisi
Israeli Ultimatums
Joshua
Frank
The Rhetorical Gore
Amira Hass
Down the Expulsion Highway
CounterPunch
Wire
Winter of Discontent: a 34-Day Fast
Against the War
Robert Bryce
The United States of Enron
Website
of the Day
Osama's
Game: an Interview with Michael Scheuer
February
14, 2006
John Sugg
Those Cartoons and the Neo Con: Daniel
Pipes and the Danish Editor
Don
Santina
DiFi and the Royal Democrats: the
Curious Withdrawal of Cindy Sheehan
William A.
Cook
Shaming Sharon
Ray
McGovern
Who Will Blow the Whistle About
Iran?
John
Ross
Bush's Mexican Poodle
Website
of the Day
Willie
Nelson Records CPer Ned Sublette's "Cowboys Are Frequently
Secretly"
February 13, 2006
Lila
Rajiva
Axis of Child Abusers: UK Troops Beat
Up Barefoot Iraqi Teens
Christopher
Brauchli
Whistleblowers and Witch Hunters:
the Bush Inquisition
Dave
Lindorff
Deadeye Dick: If Stupidity Were
Impeachable, Cheney Would Be History
Ron
Jacobs
Black Liberation
Mike
Whitney
Riding High with Hugo Chavez
Michael
Neumann
Respectful Cultures and Disrespectful
Cartoons
Website
of the Day
Virtual Resistance
February
11 / 12, 2006
Alexander
Cockburn
How Not to Spot a Terrorist
Ralph Nader
Bringing Democracy to the Federal Reserve
Paul Craig Roberts
Nuking the Economy
Pat Williams
John Boehner's Dirty Little Secret:
Flying Lobbyist Air at $4,000 a Junket
Fred Gardner
Dr. Mikuriya's Appeal: a Last Minute
Twist
Saul Landau
From Munich to Hamas
John Chuckman
Cartoons and Bombs: Was Rice Right
for Once?
Roger Burbach
Evo Morales: the Early Days
Seth Sandronsky
Economy on Ice
Website of the Weekend
Just Say Know
February 10, 2006
Carl
G. Estabrook
A US War Plan for Khuzestan?
Sen.
Russell Feingold
A Raw Deal on the Patriot Act
Roxanne
Dunbar----Ortiz
How Did Evo Morales Come to Power?
Saree Makdisi
The Tempest Over the Hamas Charter
Website of the Day
The
New York Art Scene: 1974----1984
February 9, 2006
Dave Lindorff
Bush
and Yamashita: War Crimes and Commanders----in----Chief
Mike Marqusee
The
Human Majority was Right About Iraq
Paul Craig Roberts
How Conservatives Went Crazy: the Rightwing Press
Peter Phillips
Inside
the Global Dominance Group: 200 Insiders Against the World
William S. Lind
Rumsfeld the Maximalist: the Long War
Christine Tomlinson Innocent
Targets in the "Long War": False Positives and Bush's
Eavesdropping Program
Will Youmans
Church of England Votes to Divest from Israel
Robert Robideau
An American Indian's View of the Cartoons
Richard Neville
The Cartoons That Shook the World: All This from the Danes, the
Least Funny People on Earth
Peter Rost
The New Robber Barons
Website of the Day
Eyes Wide Open
February 8,
2006
Ron Jacobs
The
Once and Future Sly Stone: Soundtrack to a Riot
Stan Cox
Making
and Unmaking History with General Myers
Sen. Russ Feingold
Why
Bush's Wiretapping Program is Illegal and Unconstitutional
Robert Jensen
Horowitz's
Academic Hit List: Take a Class from One of the CounterPunch
16
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Bush Should Have Wiretapped FEMA and Chertoff
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Alberto Gonzales Channels Mark Twain
Don Monkerud
Covenant Marriage on the Rocks
David Swanson
Inequality and War
C.L. Cook
Nuking Ontario
Christopher
Fons
Chill Out Jihadis: They're Just Cartoons!
Jeffrey Ballinger
The Other Side of Nike and Social Responsibility
Website of
the Day
Encyclopedia of Terrorism in the Americas
February 7,
2006
Edward Lucie----Smith
An
Urgent Plea to Save a Small Estonian Museum from Neo----Nazis
Robert Fisk
The Fury: Now Lebanon is Burning
Paul Craig Roberts
Colin Powell's Career as a "Yes Man"
Neve Gordon
Why Hamas Won
Joshua Frank
The Hillary and George Show: Partners in War
Peter Montague
The Problem with Mercury: a History of Regulatory Capitulation
Jackie Corr
The
Last Best Choice: Public Power and Montana
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Rumsfeld's
Enforcer: the Secret World of Stephen Cambone
Website of the Day
Negroes with Guns
February 6,
2006
Christopher
Brauchli
Spilling
Blood: Two Sentences
Robert Fisk
Don't
Be Fooled: This Isn't About Islam vs. Secularism
John Chuckman
What Did Stephen Harper Actually Win?
Jenna Orkin
Judge Slams EPA for Lying About 9/11's Toxic Air
Paul Craig
Roberts
Who
Will Save America: My Epiphany
February 4
/ 5, 2006
Alexander Cockburn
"Lights
Out in Tehran": McCain Starts Bombing Run
Mike Ferner
Pentagon
Database Leaves No Kid Alone
James Petras
Evo Morales's Cabinet: a Bizarre Beginning in Bolivia
Alan Maass
Scare of the Union: Dems Collaborate with Bush on Surveillance
Fred Gardner
Annals of Law Enforcement: a Look Inside the San Francisco DA's
Office
Ralph Nader
Bush's
Energy Escapades
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Speaking in Tongues
Saul Landau
Freedom 2006: Buying Sex on the Net or Those Older Freedoms?
Laura Carlsen
Bad Blood on the Border: Killing Guillermo Martinez
James Brooks
Our Little Shop of Diplomatic Horrors
Mike Roselle
Hippies and Revolutionaries in Carcacas
John Holt
Black Gold, Black Death: Canada's Oil Sands Frenzy
Sarah Ferguson
Cops Suing Cops ... for Spying on Cops
William S.
Lind
Beware the Ides of March
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Price of Globalization: Free Trade or Free Speech?
Seth Sandronsky
The Color of Job Cuts in the Auto Industry
Derrick O'Keefe
Rumsfeld's Hitler Analogy
Michael Donnelly
Hop on the Bus
Ron Jacobs
Religion and Political Power
Elisa Salasin
RSVP to Bush
St. Clair / Vest
Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week
Stew Albert
God's Curse: Selected Poems
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, LaMorticella and Engel
Website of
the Weekend
Killer
Tells All!
February 3,
2006
Toufic Haddad
A
Parliament of Prisoners
Heather Gray
Working with Coretta Scott King
Tim Wise
Racism,
Neo----Confederacy and the Raising of Historical Illiterates
Conn Hallinan
Nuclear Proliferation: the Gathering Storm
Eva Golinger
Rumsfeld and Negroponte Amp Up Hositility Toward Venezuela
Daniel Ellsberg
The World Can't Wait: Invitation to a Demonstration
Dave Zirin
Detroit: Super Bowl City on the Brink
Robert Bryce
The
Problem with Cutting US Oil Imports from the Middle East
Website of
the Day
The Chavez Code
February 2,
2006
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Pentagon
Pork: How to Eliminate It
Stan Cox
Outsourcing
the Golden Years
Rachard Itani
Danes
(Finally) Apologize to Muslims (For the Wrong Reasons)
Mike Whitney
Afghanistan Five Years Later: Buildings Down, Heroin Up
Amira Hass
In
the Footsteps of Arafat: an Interview with Hamas' Ismail Haniya
Norman Solomon
When Praise is Desecration: Smothering King's Legacy with Kind
Words
Michael Simmons
Stew Lives!
Christopher
Reed
Japan's
Dirty Secret: One Million Korean Slaves
Website of the Day
State of Nature
February 1,
2006
Sharon Smith
The
Bluff and Bluster Dems: Alito and the Faux Filibuster
Jason Leopold
Enron and the Bush Administration
Cindy Sheehan
Getting
Busted at the State of the Union: What Really Happened
Joseph Grosso
Oprah
and Elie Wiesel: a Match Made in "Neutrality"
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Coretta Scott King was More Than Just Dr. King's Wife
Steven Higgs
Life After Roe. v. Wade
Robert Robideau
"God Given Rights": Palestine and Native America
R. Siddharth
Tales of Power: When Gandhi Rejected a Faustian Bargain with
Henry Ford
Jim Retherford
Remembering Stew Albert: the Quiet Genius
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
The Legacy of Coretta Scott King
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
True State of the Union
Website of
the Day
Candide's Notebooks
| February
16, 2006
"Even Jobs at McDonald's
Aren't Safe"
Their Own Economic
Reality
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
Who
can forget the neocons’ claim that under their leadership
America creates its own reality? Remember the neocons’ Iraq
reality--a “cakewalk” war? After three years of combat,
thousands of casualties, and cost estimated at over $1 trillion,
real reality must still compete with the White House spin machine.
One
might think that the Iraq experience would restore sober judgement
to policymakers. Alas, neocon reality has spread everywhere. It
has infected the media and the new Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben
Bernanke, who just gave Congress an upbeat report on the economy.
The robust economy, he declared, could soon lead to inflation and
higher interest rates.
Consumers
deeper in debt and fresh from their first negative savings rate
since the Great Depression show high consumer confidence. It is
as if the entire country is on an acid trip or a cocaine trip or
whatever it is that lets people create realities for themselves
that bear no relation to real reality.
How
can the upbeat views be reconciled with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’
payroll jobs data, the extraordinary red ink, and exploding trade
deficit? Perhaps the answer is that every economic development,
no matter how detrimental, is spun as if it were good news. For
example, the worsening US trade deficit is spun as evidence of the
fast growth of the US economy: the economy is growing so fast it
can’t meet its needs and must rely on imports. Declining household
income is spun as an inflation fighter that keeps mortgage interest
rates low. Federal budget deficits are spun as letting taxpayers
keep and spend more of their own money. Massive layoffs are spun
as evidence that change is so rapid that the work force must constantly
upgrade skills and re-educate itself.
The
denial of economic reality has become an art form. Except for Lou
Dobbs, no accurate economic reporting is available in the “mainstream
media.”
Occasionally,
real information escapes the spin machine. The National Association
of Manufacturers, one of outsourcing’s greatest boosters,
has just released a report, “US Manufacturing Innovation at
Risk,” by economists Joel Popkin and Kathryn Kobe. The economists
find that US industry’s investment in research and development
is not languishing after all. It just appears to be languishing,
because it is rapidly being shifted overseas: “Funds provided
for foreign- performed R&D have grown by almost 73 percent between
1999 and 2003, with a 36 percent increase in the number of firms
funding foreign R&D.”
US
industry is still investing in R&D after all; it is just not
hiring Americans to do the R&D. US manufacturers still make
things, only less and less in America with American labor. US manufacturers
still hire engineers, only they are foreign ones, not American ones.
In
other words, everything is fine for US manufacturers. It is just
their former American work force that is in the doldrums. As these
Americans happen to be customers for US manufacturers, US brand
names will gradually lose their US market. US household median income
has fallen for the past five years. Consumer demand has been kept
alive by consumers’ spending their savings and home equity
and going deeper into debt. It is not possible for debt to forever
rise faster than income.
When
manufacturing moves abroad, engineering follows. R&D follows
engineering, and innovation follows R&D. The entire economy
drains away. This is why the “new economy” has not materialized
to take the place of the lost “old economy.”
The
latest technologies go into the newest plants, and those plants
are abroad. Innovations take place in new plants as new processes
are developed to optimize the efficiency of the new technologies.
The skills required to operate new processes call forth investment
in education and training. As US manufacturing and R&D move
abroad, Indian and Chinese engineering enrollments rise, and US
enrollments decline.
The
process is a unified whole. It is not possible for a country to
lose parts of the process and hold on to other parts. That is why
the “new economy” was a hoax from the beginning. As
Popkin and Kobe note, new technologies, new manufacturing processes,
and new designs take place where things are made. The notion that
the US can lose everything else but hold on to innovation is absurd.
Someone
needs to tell Congress before they waste yet more borrowed money.
In an adjoining column to the NAM report on innovation, the February
6 Manufacturing & Technology News reports that “the US
Senate is jumping on board the competitiveness issue.” The
Bush regime and the doormat Congress have come together in the belief
that the US can keep its edge in science and technology if the federal
government spends $9 billion a year to “fund innovative, big-payoff
ideas that have the potential to transform the US economy.”
The
utter stupidity of the “Protecting America’s Competitive
Edge Act” (PACE) is obvious. The tremendous labor cost advantage
of doing things abroad will equally apply to any new “big-payoff
ideas” as it does to the goods and services currently outsourced.
Moreover, US research is open-sourced. It is available to anyone.
As the Cox Commission Report made clear, there are a large number
of Chinese front companies in the US for the sole purpose of collecting
technology. PACE will simply be another US taxpayer subsidy to the
rising Asian economies.
The
assertion that we hear every day that America is falling behind
because it doesn’t produce enough science, mathematics and
engineering graduates is a bald-faced lie. The problem is always
brought back to education failures in K-12, that is, to more education
subsidies. When CEOs say they can’t find American engineers,
they mean they cannot find Americans who will work for Chinese or
Indian wages. That is what the so-called “shortage”
is all about.
I
receive a constant stream of emails from unemployed and underemployed
engineers with many years of experience and advanced degrees. Many
have been out of work for years. They describe the movement of their
jobs offshore or their replacement by foreigners brought in on work
visas. Many no longer even know American engineers who are employed
in the profession. Some are now working in sawmills, others in Home
Depot, and others are attempting to eke out a living as consultants.
Many describe lost homes, broken marriages, even imprisonment for
inability to make child support payments.
Many
ask me how economists can be so blind to reality. Here is my answer:
Many economists are bought and paid for by outsourcers. Most of
the studies claiming to prove that Americans benefit from outsourcing
are done by economic consulting firms hired by outsourcers. Or they
are done by think tanks or university professors dependent on corporate
donors. Or they reflect the ideology of “free market economists”
who are committed to the belief that “freedom” is good
and always produces good results. Since outsourcing is merely the
freedom of property to act in its interest, and since this self-interest
is always guided by an invisible hand to the greater welfare of
everyone, outsourcing, ipso facto, is good for America. Anyone who
doesn’t think so is a fascist who wants to take away the rights
of property. Seriously, this is what passes for analysis among “free
market economists.”
Economists’ commitment to their “reality” is destroying
the ladders of upward mobility that made America the land of opportunity.
It is just as destructive as the neocons’ commitment to their
“reality” that is driving the US deeper into war in
the Middle East.
Fact
and analysis no longer play a role. The spun reality in which Americans
live is insulated against intelligent perception.
American
“manufacturers” are becoming merely marketers of foreign
made goods. The CEOs and shareholders have too short a time horizon
to understand that once foreigners control the manufacture-design-
innovation process, they will bypass American brand names. US companies
will simply cease to exist.
Norm
Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, says that even McDonald's
jobs are no longer safe. Why pay an error-prone order-taker the
minimum wage when McDonald's can have the order transmitted via
satellite to a central location and from there to the person preparing
the order. McDonald’s experiment with this system to date
has cut its error rate by 50% and increased its throughput by 20
percent. Technology lets the orders be taken in India or China at
costs below the minimum wage and without the liabilities of US employees.
Americans
are giving up their civil liberties because they fear terrorist
attacks. All of the terrorists in the world cannot do America the
damage it has already suffered from offshore outsourcing.
Paul
Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in
the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street
Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.
He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached
at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com |
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