Don’t kid your self, Cyrena:
The Great Crash of 1929, too, was due to “The Great Heist”.  Everyone and his brother thought that they could be a tycoon in the stock market and over-extended themselves in an overheated market.  Took about stupid mortgages? People bought stock with 25% down and the rest on the margin--when the stock went below their buy price they had to make up the difference--a margin call.

The banks were neither protected (FDIC and FSBLI were created under FDR) investors, nor were prevented from playing the market.

Herbert Hoover got the blame but the real blame should have fallen on Harding and (Reagan’s hero) Calvin Coolidge--Hoover was only in office 6 months when the Crash came.  His solution? Trickle-down stimulus--sound familiar?  Of course it failed.  ("Trickle down” means our tax dollars go to the richest corporations and they piss downhill on the rest of us. Concentration of wealth is accelerated) However, in Hoover’s defense it was the first time the Federal government attempted to counter a depression, which established precedents for more drastic (and EFFECTIVE) action by FDR.

However, inflation was NOT a problem, neither was the federal deficit (the cause of the current collapse) so FDR was able to use deficit spending and the expansionism you can have with inflation to “grow” the economy.

“Globalization” sounds great on paper, but when I dial a help line and get someone in Asia who a) is barely trained in the technical issues I need b) has an attitude that is TOTALLY inflexible to thinking outside the box, and c) barely speaks English, I know that they aren’t doing this job because they are the best, but because they are the cheapest.  This has been the knock on HP--their customer support is off-shore and is very poor.  But HP is only one of many.

I know IVR systems save enormous amounts of labor, but the bottom line is they do NOT make the customer’s job easier, just the company’s. I’m told that T-Mobile’s support is some of the best in the cell industry.  This is scary, because their IVR is fairly ineffective (once you get past the language choice and sales or support).  I NEVER can get anything fixed without at least 4 one-hour calls, having to explain the problem multiple times until I finally get a Level 3 support--also offshore but usually in Canada--where the language is the same and the tech-expertise usually better than the US.

It takes a lot to destroy the greatest economic powerhouse in the world.  So many levels of incompetence.

Ayn Rand was wrong: It wasn’t the liberals and the Socialists and the collectivists who would kill the American economy--it was the so-called industrialists and bankers and conservatives.  It wasn’t the businessman who would walk away from their companies because of government regs, but ordinary homeowners who would abandon their houses to the unprincipled mortgage writers--it’s epidemic.  It was the mean-spirited Phil Gramms who said “tough shit!” to the poor but “Bailout!” to Bear Stearns and now FannieMae and Freddie Mac

Re Inherit the Wind, Part 1 of 2

Your comments here are sort of a mental telepathy or at least a déjà vu to a conversation that I was having just a bit ago, with another reader who used to comment, but not much now. I admit that I don’t have enough knowledge about economic matters to think of our economy as being strong, though I won’t doubt you.

Because, as she was saying, what we’ve got going here now is NOT anything like a ‘recession’ or even the Great Depression of 80 or 90 years ago, (even if the outward signs/results appear that way). Nope. What it is…is…

THE GREAT HEIST!!! (she called it, simply enough…A CRIMINAL THEFT!) Of course I have to add a tad bit of flowery from time to time.

Still, that’s what it is, which is why this simply would NOT have occurred, if Al Gore hadn’t been knifed out of the job we elected him to do. And I know I keep repeating myself when I though in this very chilling reminder…the words of Dick Cheney when he told the rest of the neo-cons, “JUST GET THE OVAL OFFICE.  I don’t care how you do it. Just get the Oval Office!!” In other words..definitely a PLANNED HEIST, and they’ve stolen it all.

I also get what you mean about the idea of ‘make work’, because I hate it. And I agree that if a machine can do something more efficiently, than that’s what we should use. The problem that I see with it though is the very thing that you mentioned in having the kids ‘help’ with stuff. It’s only to teach them, and not because there’s much efficiency in their ‘help’. (if anything, it slows us down). But, we do it so they can learn some other things (fundamentals) in addition to the ostensible benefits of whatever the particular chore happens to be.

The negative result to learning based on what the machine can do though, is that it prevents the learning of some of the basic stuff. Like, customer service. Or like how to think critically. I’ve noticed that with some much of the past couple of generations. They don’t learn how to connect conceptual dots that require standard communication, because they learn everything in terms of the language of technology. And I’ve discovered that in standard jobs across the spectrum. In the old flight planning, and route structure, one knew how the whole thing fit together. Now they just plug the values into the computer. That’s GREAT for a double check, and for making quick changes, and all the rest. Don’t get me wrong. But if that’s the ONLY way that people learn, a bunch of really important stuff goes unlearned. It also means that if ever any of these machines or extremely complicated systems that are supported by all of these machines breaks down, lots of folks don’t have a clue to how to do so much as blink their eyes or blow their noses.

Part 2 of 2

A 12- year old in my friend’s classroom recently talked of hearing a ‘funny sound’ on the phone when he was trying to call his grandmother. Well, it was a BUSY signal. He’d never heard it before, because everybody has ‘call waiting’ or whatever. And those damn menus that I get when I call someplace for a consumer related issue drive me nuts, because if I’m bothering to call to begin with, it means I need to talk to a PERSON. (otherwise, I’d just do it myself) But then, by the time I DO get a ‘person’, it turns out they don’t know anyway! Just over the past few years, I’ve found that at least 50% of the times that I need to get information from a real person, it’s WRONG! So I have to keep calling back with the hope that I get somebody over the age of 40, whose been around long enough to be able to actually know what they’re talking about, and manage to communicate it.

Several months ago, the power went out in a portion of the complex where I live. It was storm related, so understandable. Still, when it had been off for over 24 hours, I finally called the off-hours line, (it was a weekend) where there are allegedly 12 different people ‘on-call’ to handle various types of issues like this. There was a pre-recorded message saying that…THE POWER WAS OUT! OooKAY! Yep. I knew that. Then it went on to say that they didn’t know when it would be back on. But…it said, if you’re calling for any ‘other’ EMERGENCY, just leave a message, and we’ll get back to you.

Well, I just hung up, since all I really wanted to know was if they had an idea of how long the power might be off, so that I could make some alternate arrangements for some things. Then it dawned on me, (only because I’ve been around here long enough to know the mentality of some of these COLLEGE STUDENTS) that they might not have any ‘updates’ because they might not have INQUIRED. I called back and left a message that time, suggesting that they might contact the POWER COMPANY, just to get an assessment on what the problem was, which might then give us an idea of how much longer it might take. An hour later, the power was back on.

No, I’m not making this up. Nobody had known to do something that basic. I guess they were just gonna wait until Monday when the regular staff showed up, even though they aren’t a whole lot better. And yes..this is University run off campus housing. And all of these ‘workers’ get free rent for an entire year, just to be ‘on call’ for off hours. Nice work, (for them) if they can get it. Doesn’t help the rest of us much though.

So my point...there needs to be a balance to this stuff, if only so that people can make the right judgments in circumstances and situations where there’s no machine to help ‘em out.

When mechanized looms threw weavers out of work in France, they took their crude wooden shoes, their sabots, and threw them into the machines, breaking them.  Thus the word “sabot-age” was born.

But were they right?  If a job that can be done by a machine is forced to be done by an employee, is that worker truly productive?  Who has not had their kid “help” in some activity, from cooking and cleaning, to painting the house and changing the oil?  We don’t do it because it’s efficient but to teach the child.

But an adult kept in a make-work job is not the same.

Do I want jobs exported? No.  But that wasn’t economics, that was politics--a Reagan tax cut if you moved your production off-shore, pretending to help a poor country.

We have laughed the crude, corrupt and inept way Latin American and African nations have bankrupted themselves, faking with pretend “business” instead of real competition and economics.  And we’ve done the same thing to ourselves.  It’s taken 27 years, from Reagan through Bush, and, our economic machine is SO strong, had Al Gore properly taken the Presidency, it would STILL be healthy today.

But the final rape, the final sucking dry, the final lies by the Banana Republicans have turned us into another dictator-run destroyed economy.  If McCain wins, vowing to follow Bush’s rape-us-all economics, we deserve EVERTHING we get.  Because we should have turned the monsters out, not let them manipulate our fears once again.

The hot pot do yourself restaurants have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. they exist for different reasons, and you don’t sound like you will ever find out. silly.

jackpine savage, you are entirely correct when you say, “Corporate America wins again.”
But there is one thing that you have forgotten in the equation, not do they win coming, (Consumers paying higher prices) but now in the age of globalization, the Corporations of America, that used to be reasonably good citizens, they pay little if any taxes to enjoy the privilege of outsourcing our jobs to other countries that have little or no protection for the workers in their plants.
If anyone goes into Wal-Mart today, I would dare them to find products that were made in America!  Clothing, made in China, housewares, made in China, air conditioners, made in China, or another country in the Far East. Almost everything that you can buy in Wal-Mart is definitely made in some other country to “keep” costs down, while Americans cannot afford the prices that even Wal-Mart is charging for basic necessities.
In the rush to outsource all of the jobs to other countries, I believe that corporate America has forgotten one more thing, if all the jobs are outsourced to other countries how are Americans, supposed to pay for the products that are being imported into our country at exorbitant prices?
Sooner or later, and I believe sooner than later, the vicious cycle of outsourcing jobs to whatever country happens to be the country of the day, will effectively ruin the economy of America. The promised new technology jobs of “tomorrow” are not here yet, and for the foreseeable future will only be a pipe dream in the eyes of the American Worker.
Forgive me for being so pessimistic, but in the long run, it would pay to move to another country, where even though the pay scale is lower, that’s where the jobs are and the cost of living is lower.
I, for one, will work my tail off, to find the right country, and move there even though it is not America and there are not as many freedoms and I will be the foreigner, trying to assimilate myself into a foreign culture.

Interesting observation…

And like the price of the Maytag washing machine does not decline noticeably when the factory is moved to Mexico to save on labor costs, the price of all this do-it-yourself stuff isn’t really any lower than when someone did it for you.

Corporate America wins again.  In case you’re keeping score, they’re winning by a large margin.