Your host didn’t quite know what to say after viewing the meeting of the President and the Hu fellow from China yesterday. A perfectly honest man might have created a stink and told the truth:
We’ve spent a lot of time digging our own holes and now you’re a part of that, an enabler. And since we’re not going to agree on anything, get out. But before everyone leaves I’d like to show some handy charts I’ve had prepared by government employees, people who still have jobs. Which is what this is all about.
From the Department of Commerce, a pie chart of worldwide steel production as of November 2010:
The Commerce department on steel production is full of graphical data. All of it a horror show in terms of showing how the United States has disintegrated.
From 2009, another appalling graph — produced from data taken by the US Census, part of Commerce, on military production in the US versus everything else (and originally shown in the NY Times):
This continues on the blog riff that the US produces nothing but weapons. At the expense of everything else.
And that while what production of durable goods in the US that remains is charted, it — along with the fortunes of the middle class and the new mass of unemployed — cratered in 2009. However, military production did not.
It went through a minor dip and then soared.
This is immoral. It destroys any argument on fairness and shared burden and consequences being a part of US society. It broadly and mercilessly insults the intelligence of all those who must listen to, see or read about the Department of Defense making nibbles around the edges to trim its budget in the coming time of austerity.
The post a few days ago asked the rhetorical questions: What manner of leading western country has one company, General Atomics, devoted to only making killer drones for assassinating people elsewhere – that’s half the size of the Food and Drug Administration? Or where the budget for killer drones is the same as the one to ““Transform Food Safety System, Invest in Medical Product Safety, [and provide] Regulatory Science”?
In light of this, I had an idea for what would have been an appropriate response to the Obama/Hu joint appearance. People armed with creme pies, enough for those onstage and in the polite audience.
Today’s news, from AP, delivers this classic piece of instantly generated convenient American bullshit, the usual lame attempt to polish a really big turd:
[President Obama] said the newly announced business deals worth $45 billion — which include a highly sought-after $19 billion deal for 200 Boeing airplanes — would help create 235,000 U.S. jobs, in addition to the half-million U.S. jobs already generated by the United States’ annual $100 billion in exports to China.
Boeing, the big arms manufacturer.
Perhaps one of the problems rests in the idea that the people who lead this country, and those who follow them around reporting on their insubstantial statements, don’t really grasp how many things in the US are made in China.
It’s not just a lot. It’s virtually everything I come into contact during my daily travels, except cars and food. There’s no getting away from it. There are no alternatives.
Perhaps the people in power never look hard at the astonishing data revealing profound failure, all carefully produced by government agency. It’s too ugly and impeaching. It reveals economic treason on a grand scale.
Here’s a quaint poster, one sold to the upper middle class, a decorative thing that shows a government chart of US steel production from 1895. Now it’s sold as a gift, presumably made in China, for hanging on the wall where perhaps someone fancy and fine will momentarily wonder what happened to all that and how the word growth was redefined as looting.
An alert and courteous reader passed on a related piece, from someone’s column on innovation, or the lack of it in the US. It was discussing how that word has been redefined also — downward into the nothing of going nuts for iPhones and apps:
As for the rest of the crowd, it was disturbing to observe what appeared to be a total lack of awareness of the bigger picture. The preoccupation, bordering on obsession, with what they define as “technology” really costs all of us. In the minds of the svelte and young, it seems technology is only information technology: iPods, iPads, laptops, displays, and cell phones ad nauseam.
The concept of technology that you and I might define as the real iron that once drove this country — motors, valves, machinery, presses — that stuff that required the skills of engineers and craftspeople in this country to design and build, never seemed to cross the minds of the beautiful.
I suppose that is the root of the problem. The technology being discussed, software and cell phones and the like, is engineered and built overseas. The software is outsourced to India and the electronics built in China.
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