I love America! When you get rich, I mean really rich, you get to have dinner with the President and tell him that the country (read: our economy) is just SOL. That's what Steve Jobs told Obama in a recent NYT article that should be the rallying call for the OWS folks. Obama asks Steve Jobs if any of his company's jobs might return to American soil. Steve told Obama, "The are NEVER coming back!"
What really got me in this article was the arrogance with which Mr. Jobs addressed the President, and the pusillanimous response from Obama--he sat mute! What? I could have cut Mr. Jobs off at the knees. American workers are indolent, uneducated, unwilling to rise to challenges, and require too much for their labor?
Well, Mr. Jobs, when you send your manufacturing to China, and let them live like caged animals, pay them nothing, and shake your head as the suicides at the Apple plant in China continue to mount (while working those insane hours at a moments notice--it was just recently that Wired Magazine ran a news story entitled: One Million Workers, 90 million iPhones, and 17 Suicides...at the Foxconn plants), whilst charging Americans, who built your company, insane amounts of money to buy your products......wow, you are a true visionary worthy of giving the President advice, cloaked as a back handed slap in his face. Ours, too!
If you are educated, you can connect the dots pretty easily. First, Obama should have used this as a teachable moment. Mr. President, America is dying from the blood letting of jobs overseas. You have the power to "level the playing field," and slap some serious tariffs on Apple's goods. Okay, tariffs are not in vogue, but poverty and despair in America are clearly the new fashion. What do you vote for, I ask?
I sit here writing this posting, and write on an Apple MacBook Pro which I paid way too much money for, but would have paid an extra $50 to a $100 bucks to cover the tariff to assuage my guilt at sending good jobs overseas. I spent an hour yesterday in a cafe talking to a middle aged woman about the merits of iPhones and MacBooks. She was holding an iPhone 3G in her hand like it was a Faberge egg, from which she accesses the Internet. She dreams of owning a MacBook, but is unemployed, and can't afford one. Her iPhone 3G is riddled with bugs (so much for all the hoopla about meticulous engineering). She desperately wants a MacBook, but when pressed, she bemoaned that she can't buy one unless it were used. She's unemployed, and that's what's keeping her from buying a MacBook. Could Steve Jobs ever wrap his head around that? If you lower prices, cut profits a little, than more folks will buy your products.
But Apple doesn't care that it blew it with the 3G, they just want profits. Check back in five years to see their stock price--if the company still exists with the Maestro gone, and no heir apparent. Oh, Tim Cook, who moved production to Asia, will be the guy to ensure the company's future? One thinks not.
Thomas Friedman wrote a follow up Op/Ed in the NYT explaining how "this is the way things work now." WTF? Where are the voices of hope and the rallying cry to take on foreign competitors! The American economy has been the envy of the world for the past 67 years. Now that the middle class is under attack from both government and corporate America, we are creating a recipe for disaster unseen in this country since 1860.
For example, I was on a business call to meet with the General Manager of a General Motors plant in the State of Delaware in 1988, and he gave me a tour of the facility. The entire plant was run by computers and robots. The cars were guided from one station (installing various options) to the next, all by themselves. Of course there were manual laborers there to help with things the robots can't perform, but that was 24 years ago, and we have come so far from that. And then I read this crap about how Apple has perfected the perfect template to decimate the entire economy, by sending all of our jobs to China to make an ocean full of money. Ahhh!!! Not for nothing, but GM closed that assembly plant in Delaware. The problem was not with the engineers, but with the accountants. Now you ask why GM went belly up?
Okay, try this on. I buy and sell a lot of very sophisticated sound equipment. Did you know that the best sound equipment is made in the good ole U.S.A.? Yup! We make the best high-end electronics that are the envy of the world. I could bury you with legions of examples of how Americans, with one hand tied behind our backs, can still outwork and outsmart any country in the world--if the government would only get on the side of labor, and use tariffs to keep outside markets from eating our lunch, we could turn this ship around. Otherwise, our economy will be sitting on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, along with the Titanic.
Why has America been great? Freedom. Today in the HuffPost (see below) there was a short article about the coordinated efforts of police officers across the country who have been abusing the media who have been trying to accurately report the news. What? The Republicans, of which most cops align their political beliefs, want to screw every cop in the country out of their pensions, when these said pensions are becoming the biggest drag on the deficit at the federal, state and local levels. Is the Fourth Estate being targeted for elimination by a nascent police state, or are the cops dipping into the drugs they're confiscating, and losing touch with the people who ratify their financial futures?
The cops have only one friend--us liberals! So why do the cops pepper spray little old ladies in the Pacific Northwest carrying the banner of OWS, when these same folks will be at their backs in the voting booth? Maybe now, they won't. But kidding aside, we will. But isn't this a teachable moment for us all...the cops are on the wrong side, because our country has morphed into a pseudo-democracy that is resembling Germany in the 1930s? Is that the subtext, or are the police that obtuse that they can't see the folks at the top have them squarely in their budget cutting gunsights?
Oy, vey. Steve Jobs built a lot of amazing products, but he didn't change the world, like Martin Luther King, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln or Ghandi. So why lionize Mr. Jobs? He didn't invent the mouse; he stole it from Xerox. Like Bill Gates buying the source code for MS-DOS from some guy in Seattle, and repackaging it. These people are so respected for things that are fundamentally ephemeral. And who's to say some other engineers wouldn't have come up with other, cheaper and better products?
I only have one dog in this fight, and it's the American worker. The President wants to know how to create jobs. Well, Mr. President, please start first by closing the gate so the job losses to overseas manufacturers stop hemorrhaging. Second, stop inviting billionaire capitalists, like Steve Jobs, to dinner to discuss macroeconomics, and start inviting smart people, like Paul Krugman, who can offer sound advice and counsel to address problems that affect the bottom 99%.
Wow, Mr. Jobs and Company really think they are the smartest people in the room. They're idiots. And if Mr. Jobs thinks that it's so cool to promote slave labor, and dump known carcinogens into the drinking supply of those who live near the Foxconn plants, man, you are nuts. Furthermore, Mr. Jobs could not begin to offer the solution to our economic problems, because he was the problem. And Obama should have slapped Mr. Jobs down and explained that capitalists can do what ever they damn well please, but the government is here to protect the interests of the People. Screw Apple, and GE, and all the others who follow suit.
If Steve Jobs complains that we have too few engineers in America to compete, then he should have told this to President Obama, and then the President might just have a new arrow in his quiver to push for more money for higher education, especially in science, technology, engineering and math. We all know that the future is dependent on mathematics.
My worry is that too many people have read the NYT article (and video they made as a companion piece), and think: "Yeah, we're a bunch of losers." I guess many of these same folks are just hunky dory with: One Million Workers, 90 million iPhones, and 17 Suicides...
Sorry sports fans, my bet stays on America. I want to see "Made in America" on everything I buy. That's my dream. It happened when I was a tyke; it can happen again. We kicked Japan's ass when they came at us in the 80s. Remember when the Japanese were on top, flush with cash, and began buying trophy real estate in America, like Rockefeller Center in NYC in 1989? Well, that fell apart, and now its owned by Americans again.
As long as real democracy and freedom exist in this country, we will always attract the best and brightest from around the world, as we always have. It's no secret that 55% of our Ph.D. engineering candidates are foreign born. They come here for freedom and opportunity. Take away our freedom, and game over. Tell that to your local law enforcement before they pepper spray your grandmother protesting cuts to social security as part of the evolving OWS movement.
Apple Article in NYT
Cops Hassling OWS News Reporters
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