“The basic complete lack of any actual real facts”
This post was supposed to be on Blogcritics, but since it doesn’t meet with their standards, I’m posting it here.
You can tell when you score points with a recent post when the responses to it get personal, ignoring the attributes of that topic in favor of personal slander of the author, during which the commenters make unsubstantiated claims with no links to support their “everyone knows” idiocy.
For instance, Al Barger jumps in with, “Fool calls himself the ‘Realist’ seemingly exactly because he’s not. Brother Nalle makes the obvious point about the basic complete lack of any actual real facts.” That isn’t even properly grammatical English, Al! My own editor, “Brother” Dave Nalle would never let me get away with such sloppy writing!
Since you brought him up, let’s let him get his shots in: “Realist is clearly out of his league. The only value to these omnibus articles of Realist’s is to follow the links to his even more insane sources of inspiration so you can guage [sic] just how crazy the most dangerous elements on the left are.”
That’s “gauge”, Dave. G_A_U_G_E. Look it up.
OK, Dr. Nalle! Having diagnosed my mental condition along political lines, maybe you and “Brother” Barger would like to see some real facts from those who are all-stars in their leagues? You can hit the ‘back’ button to resume your slanderous tirades of me once you’ve determined that I still fit your narrow psychological profile.
Assuming that those complex concepts of “forward” and “back” didn’t lose you, you have now returned after reading the samples I offered on my own blog about manufacturing job losses across the nation and the devastating effects they are causing to small communities. You don’t have to like my facts (or me, for that matter). But maybe you will accept instead those points of evidence presented by wealthy and prominent Americans, whose written attempts at getting through to those who will not see anything not issued by the Republican National Committee Ministry of Truth may or may not be heeded.
Take CNN’s Lou Dobbs for instance, who asks in Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas: “How can our politicians call trade ‘free’ when year after year we sustain runaway trade deficits and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs?” Dobbs believes that we are well on our way to “losing another 14 million jobs to outsourcing.”
He’s on television, so he can’t be “out of his league” or be considered a “fool” by those whose political and economic beliefs are considered correct, right? Or does he also suffer from “a complete lack of any actual facts”? Are Dobbs’ sources of inspiration “insane”? Or, are we not to care about how the current U.S. policy is anything but de facto foreign aid at the expense of U.S. workers, as U.S. Business and Industry Council policy analyst Alan Tonelson writes in The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards?
This topic of how globalization is affecting the workforce is one that corporate executives are concerned with, or there wouldn’t be a market for Workforce Wake-Up Call: Your Workforce is Changing, Are You?. As a result, should not someone care about this issue from the worker’s standpoint?
Someone does, as The 2010 Meltdown: Solving the Impending Jobs Crisis indicates. The Idaho Press-Tribune wrote that this book “prompts critical thinking about where we are headed and what we need … to prevent a 2010 meltdown of our workforce and our economy”. You might want to listen to the opinions of Idahoans, unless you think that Red State too liberal and “insane” to be credible.
Maybe you would prefer the wisdom of that Commie pinko tree hugger Senator Lindsey Graham, long a staunch supporter of George W. Bush’s economic and political policies. His state has been ravaged by globalization and offshoring, and he lends his endorsement to Senator Byron Dorgan’s Take This Job and Ship It: How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America, saying, “If you’re tired of seeing good American jobs shipped overseas in search of cheap labor, you’re going to appreciate this book. … His book offers real solutions that can strengthen our country.”
But maybe the only “strengthening” you care about is sending more troops to be wasted in Iraq, right? You believe that our nation’s only role in globalization is to supply the soldiers intended to impose it on the rest of the world for the benefit of American-sired internaltional corporations? That was once the role of John Perkins, co-author of A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption, in which he quotes neo-con-federates Niall Ferguson and Charles Krauthammer as saying “globalization is a fancy word for imperialism”.
The totalitarian approach to economics isn’t limited to foreign adventures. Amazon reviewer Thomas Duff pointed this out in his review of “most dangerous element” McKinsey & Co. analyst Diana Farrell’s Offshoring: Understanding the Emerging Global Labor Market, saying:
I felt as if the individual got overlooked in their analysis. The statistics are used in such a broad way as to ignore reality. For instance, “from 1979 to 1999, 69 percent of US workers who lost their jobs as a result of trade in sectors other than manufacturing found new work within half a year. On average, they received similar wages in their new jobs (though roughly half took pay cuts).” So the reality is that 30% of workers (and let’s not dwell on those in manufacturing) were still unemployed after six months, and of the 70% that *did* find other jobs, half had a lower standard of living.
One of McKinsey’s “more insane sources of inspiration” was Austrian economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter, who wrote in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy that “capitalism will collapse” and be replaced by a non-Marxist socialism. He thought that the “success of capitalism” would lead to a form of corporatism that would destroy “intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive”. Schumpeter also had no faith in democracy, believing that the people’s ignorance and superficiality made them easily manipulated by politicians, whose aim was to limit and control popular participation in their governance.
But our own history, which Schumpeter should have known about, exposes the lie. If We, the People believed as this citizen of the totalitarian Austro-Hungarian Empire did, there would never have been an American Revolution. We would still be a part of the British Empire. Even current events bring the lie to a passive acceptance of modern globalization corporatism, as the unfortunate Rep. David Obey recently discovered through the well-meaning but misdirected actions of American citizens unhappy with their representation. Such action might have been better directed toward Senator Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson for their attempts to aid and abet the imposition of modern military corporatism on America through the political manipulation of federal criminal investigations.
But I digress.
Maybe economist F. A. Hayek should have warned us that empowering business by decreasing government control would lead just as effectively to the horrors of nazi Germany and fascist Italy as empowering government with increasing economic control, the theme of his The Road to Serfdom.
Or would he now be deemed “out of his league” and a “most dangerous element on the left” with “the basic complete lack of any actual real facts” if he had?