RANGER AGAINST WAR: A Black Border for America <

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

A Black Border for America

--Thomas Nast on fake economy

There's something happening here

What it is ain't exactly clear

--For What it's Worth,

Buffalo Springfield


Round and round it goes,

where it stops, nobody knows

--Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour


And somewhere men are laughing,

and somewhere children shout;

But there is no joy in Mudville -

mighty Casey has struck out

--Casey at the Bat
, Ernest Thayer

______________________


This was written with the last pen sold by our now-defunct Borders Bookstore. The pen was made in China; it ran out of ink by day two.


Back in the halcyon days of 20th century United States, mystery writer John D. McDonald authored the Travis McGee series, an easygoing character who lived on a boat. In order to wrangle favorable book deals from his publisher, McDonald would say that he had the final installment in the bag:
A Black Border for McGee; in other words, he would kill off the cash cow if they were niggardly in their negotiations.

Mr. McDonald, former OSS member (R.I.P), could not have known there would soon be a Black Border for America. The closure of the Borders bookstore chain signifies many things. Most obviously, the loss of 19,000 more jobs on September 1. They will soon be joined by the losses incurred from the closure of 1,300 post offices. Congressman Darrell Issa projects
200,000 fired laid-off over the next few years.

While our government diddles over budget caps and defaults
the everyday lives of our middle and lower classes are slowly fading to black, because the things not counted in the cost of living index -- things like gas and food -- are the mainstays of their lives. How is it we can have a rosy uptick in consumer purchasing? Because the wealthiest 5-20% are back to purchasing top drawer items at full price, because they know there will always be more for them (Sales of Luxury Goods are Recovering Strongly.)

Meanwhile, dollar stores are failing to make their quotas or have an extremely thin profit margin because their denizens are cutting back to the bare essentials, cutting out "discretionary" purchases like hand lotions. A Dollar Store manager said apologetically in a NYT article, "it may sound ridiculous", but the stores will often not raise popular items by 10 cents as that would have a significant impact upon their client base.


Back to the pen: Ranger has a handsome wooden Hallmark pen for which he cannot obtain refills; we are no longer manufacturing them. The only hope for using the refillable pen is to find unused ones on eBay when stationary stores close out, or to order an adapter provided by Hallmark Canada to allow the use of other refill cartridges.
Ranger finds himself like the Road Warrior, searching the parched landscape for niceties that one were.

It seems Americans would rather buy 50-pks at Costco of cheapo Chinese pens rather than taking the time to actually keep track of and dissemble a pen for refilling.
More trash, less value, the appearance of value, less manufacturing in the USA.


Meanwhile, Fla-duh Governor Rick "Pink Slip" Scott
calls for ever more students to become engineers, scientists and mathematicians, without specifying where these people will work. But some people will surely benefit: The community college system, which will run under-prepared applicants through the remediation mill for several terms, and all the support associated with that. Surely every government agency involved with placing, training and benefits for people mismatched to field. Failure and sickness is becoming big business in the U.S. Rick Scott would know this from his holdings in the health care field.

And maybe, when these poor schlumps find no jobs, they can rock their basic math skills by being able to subtract the receipt total from funds given at the burgeoning Dollar Stores without dumbly staring at the register and being flummoxed by the offer of an extra penny to avoid getting four back.
Surely the tabs will never be too high to compute, and dollar type stores are a growth area. It's something.

The economic climate of America is not going to improve for the masses anytime soon.

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14 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
--Something's Happening Here,
Buffalo Springfield

Actually, the song is called

"For What It's Worth"

Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:14:00 PM GMT-5  
Blogger Lisa said...

Anon,

Thanks. Crowd-sourcing is a great thing.

Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 1:37:00 PM GMT-5  
Blogger BadTux said...

Even if I wanted to buy a refill for my pen, the clicker thingy isn't clicking so well anymore and I don't know of anyplace within a hundred miles of my home that I could buy such a thing. So do I go to Costgo and get the 50-pack of Chinese pens, or do I go onto eBay or Amazon and buy the last set of refills from the last non-bankrupt supplier of refills? Ever since we shipped all our industry to China, we get what the Chinese want us to have -- not what *we* want us to have. So it goes, in declining empires... once empires forget that wealth is *stuff* and thus quit generating their own wealth, the end is inevitable.

- Badtux the "But Mandarin is so hard to learn!" Penguin

Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 6:58:00 PM GMT-5  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I am unrepentantly decadent. If I am not typing, I am using a fountain pen. One that fills from a bottle of ink. Yes, you can't buy that "downtown" any more, either. But an American company, "Noodlers" sells online...if I recall, they are located in Florida. I recommend them heartily.

And yes, I know, ending pens-lives isn't the point. But we must hold onto what remains.

Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 7:53:00 PM GMT-5  
Anonymous Lisa said...

B.T.,

Unsolicited Opinion posted this & I wondered your take:

We're Chasing the Wrong Deficit

If you want to understand the root causes for the nation's (and the world's) economic distress, you can do no better than get hold of the 17 October 2011 issue of The Nation which features an in-depth article on John Maynard Keynes and his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

Keynes believed that practical leaders would always see the supreme importance of keeping the country out of external debt—indeed, he seemed to see this as the first duty of the state. For Keynes, in his later years, it was the economic analogue to defending one’s country. Avoiding an external debt was an act of patriotism and national self-preservation in a sense that even reducing unemployment was not. ...Keynes would not believe how Obama, the Tea Party, the Democrats, the Republicans—our leaders—pay so little attention to our whopping trade deficit, as if it had nothing at all to do with our slump.

The right, the Tea Party, the Concord Coalition, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson, Peter Peterson—they want to bring down the federal deficit. The left, our side, generally wants to go deeper into debt and get to full employment. Then we’ll bring down the federal deficit. Then we’ll have full employment and all will be well.

But until we bring down the trade deficit and fix our balance of payments, there is no way out of debt.



The bottom line: our corporate overseers have de-industrialized this nation to the point where even if Americans have money to spend, we will spending it on foreign made goods.

Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 8:56:00 PM GMT-5  
Blogger BadTux said...

That's pretty much it, Lisa. The vaunted "efficiency improvements" over the past thirty years where fewer Americans supposedly produce more "stuff" are a lie, because the "stuff" isn't actually being produced by Americans -- they're being produced by Chinese, and *imported* by Americans. That naturally takes fewer Americans than, like, actually *building* the stuff.

To a certain extent imports are good. Nations can't produce *everything* they need to have a healthy economy, for one thing America's population simply isn't big enough to produce everything we currently consume even if we re-industrialized. But what we're seeing right now is imports being used as a method to impoverish Americans and thus America by depriving them of jobs producing actual stuff, and instead substituting McJobs in the "service economy" (will there be fries with that order sir?). Meanwhile, this is all being paid for with freshly printed dollars... but because we're exporting them to China rather than keeping them here, we're also exporting our *inflation* to China (thus why we are not seeing inflation here, but China's in the middle of a raging inflationary spiral).

So yes, printing dollars and handing them to Americans will create inflation -- in China. And will create jobs -- in China. None of which helps America and Americans all that much :(. To get Americans to work that creates actual wealth, we have to put them to work doing productive things like, say, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. Yeah, good luck with that...

- Badtux the WASF Penguin

Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 9:21:00 PM GMT-5  
Anonymous Lisa said...

BT,

Thank you for your read -- I presumed that was just about the size of it.

Everything I buy that I think is sourced from another country is, as you say, imported by them but Made in China. Everything. And mostly, it's shoddy stuff.

I remember about 20 years ago the rosy prognostications of the future burgeoning service "industry", and of course, technology. But there's no there, there. I mean, we can fete the Asian and European tourists, and we can develop ideas, but who's going to construct them?

Dreadful bill of goods I think we were sold in the p.s. probably 50 years ago removing the technical and secretarial tracks. Everyone had to come out the same only, that's not how we're made. So now we have the sly shift back to college track with magnet schools and the IB programs, but the rest aren't given equal specialization.

They just flounder and get disgorged to the community college / remediation behemoth.

I don't understand why we don't resurrect programs like the CCC or WPA? I mean, these are kind of dire times, and things need correction and building.

Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 9:46:00 PM GMT-5  
Blogger BadTux said...

Well, these are dire times for the bottom 80%. But they aren't dire times for the 1% who rule us, they're doing just fine thank you very much, so there's no incentive to do something like a WPA or CCC on their part.

Yes... WASF. The "service economy" has serviced us good and hard, like a stallion services a mare.

- Badtux the Waddling Penguin

Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 9:53:00 PM GMT-5  
Blogger FDChief said...

One of the things that makes this difficult is the issue of "protectionism".

Conventional wisdom is "tariffs are bad" and that we are all Free Traders now.

But how do you afford your rock-and-roll lifestyle when you're trading with someone in an economy that provides workers that can produce the same product for half the cost?

Inevitably the manufacturers will flee to the Third World.

We tend to forget that the United States built its manufacturing power in the late 19th and early 20th Century behind high tariff walls; we're coasting today on the remnants of those fortifications.

But now? To return the manufacture of Cheap Plastic Crap to these shores would take decades...and the crap wouldn't be cheap, either.

I honestly have no idea what is going to replace the "70% consumer spending" economy that cratered in 2008. I have no doubt that something eventually will...but what, and how long it will take..?

It may be a long, hard season...

Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:45:00 AM GMT-5  
Blogger Lisa said...

I do understand why you are waddling, BT -- a most graphic image :(

Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:31:00 AM GMT-5  
Anonymous tw said...

Back to "For What It's Worth", my favorite lines

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your heart it will creep
It starts when you're always affraid
You step out of line, the man comes and takes you away

Steven Stills

Friday, October 14, 2011 at 9:50:00 PM GMT-5  
Blogger Brooklyn Red Leg said...

Conventional wisdom is "tariffs are bad" and that we are all Free Traders now.

Free Traders my ass. NAFTA was 1500 pages of regulations. How is that 'Free Trade'. Its as absurd as saying we have a Free Market Economy when we have a Mixed Economy (Corporatism/Soft Fascism).

And yes, those of us at the bottom are getting totally screwed by Inflation. Screw Keynes. We've been using his stupid models for far too long.

Keynes vs. Hayek Round 2!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTQnarzmTOc

Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:00:00 PM GMT-5  
Blogger Lisa said...

tw,

One of my favorites, too. Insidious it is, but like the old line goes, "Is it 'paranoia' if they really ARE out to get you?"

Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:00:00 PM GMT-5  
Blogger FDChief said...

BRL: Inflation?

OK...put down the crack pipe and back sloooowly away.

NAFTA is a pimple on the ass of "free trade". "Free trade" simply means that foreign goods are free to move into the U.S. in a way not seen prior to 1980. "Corporatism" is a "free" economy in that its not a "command" economy - it's just not free for the poor schmoes on the bottom. The "free markets" of the Gilded Age were indeed "free" - from government regulation. What they were not "free" of was monopolism, which is similar to what we're seeing today.

OK, Inflation. Inflation is not a problem and hasn't really been since 1977.

There are problems - stagnant wages, vicious competition from low-wage countries (offshoring, "downsizing"), increased "productivity" that means fewer people doing more work often for less pay - but inflation isn't one right now.

Keynes. You're kidding, right? Keynes would have had 13 million Americans out building bridges and highway embankments. We haven't been "Keynesian" since pre-Carter. The current political climate - that rejects any sort of tax increase even as the economy is stuck in a liquidity trap = is, if anything, more like Hayek than Keynes, although it avoids the worst Hayekian silliness of the goldbug-sort.

We're not going anywhere at the moment, so not to worry. The monkeys running the GOP zoo will not allow any sort of populist-friendly, un-Chicago-school solution.

Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 9:25:00 PM GMT-5  

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