(A sermon for this hype magnified, so-called “Financially Collapsing” Sunday.)
Blooger KlatooBaradaNikto wrote a piece called IBM’s Warning Shot here recently.
I present it in its entirety:
Two weeks ago, IBM announced that it plans to shift all operations to India and offered US workers the chance to move to India if they would adapt to Indian wages.Cisco,another heavy hitter in the networking sphere,after announcing that it is planning major cutbacks,also announced moves to India and China.The pharmaceutical have already climbed aboard this train,moving research work in drugs to India to contain their spiraling costs.
Technology Review,MIT’s prestigious journal predicts that in the next ten years 36 million jobs in technology related fields will move to India,decimating an already reeling middle class.This is the kind of calamity that Paul Craig Roberts has been predicting for quite sometime now.As manufacturing moved to China,economists crowed that this need not worry us because we are the leaders in high technology and the best jobs will stay in US.That now sounds like a mirage.
A long age of suffering is upon us because there are now many more competitors who are gaining strength through their educational systems.They have also learned the American trick of empowering the people with capital and encouraging their enterprise. And they can do all this at fraction of our costs. All this bodes ill for our own economy.
Read on for more.
This whole “The sky is falling” thing is really just a long-overdue adjustment. I have been advocating for over four years on these leftiness blogs that middle and upper-middle class people people must begin to pull in their belts and join the working class/lower middle class in terms of lifestyle and expenditures. Inflation? The real inflation has been in the way that so many Americans have lived over the past 50 years or so.
I will post the following linked information again. And again and again and again until people see the truth of the matter.
Pioneering Study Shows Richest Two Percent Own Half World Wealth
The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth according to a path-breaking study released today by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER).
The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.
The research finds that assets of $2,200 per adult placed a household in the top half of the world wealth distribution in the year 2000. To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world required $61,000 in assets, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1%, a group which — with 37 million members worldwide — is far from an exclusive club.
—snip—
Using currency exchange rates, global household wealth amounted to $125 trillion in the year 2000, equivalent to roughly three times the value of total global production (GDP) or to $20,500 per person. Adjusting for differences in the cost-of-living across nations raises the value of wealth to $26,000 per capita when measured in terms of purchasing power parity dollars (PPP$).
The world map shows per capita wealth of different countries. (Figure 1: World Wealth Levels in Year 2000) Average wealth amounted to $144,000 per person in the USA in year 2000, and $181,000 in Japan. Lower down among countries with wealth data are India, with per capita assets of $1,100, and Indonesia with $1,400 per capita.
Per capita wealth levels vary widely across countries. Even within the group of high-income OECD nations the range includes $37,000 for New Zealand and $70,000 for Denmark and $127,000 for the UK.
Wealth is heavily concentrated in North America, Europe, and high income Asia-Pacific countries. People in these countries collectively hold almost 90% of total world wealth. (Figure 2: Regional Wealth Shares)
Although North America has only 6% of the world adult population, it accounts for 34% of household wealth. Europe and high income Asia-Pacific countries also own disproportionate amounts of wealth. In contrast, the overall share of wealth owned by people in Africa, China, India, and other lower income countries in Asia is considerably less than their population share, sometimes by a factor of more than ten. (Figure 3: Population and Wealth Shares by Region)
This is an unnatural state of affairs. It was imposed and maintained by by vast military superiority after WW II, and that superiority was maintained by equally vast technical and industrial superiority for over 50 years. The military superiority….except for essentially unusable WMDs…is flat out over. The Vietnamese figured out how to beat the U.S.; the Islamicists whipped both Russia and the U.S. and the rest of the world took due note.
The tech/industrial edge is now as good as gone as well. Part of this change has been simple math…lots of people (China + India particularly) + relative social stability + better education = power…and part of it has been fueled by the overfed complacency of the American middle and ruling classes. YOU know, the ones who ceded the U.S. industrial base to other countries in the ’70s because they thought that they were too good to worry about people who got their hands dirty for a living? Yup. Those fools. The same ones who let the educational system here fall into serious, multiple-choice, grade-on-a-curve, rote-learning, no-child-left-behind disrepair. It is now almost totally broken, right on up through graduate studies programs.
So it goes.
And we have to deal with it.
Bet on it.
First thing?
Flush all debt down the toilet as soon as possible. If you don’t have the cash to buy something…and I mean a house, a car, a TV, new shoes, a bottle of wine, a beer, the works…THEN DON’T FUCKINGBUY IT!!!
Duh.
Yes, you are going to take a loss if you sell your house now and move to one that is more affordable or start renting.
Tough shit. You bought into the credit addiction and now it’s time to kick. Lemme tell you something from both personal experience and a long life spent shoulder to shoulder with addictive personalities in the music world. There is only one way to effectively kick an addiction, and only one time as well. The way is cold turkey and the time in now. Bet on that as well.
Second thing?
As soon as possible…GET A JOB!!!
Yeah, you.
And yes, I mean a real job. Not pushing papers or playing office politics or selling useless, credit-based items or working in an empty, do-as-little-as-possible-and-make-as-much-money-as-can-be-made-from-empty-hours-spent-avoiding-work-
and-real-responsibility bureaucracy.
Something real.
A real service or a real craft. Like being a garbageman or a moving man or a real teacher…they exist, bet on it…or a carpenter or a bicycle repairman or a musician for whose work people pay real money to enjoy.
Something real.
ANYTHING real.
Please.
You have a real interest. I know you do.
Cooking?
Cook fer chrissake!!!
Dogs? Photography? Automobiles? Martial arts? Knitting?
I do not give a fuck.
Start now. Learn how to do whatever you really love to do well and then
DO the motherfucker!
I can hear the whining already.
“What about my children?”
“What about my security?”
“I’m not GOOD enough!!!”
“There’s no MONEY!!!”
“I’m SCARED!!!”
Etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
Get it through your thick, overprivileged skulls now.
Your children are going to have to deal with this reality soon enough. Now’s the time to make sure that they don’t get strung out on the false message that has been pumped into American culture by the corporate-owned advertising media.
“BUY!!! BUY!!! BUY!!!”
It’s over, kiddies.
Get used to it and join the rest of humanity.
If you cannot get this into your softened brains, turn the fucking media off until you do see the truth of what I am saying.
You can do it. I know you can. Your parents and grandparents didn’t fall into that media trap. Not like you have for sure.
NEWSTRIKE!!!
MEDIASTRIKE!!!
CULTURESTRIKE!!!
Who really gives a flying fuck about Lindsey Lohan and what direction in which she likes to point her sexual organs?
Apply the FAT theory and go on about your real business.
The business of survival and growth.
You be bettah off.
Bet on it.
I am, for sure.
I made this move…a second time, after dropping back into the system, to some degree…almost 8 years ago and I have to tell you that on certain levels I am absolutely thriving as a result.
Got kids?
Got responsibilities?
I understand. I really do. But do what you can in this regard. It’s a process, and if you start that process, eventually you will free yourself from the slavery under which you have been living.
A slavery of which you were almost totally unaware. A slave cannot escape his bonds if said slave does not even know that slavery is the condition under which he lives.
Check it out.
It’s gonna happen anyway.
India? China? The Islamic world? South/Central/Caribbean America? Maybe even poor, fucked Africa eventually? They’re not going away. Get used to it. This is the way it is going to be. A relatively level playing field across the globe. No more “I got; you cain’t have!!!” shit.
More like lovely, fucked, tragically wise Billie sang:
God Bless The Child
Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his ownYes, the strong gets more
While the weak ones fade
Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade
Mama may have, papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his ownMoney, you’ve got lots of friends
Crowding round the door
When you’re gone, spending ends
They don’t come ’round no more
Rich relations give
Crust of bread and such
You can help yourself
But don’t take too much
Mama may have, papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his ownMama may have, papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own
He just worry bout nothin’
Cause he’s got his own
Yup.
Money, you’ve got lots of friends
Crowding round the door
When you’re gone, spending ends
They don’t come ’round no more
Musician as prophetess.
Lissen up.
It’d do you some good.
God bless the child that’s got his own?
Brethren an’ sistren…if the bank own it, it ain’t your own. You just a squatter.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG