I’ll just tag a few bits of Sunday reading before we head out for breakfast with friends at Koolau Golf Course. With our range out of order, we’re thrown off our normal Sunday routine of a puffy egg white omelet. So we’ll go the commercial route today.
So, to the reading. Sometimes I’m very glad for Ken Conklin, and this is one of those times. He has taken the time to dismantle Keanu Sai’s latest pseudo-history in a long essay: “So-called executive agreements between Hawaii Queen Liliuokalani and U.S. President Grover Cleveland — the new Hawaiian history scam by Keanu Sai.”
Thank you, Ken.
An editorial in the Christian Science Monitor this week also caught my attention (“For US economy, investments first, jobs to come later“). It compares economic approaches of the U.S. and Germany, with rather eye-opening conclusions.
Long the largest and the strongest economy in Europe, it channels its savings into wise investments in the people and technology that fuel the successful export of manufactured goods.
Compared with the US, Germany has not put vast resources into buying homes, creating a giant financial-services industry, or stimulating consumer demand.
More than half of German households rent while home prices have been level for a decade. Much of business is privately owned, not relying on Wall Street-style public ownership and its fickle, short-term perspective. Germans are modest consumers, living within their means.Long the largest and the strongest economy in Europe, it channels its savings into wise investments in the people and technology that fuel the successful export of manufactured goods.
Compared with the US, Germany has not put vast resources into buying homes, creating a giant financial-services industry, or stimulating consumer demand.
More than half of German households rent while home prices have been level for a decade. Much of business is privately owned, not relying on Wall Street-style public ownership and its fickle, short-term perspective. Germans are modest consumers, living within their means.
And…
In Germany, exports account for nearly half of the economy; In the US, it’s only 13 percent.
So instead of talking of “job creation,” let Washington rally around “investment in manufacturing.” That was once America’s strength before it was lured into putting its savings and its best and brightest into the real estate industry, the New York canyons of high finance, and high-flying corporate takeovers.
Maybe our much heralded consumer-driven economy hasn’t been the best model in the long run.
And then, from the Mother Nature Network (really, that’s what it says), another thought about economic insanity, “Why would a Hawaiian coffee shop import bananas?”
At a coffee shop in a remote town at the crest of a pass between two volcanic peaks, on an island whose soil is so awesomely fertile it’s inspired a local adage that says you could stick a broomstick in the dirt and it’d soon bloom, at the far end of a lush island chain that produces 15,000 tons of bananas every year, there is a tray of Ecuadoran bananas for sale. Shipped from several thousand miles south by container ship, unloaded first at Honolulu for transfer to a barge and then tugged to the port of Hilo and then trucked past fields filled with papaya and pineapple and lilokoi and oranges and delectable little bananas to a Starbucks in the shadow of Mauna Kea. Ecuadoran bananas for sale on Hawaii’s roof for a dollar each. Not an outrageous price, but it doesn’t begin to account for the skewed math that makes it economically “rational.”
And so it goes on a lovely Sunday morning.
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“Why would a Hawaiian coffee shop import bananas?” Well, they would not and they do not. It is not a Hawaiian coffee shop. It is a mainland corporate presence replete with their skewed, screwed way of doing business and not supporting the local producers.
“Maybe our much heralded consumer-driven economy hasn’t been the best model in the long run.”
Our economy was not “consumer-driven” until corporations decided it should be. There’s an excellent BBC documentary by Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self. Google reveals a Wikipedia article and the YouTube video of the documentary.
The documenatry relates the use of psychological methods to manipulate the masses for political and corporate gains. It was felt that the masses could be better controlled (I’m paraphrasing) if they could be made to behave basically like lemmings, through consumption. Doing something together normalizes it and so stengthens the ego, preventing destructive insticts, goes the theory.
Also figuring in the documentary is Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud, who is credited with the invention of public relations. He used PR to promote smoking among women, for example. The scale of his success is impressive, and led directly to the creation of what we call a consumer-based economy.
The American public has been manipulated to consume. Apparently, we are supposed to borrow and spend to keep the economy going, even now.
Switching to my own thoughts for a moment, it may be that Americans will no longer be able to support the corporate economy this way. Basically, without jobs, without the ability to pay for college, without access to medical care, it won’t be possible for us to fill corporate coffers indefinitely. So as poverty grows in the USA, corporations will move on to China. It’s already happening. GM’s largest growth in automobile sales is in China, and the numbers are staggering. Not yet, but perhaps soon, we will no longer be needed as either workers or as consumers.
But my point is that our economy is not as much consumer driven as we have been driven to consume.
Actually, better viewing may be the archive.org downloadable copies. They seem to have several by Adam Curtis. Comment on The Century of the Self:
“The Century of the Self tells the untold and sometimes controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. How was the all-consuming self created, by whom, and in whose interests? “
Conklin’s still spinning scam? zzzzzzzz
True, he gets mahalos for linking to the Willis-Dole letters…which everyone should read.
Consumer-driven economy? Heh.
Moody’s Analytics’ latest data show the top 5% highest income people account for 37% of all consumer purchases. Makes sense since wealth is so incredibly concentrated in the top tier incomes but…how can you expect a recovery when wealth and spending is so stratified?
Charles Hugh Smith, in his blog Of Two Minds, writes quite a bit about the inherent flaws of the German economy. Basically, the export-led German economy is fueled by consumption in other developed nations. Rich people (or those who want to appear to be rich) in places like the UK, US, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain will purchase Mercedes and BMWs when their economies are strong ( which isn’t for long, in a consumer society). But the frugal and disciplined German economy is dependent on the lack of frugality and discipline in other economies, and it will ultimately experience the systemic failures of consumer driven economies. And logically, not all economies can have half their GDP generated by exports the way Germany does; if all the developed world tried to do that, German exports would shrivel and many economies would fail at exporting.
In the 1970s, eastern Europe, east Asia and Latin America all tried to become export-led economies, but only Japan succeeded. Demand on the world market is inherently limited. Moreover, the secret formula that made ALL developed countries rich, from the US to western Europe to Asia, is to have a fully capitalist economy that has tariffs of 50% on manufactured goods in order to protect nascent industries. Industrialized countries that got rich by doing just that, however, will attack developing countries that do this. Japan and South Korea were exceptions to this because they were crucial military allies to the US in Cold War, and the Americans turned a blind eye to Japan’s high tariffs and government-led and protected yet capitalist export economies.
Also, what Germany does is a form of economic colonialism. The British built a massive economic and political/legal infrastructure in what is now India, not for the Indians, but so that the British could annually extract (steal?) ten percent of India’s GDP in the form of raw materials and take it to Britain, render it into manufactured goods, and then sell it back to the Indians. This is classic modern, Western colonialism. The US is often accused of being imperialistic, but the countries that conform to this classic model of economic imperialism are Germany, Japan, South Korea and China. The US doesn’t really make anything for export except weaponry and movies.
Americans represent 5% of the worlds population, yet they consume two-thirds of the world’s natural resources (and they do this with their maxed-out credit cards). If the US were to export two-thirds of the world’s manufactured goods, then we would really hear cries of American imperialism.
Also, as we see in Detroit, bringing back manufacturing would also entail having labor unions cut way back on their demands. The workers might like to bring back factories, but there will be no return to the salad days.
Thanks, Ian, for recognizing the work of Kenneth Conklin. Another article by him that deserves wide notice is “Hawaiian Language as a Political Weapon.” Anyone who values Orwell on language would find the article rewarding. It would have been a welcome addition to “The Value of Hawaii.”
http://www.angelfire.com/big09/HawLangPolitWeapon.html
I could never understand what Conklin is defend ing when he attacks the Hawaiian past and present. Is it the civilization that used atomic weapons on Micronesia as merely a test and then finds it too costly to supply medical services for the pain and suffering it caused?
I have always boycotted Starbucks. It ‘s politics are not pau.
I wouldn’t have guessed Ian that you would ever support a blatant Hawaiian hater, bigot and liar like Ken Conklin who compares Hawaiians to Nazis. This makes me very sad.
I don’t want to leave you sad…I’ll try to post a full response. For now, I’ll just point out that I’m not endorsing Conklin’s range of views. I have moderated or declined a number of his comments here that were off the edge. However, I do appreciate his scrutiny of Sai’s positions, which desperately need to be very carefully examined and criticized where appropriate. He’s been given a free ride locally because few people want to engage at that level. That’s unfortunate, in my view.
Back in the 1990s, I met a few people who would faithfully watch Rush Limbaugh’s TV show. They hated Limbaugh and were not themselves conservative, but they said that loved the way that he would skewer Democrats. I watched the show and was shocked that Limbaugh did not really skewer anyone, he would simply show video clips of Democratic politicians.
For instance, on the show I saw a video clip of Bill Clinton on the campaign trail at a state fair, with something like a wet t-shirt contest right next to him. Clinton had a microphone, and he told the audience “This is great! You guys have no idea what I had to sacrifice in order to run for President….” I was shocked.
Maybe that is the appeal of certain of Ken Conklin’s writings. One does not have to agree with him in order to enjoy the way that he easily pokes holes in the rather weak arguments of those he opposes.
But I still prefer Pierre Omidyar to Conklin. Rather than impose an ideology on society, Omidyar subsidizes a newspaper that simply asks questions. That kind of questioning eats away at the status quo and its assumptions.
But it is a scary thing to ask questions because one never knows where they will lead. For example, i am rather shocked at how low the minimum wage is, but I did some reading on the minimum wage. There is a very real trade off between paying people a decent living wage and maximizing employment; in fact, whenever the minimum wage is raised, employment among teenagers drops, and that effects teenagers’ abilities to negotiate the job market (how to apply for a job, how to persist at seeking a job, what to expect from a job realistically). So I am at a loss what to believe in terms of a minimum wage.