The Great White Wail: The Not-So-Silent White Majority

[derspiess]

I listened to the NPR interview of that Spencer fellow the other day.  Creepy dude, though he has a perfect nerdy/effeminate NPR voice and speaking style.

[CountDeMoney]

I listened to the NPR interview of that Spencer fellow the other day.  Creepy dude, though he has a perfect nerdy/effeminate NPR voice and speaking style.

They all do.  Pretty sure that's the only octave and range NPR listeners can actually hear.

[Admiral Yi]

Robert Siegel has a gravelly masculine voice.

[CountDeMoney]

I am physically incapable of listening to NPR.  I slide out of my chair or run off the road in a deep slumber.

[derspiess]

Robert Siegel has a gravelly masculine voice.

I guess they have room for a nerdy-sounding old guy.

[Razgovory]

I am physically incapable of listening to NPR.  I slide out of my chair or run off the road in a deep slumber.

Their new format isn't so good.

[viper37]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/

Alt Right Conference in DC. 

"Hail Trump.  Hail our people."  Nazi salutes.

"peaceful ethnic cleansing."".  I like that.  What does it involve?  You ask every no white, gently, to please get the fuck out of my country? And when they talk back, you teach them it's no way to talk to a master?

[The Minsky Moment]

The funny thing is that in countries outside the US, the opposition to free trade agreements are based on not wanting to let the US reap inordinate benefits for free. You think you're getting screwed by the world - the rest of the world thinks you're screwing them.

The real funny thing is that the entire narrative about Country X "winning" or "losing" trade agreements as though it were a game of checkers makes no sense to begin with. 

Take the TPP for example.  One of the big negotiating items was the patent protection period for biologics.  The "American" position was that it should be longer, the "Other" position was that it should be shorter and the end result was that it came out in between.

Now did America win because it got a longer patent period than others wanted, or did America lose because it get less?

The whole question makes no sense.  It's the pharma companies that make biologics - wherever they or their shareholders are located - that stand to benefit from longer patent protection and drug purchasers - wherever located - that stand to lose from that.  Regardless of what positions the USTR takes there are Americans on both sides, and non-Americans on both sides.

That's typical.  People don't bitch about NAFTA because it was bad for "America" - in an aggregate GDP sense that it almost certainly wrong.  They bitch because it hurt some Americans - e.g. truck drivers in the Southwest. 

[OttoVonBismarck]

Well Minksy, people don't vote as "aggregate entities" or as countries, they aren't dispassionately running things like in a game of EU where they are mostly focused on national instead of individual interests. The people were promised greater prosperity with free trade, particularly NAFTA, and the country got it. But large segments of the population lost their jobs, and for a variety of reasons have been unable to find equivalently good replacement jobs.

Part of the issue a lot of people who live in highly prosperous economic areas (like NYC, Pacific NW, the Bay Area, NoVa etc) is that a large segment of the American population wants to have the ability to work good paying jobs where they are now. There's a class of Americans who are highly mobile and jet around the country, abandoning family and friends. It's to their economic benefit, and they're part of the "new economy." But there are a lot of Americans who really value being able to raise their kids in the same town they were raised in, where they can keep all their friends from High School, where their parents are nearby and can be involved in their kid's lives etc. No one is putting "new economy" jobs into Youngstown, OH or La Crosse, WI, or Altoona, PA, but a lot of old economy jobs were located there, and the people who worked them or whose father's and mother's worked them still live in those areas.

Very little in American politics can withstand the nuance of a two sentence explanation, let alone the multiple sentence one required to explain that TPP, NAFTA, were going to be /were net goods for America, albeit with trade offs. You don't get to that point of the discussion and still have the floor, because someone screaming a few words over and over again will always be heard first and louder.

[viper37]

They bitch because it hurt some Americans - e.g. truck drivers in the Southwest. 

Did NAFTA really had adverse effects on these Americans or was it something else?

If I look at manufacturing jobs in Quebec, they have disapeared too, in some places as fast as in the US.  Entire villages depending on a single industry was always a bad thing.  I kept telling the same to everyone for 20 years, and only when Bombardier was left with less than 100 guys did the city awakened and scramble to diversify its economy.  Previous attempt at diversification was simply to subsidize a new industrial park compose mostly of sub-contractors to Bombardier...

Anyway, looking at the jobs that disapeared here I see:

• softwood lumber industry.  With the trade tariffs asked by the US, we can't export as much as before. Americans were non competitive and wined at their Republicans congress people to get tariffs.  Certainly not the fault of NAFTA here.  We had a lot of lumber mills closing and lots of lumberjackers losing their job.  Also, the green facists demonized and still demonize any wood or paper production made in Quebec&Canada, so the big clients now buy their products elsewhere.  Not NAFTA's fault.  Not CETA's fault.  Not the future stillborn TPP's fault.
  
• steel.  For years, American companies would come to Quebec, dig the minerals, ship them into the US and sell us the finished product.  A small part of our mineral production is transformed in Canada.  NAFTA certainly did not increase the costs of steel.  But US protectionism did.  So now, instead of buying steel rebars coming from US&Canadian mills, we import our steel from Germany, and some other suppliers have them from China. No trade deals with China, and CETA wasn't even on the agenda then.  But they produce in metric, and that is fucking nice for a change
  
• tobacco.  People smoke less.  Deal with it.
  
• oil industry (Canada).  Well, there is a slump in oil prices.  Not related to NAFTA at all.
  
• clothing.  Yep, that is real.  A real loss there.  Working 12hrs a day for 5$/hour creating jeans.  We lost these jobs to China and other asian countries.  No trade deals there.
  
• bio pharmaceutical.  This hurt a lot.  The job loss is one thing, but for years the government listen to their lobbyists and granted them everything they wanted: subsidized R&D costs (refundable tax credits and direct subsidies) and longer patent duration.  Despite this, they still moved a lot of their production elsewhere.  Not in Mexico. Not in the US.  A little in Asia, a lot in Europe.  I'd like Trump supporters to explain me that one, how it was caused by NAFTA
  
• general manufacturing: anything from car making to train making.  Lots of this is now done elsewhere in the world.  Mexico is a joke.  They ain't productive at all.  Bombardier's plants has to give work to a subcontractor who can't do all the job and has to subcontract it too.  Yet, it's still more competitive than the plant were workers were proud to say they were paid for 8hrs while working 6hrs at most.  Gee, I wonder why they chose Mexico and China (who is not part of NAFTA, last I checked).
  

As we make more&more trade deals and reduce tariffs, a lot more people can afford our products and obviously, we often can have them made for cheaper than here, for various reasons, including different health&safety and environmental regulations.  Poverty is lessenning all accross the globe.  Given the provisions in CETA and TPP, if anything, it would have evened out the playing field, not made it worst.  Sure, we remove tariffs, but currency manipulation is made more transparent so actions can be taken or complaints registered to the arbitration tribunal with hope of a relatively quick resolution.  Child work was now forbidden and various legislation had to be put in places, and observers were designated to insure monitoring of fair trade practices.  Not ideal, but compared to the actual situation and what will happen when China take the lead, certainly much better than now.

[viper37]

The people were promised greater prosperity with free trade, particularly NAFTA, and the country got it. But large segments of the population lost their jobs, and for a variety of reasons have been unable to find equivalently good replacement jobs.

If my job was now done by a Chinese or an Indian, two countries not part of NAFTA, how is this the fault of NAFTA?  Are there some provisions in NAFTA that I'm not aware of that make delocalization toward Asia and India easier than it was before?

Part of the issue a lot of people who live in highly prosperous economic areas (like NYC, Pacific NW, the Bay Area, NoVa etc) is that a large segment of the American population wants to have the ability to work good paying jobs where they are now. There's a class of Americans who are highly mobile and jet around the country, abandoning family and friends. It's to their economic benefit, and they're part of the "new economy." But there are a lot of Americans who really value being able to raise their kids in the same town they were raised in, where they can keep all their friends from High School, where their parents are nearby and can be involved in their kid's lives etc. No one is putting "new economy" jobs into Youngstown, OH or La Crosse, WI, or Altoona, PA, but a lot of old economy jobs were located there, and the people who worked them or whose father's and mother's worked them still live in those areas.

That is true.  I sympathize with these people to an extend.  But imho, doing the same thing as your great grandparents and your grandparents did is not a God given right.

Women, blacks and gay can now work for the same pay.  Is it too liberal, too much to the left to give everyone the same access to the work market?  Obviously, it means there are less jobs available to white men.  It means they have to get better than their great grandparents were.  They need to prove they can justify their wage.  And many don't.

I see it in my business, with the type of people prefers to hire vs the type of people I'm trying to keep.  Uneducated workers, barely able to write their name correctly vs skilled manual workers able to use a computer and a smartphone/tablet, able to learn new techniques as they come out.  And a lot of the people losing their job and unable to find a new one belong to that first category.

And then there are those who face the consequences of the political decisions to prefer a mono-industrial town to a diverse economy.  Give tax credit or other subsidies to a specific plant and it will create jobs.  For a while.  Other businesses won't develop because they can't compete.  And when these big corporations decide to close a shop in Montreal to move it to Tennessee or Alabama because the State and the city gives them a shitton of cash to open a new plant there, well, you lose everything.

But we have indirect control over it.  We have the power to change the morons who want to create jobs by subsidizing everything.  Yet, we chose not to.  Time and time again, whenever someone different comes along, someone who says it's counter productive to place all your eggs in the same basket, he/she is ridiculed.  Unions will lobby against these politicians, media will lobby against these policitians and the population will vote again for the same kind of morons promising the same thing that never work.

And one day, you wake up with 25% of your university graduate considered semi-illeterate (able to read, unable to comprehend).  50% of your general population considered the same.  And your future looks bleak,  Because while you were subsidizing mono industries, other countries invested in R&D.  They didn't fight progress, they didn't fight science, they didn't fight elitism: they trained their best to be even better and their averages to become the best.

Very little in American politics can withstand the nuance of a two sentence explanation, let alone the multiple sentence one required to explain that TPP, NAFTA, were going to be /were net goods for America, albeit with trade offs. You don't get to that point of the discussion and still have the floor, because someone screaming a few words over and over again will always be heard first and louder.

I fear it's the same in Quebec, and in France.  So many lies by the left and the extreme right.  The lies that are much more comfortable than the hard truth.  It seems people prefer to be lied to rather than face the ugly truth: they need to adapt to a changing world.  You can not stop progress, it will always get you.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The erosion of these manufacturing jobs goes back to the 1980s, NAFTA absolutely had some impact. Maquiladoras, especially in the auto-parts industry, the actual auto-manufacturing industry and etc absolutely represent lost American jobs. But we've also seen significant increases in automation even since the 1980s, hell, even since the 2000s. A rule of thumb in manufacturing is a machine that replaces a worker must pay for itself in 2-3 years. Lots of machines are getting more affordable relative to the cost of labor that it's making more and more sense to replace workers.

So there's a double squeeze going on, and automation is never going away, and is only likely to increase. In fact if we genuinely make it harder to off-shore manufacturing as Trump suggests, I think you'll see a change to the fundamental calculus of when it makes sense to replace a worker with automation, and you'll see even more investment in factory automation.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Also trade-normalization with China probably cost way more American jobs than NAFTA, depending on who you ask NAFTA was either job neutral or job positive, but trade normalization with China has probably been a net job destroyer, although it's probably been a net wealth creator.

[viper37]

The erosion of these manufacturing jobs goes back to the 1980s, NAFTA absolutely had some impact.

NAFTA came into effect in 1994.  FTA (Canada-USA) came into effect around 1988.
You can't blame something that did not exist for the loss of jobs.

On the contrary, it slowed down the erosion of manufacturing jobs since there was an increase in demand for manufactured products on both sides of the border.

The first automation of jobs in occident in the 80s started the decline in manufacturing jobs.  Compared how many workers were needed to produce a car in 1950 vs how many in 1987 and you'll get your answer.

Free trade agreements are actually good for improving market shares of various companies.  But eventually, the people who refuse to adapt to change fall behind.

As you say in your other post, the normalization of trade with China did a lot more damage than NAFTA could ever have done.  Currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, total disregard for the environment and workers conditions meant they could produce at a fraction of our costs.

The TPP could have helped slowed down erosion, at least, make the Asian countries a little less attractive for delocalization and marginalize China a little bit.  But now, it's dead.