Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hugh A who wrote (23300)	9/12/2002 1:40:48 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 74559

Hi Hugh, That was excellent. I was left wishing for more of your clear-headed prose. It's all too rare to have an intelligent exchange on SI these days. <smile> Re: you can't go unchallenged... Trust me on this, I haven't been and I won't be. Re: (Rant alert). Trust me on this, if you think that was a rant you don't know the meaning of the word. <gg> Re: So globalization is bad and Flint Michigan didn't deserve its fate. I'm glad you agree. Re: What drove GM to locate in Flint in the first place? Proximity to greenfield development property, a skilled and educated workforce, convenient transportation links to raw materials, suppliers and markets and benign government policies. More or less the same parameters that biz plans are based on today. Re: I really don't know, but you can bet it wasn't someone from Flint who made the decision. Correct. It was several someones in Detroit and New York. Re: Go back a little farther, to the 1870's. Who paid for your railroads? Same people who paid for ours, the Brits. Nonsense. In the U.S. the railroad developers were induced to secure the financing from the Brits and the money centers in the U.S. by means of an astonishly generous land concession. The U.S. railroads, and I'm thinking here in particular about the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific and Great Northern were awarded huge checkerboarded sections of land as an inducement to lay the rail. This provided a handsome reward for the finaciers you incorrectly seem to imply were some sort of benign "angels" or early venture capitalists. They were simply converting hard cash into real assets at an extremely lucrative rate of compensation. The risks they took mainly involved their own failure to comprehend they were often backing swindlers and sharp operators. Re: infrastructure built by British money and Chinese guts (literally). Sheesh, first a fantasy about limestone currencies, and now a fantasy writing the American banking houses and the Irish out of history. Too Funny. By half. <g> Re: So now that it's the 3rd world's turn to benefit from investment from abroad you're going to fight it. Absolutely not. It is fully my intention to get the real facts onto the table. For instance, independent analysis of the IMF/World Bank/WTO policies regarding trade between the OECD countries and LDN (Less Developed Nations) indicates that the austerity programs, combined with restrictive tariffs on commodities where the 3rd world has an advantage, such as textiles and foodstuffs, has actively stifled development of the LDNs. The policies of today are completely unfair. Favoring risk taking by multinational banks, portfolio investment, insurance for "moral hazard" and a clear bias toward the destruction of indigenous and subsistence solutions for the purposes of creating artificial "market-based" economies. This gets back to the intelligent and sane policy the planet has abandoned. Trading with your neighbor makes way more sense than allowing an anonymous and uncaring multinational corporate entity to force us to trade across the globe. This is the Wal-Mart syndrome, where there's a huge race to the bottom. The U.S. no longer produces the high-wage blue collar jobs that would allow U.S. consumers (how I hate that demeaning term. We should be citizens! Damn it!) to purchase well-made goods from our neighbors and afford to pay the taxes to keep up our infrastructure. Trade deficits to China don't do America a damn bit of good. No matter what the economists want to lie to us about. Re: But you can't suck and blow at the same time. That's exactly what I think we need to do. Trade on a community or regional basis. Strengthen our local economies and export our best-in-class technologies for a profit to the Chinese, etc. and let them develop their own consumers. The system that we have in place now is a siphon to suck the economic lifeblood out of both the over-indebted American consumer and the wage-exploited LDN worker. The only crowd getting rich off this trade is the elite corporate class and that is why the spend such a fortune on propaganda and disinformation to try to confuse the general public as to the value of the swindle. You don't have to trust me on this. Here's a wonderful new book that describes just how despicable the thinking is that is going into the globalization swindle: "The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy" by Noreena Hertz Ph.D. Economics, Cambridge, UK amazon.com For a quick hit at how this racket is being "sold" to the public, it's hard to beat the writings of Greg Palast: gregpalast.com Hugh, globalization is just a swindle. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it! Rant On, Ray

To: Hugh A who wrote (23300)	9/13/2002 12:04:48 AM
From: AC Flyer	Respond to of 74559

Excellent post, Hugh, but don't waste your breath on Ray. He's trapped in his class warfare ideology. Forget about Flint, Michigan. Brain dead labor and brain dead management. They deserve each other. What about the automotive boom towns - Georgetown Kentucky, Smyrna Tennessee and others. The UAW has failed to organize even one of these transplants (excluding NUMMI which is basically a GM operation). All those high paying jobs* and all that productivity and not a sniff of the AFL-CIO anywhere. Imagine that! The business of organizing labor is out of sync. with the economic realities of the information age. Labor unions are being roundly rejected by their potential customers. Poor Ray. He doesn't get it. toyota.com * TMMK 2000 employment 7,759; total payroll $508.3 million; average compensation $65,500.