America First by Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech was well written and well presented. However it lacked any detail. Lots of vague generalities was the order of the day. The New York Times commentators offered some interesting and worthwhile observations.

The only thing that can be understood is that, as president, Mr. Trump would put America first in all of his decisions. Which president and which candidate for president would to otherwise?

Mr. Trump is a master of generalities. Read the speech slowly and carefully and you will see glaring contradictions. Compare these two statements in his speech. “Our allies must contribute toward the financial, political and human costs of our tremendous security burden. But many of them are simply not doing so. They look at the United States as weak and forgiving and feel no obligation to honor their agreements with us.” “America is going to be a reliable friend and ally again.” So which is it?

Trump repeatedly said that the United States under his administration would be a “reliable” power. But he also said U.S. policy would have to be “unpredictable” to keep the world guessing, a formula rarely used in high-stakes diplomacy.

Being president of the United States carries a major responsibility. Do you really want a reality show star to lead this country?

Manufacturing and Minimum Wage Jobs in the 21st Century

Lower taxes might help domestic manufacturers but when the cost of labor in other countries is one-tenth the cost in the United States lost jobs will not be returned to this country.

Individuals assembling Apple’s iPhones in China allegedly work long hours for low pay. They work 11-hour shifts at a rate of $1.50 per hour. During each shift they are docked 20 minutes of pay (I assume for a lunch break). There earnings are $268 per month before overtime. This information is from a report in Business Insider.

GM, Ford Boost Mexico Output With $26-a-Day Workers. Mexico’s share of North American auto production may rise at a quicker pace as General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC seek out workers making less than 10 percent of what their U.S. counterparts earn. This information is from a report in Bloomberg Businessweek.

For example crib maker Stanley Furniture Co. misjudged the willingness of Americans to pay more for domestically produced goods when cheaper imports are available. Meanwhile, the husband-and-wife entrepreneurs who founded 20-year-old Chesapeake Bay Candle have struggled to find workers who can do basic math. This information is from a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Los Angeles, once the epicenter of apparel manufacturing has seen the outsourcing of jobs to China and Southeast Asia due to lower labor costs.

Do you really believe that Donald Trump will bring those assembly jobs back to the United States? Donald Trump does not agree with the idea of a $15 per hour minimum wage. I heard him say that. Los Angeles was once the epicenter of apparel manufacturing Los Angeles was once the epicenter of apparel manufacturing, attracting buyers from across the world to its clothing factories, sample rooms and design studios. But over the years, cheap overseas labor lured many apparel makers to outsource to foreign competitors in far-flung places such as China Los Angeles was once the epicenter of apparel manufacturing, attracting buyers from across the world to its clothing factories, sample rooms and design studios. But over the years, cheap overseas labor lured many apparel makers to outsource to foreign competitors in far-flung places such as China

Just to add to the difficulty in keeping jobs in America paid family leave regulations have been passed in New York and California.

Most web sites contend that government regulations are a significant cost to business in the USA. The problem is that every regulation has its supporters.

Unless Donald Trump intends to drive up the cost of clothing, cars, and electronic devices there is no way he can bring those jobs back to the United States. His ideas will spark a trade war.

The solution is retraining in areas short of workers. CNN posted an article listing 30 jobs needing most workers in next decade. How many people will take the opportunity by at least investigating the opportunities?

I am Drinking Bottled Water

We started using bottled water immediately after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. An article in a local newspaper warned that there was a concern about contaminated drinking water in the San Fernando Valley.

To this day we are still buying Arrowhead bottled water in 2½ gallon containers. Friends and acquaintances believe I am wasting money.

Then came the Flint Michigan lead polluted water. There have been articles in newspapers about other towns that may also have lead polluted water. Now Des Moines, Iowa’s water utility is suing to stop nitrate pollution from upstate.

Nitrogen (it’s part of fertilizer) pollution of waterways is a problem that extends well beyond Iowa. In Lake Erie in 2014, a toxic algae bloom—caused by runoff from farms and septic systems plus warmer temperatures, among other factors—contaminated Toledo’s water supply.

The main line pipes in my neighborhood are over 50 years old and many pipes in my city are almost 100 years old. Many pipes have burst due to corrosion. Still the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) insists that the water is safe to drink. They issue semi-annual reports on water quality to reassure the residents.

From WebMD:
Occasionally, your tap water can become contaminated as a result of breaks in the water line, although one of the biggest problems is lead getting into the water from pipes. Even ”lead-free” pipes can contain as much as 8% lead.

The best way to avoid consuming lead from tap water is to only use water from the cold tap for drinking, cooking, and making baby formula and to let the water run for a minute before using it.

This is not reassuring. I will continue using bottled water.

Man is Polluting This Entire Planet

Humans are destroying planet earth! It’s happening slowly enough that most of the people alive today will not realize the consequences of their behavior.

It’s not just the atmosphere that is being polluted. We are fouling the water, the seas, and the soil. Almost everything we do on this planet has a negative effect.

Business and government, in general, are only mildly concerned. Their primary concern is providing products and services to the population.

What are the long term consequences of the BP Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? What are the long term consequences of the Aliso Canyon methane gas and oil leaks in Los Angeles?

Oklahoma has experienced a major increase in earthquakes in recent years, including a 5.7-magnitude temblor that injured residents and damaged 200 buildings in November 2011. Swarms of quakes have continued in 2015. There is general consensus among scientists that the spike in Oklahoma’s earthquake activity has been triggered by disposal wells, used to dispose of waste from oil and gas drilling operations — including hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” — a phenomenon known as “induced” seismicity.

“Inside the Billion-Dollar Dig to America’s Biggest Copper Deposit” is the report in Bloomberg Businessweek that tells of the One Billion Dollar investment by the world’s two largest mining companies to drill down more than a mile to a copper deposit that is believed to justify the investment. The problem is that a forest is being destroyed and that land, about 2 miles in diameter (2,400 acres), and the removed soil could result in a 1,000 foot deep crater.

The issue of pollution isn’t just an American problem. Think Beijing’s air pollution is bad? There 10 cities that are worse. 13 out of 20 cities on world’s worst air pollution list are in India according to CBC News.

The Fukushima Daiichi reactors impacted by an earthquake will result in areas around the crippled nuclear plant could remaining uninhabitable for 20 years. But no one really knows. After all the crippled Chernobyl 4 reactor now is enclosed in a concrete structure that is growing weaker over time. Ukraine and the Group of Eight industrialized nations have agreed on a plan to stabilize the existing structure by constructing an enormous new sarcophagus around it, which is expected to last more than 100 years.

In the Los Angeles area alone, 10 metric tons of plastic fragments—like grocery bags, straws and soda bottles—are carried into the Pacific Ocean every day.

The polar ice caps have melted faster in last 20 years than in the last 10,000. What will they call GLACIER NATIONAL PARK place once the glaciers are gone?

Of course all of this information can be found on the web. The problem is that no one wants to confront the reality that over time all of mankind is destroying the planet. Global warming deniers, pollution deniers, habitat deniers are leading the band wagon.

Fear for your grandchildren!

Bernie Sanders: If you don’t like Israel don’t ask me for money!

Mr. Sanders:

You continually send me e-mails asking me to send you money so that you can be elected to be the President of the United States.

I am Jewish and I fear for the safety and future of Jews in the world, especially when Iran is launching missiles – dedicating to the eradication of the State of Israel.

I will not vote for you because I believe that you do not know the difference between good and evil. You have spokespeople, like Linda Sarsour, who decry the State of Israel and liken it to white supremacists and say that it is an apartheid state.

After the Germans, Arabs and Japanese conspired to conquer the world and wipe out every Jew in the world in World War 2, the world (at the U.N.) voted to divide Palestine into Arab-land and Jew-land (this was after Great Britain gave 80% of Palestine to Jordan in 1922).

Israel agreed to accept the “partition” plan and the Arabs refused, claiming that they wanted 100% of the land – that the Jews could live in the Mediterranean. After the war of 1948, the borders were fixed; except that the Arabs again refused to honor those borders or acknowledge that the Jews had any right to live anywhere.

In 1967, the Arabs launched another offensive against Israel. Israel won that war too. Israel ended up with more territory. They gave most of the “gains” back to Egypt in order to make peace with Egypt.

They offered to give the “West Bank” back to Jordan to make peace, but Jordan refused to take it – because Jordan hates the Palestinians (the Jordanians have kept the Palestinians in camps for the past 60 years – rather than accept them as Jordanian citizens).

Israel kept, accepted and made citizens of the Israeli Arabs. I’m sure that you know that 20% of Israelis are Arabs …. and 20% of Israeli medical students are Arabs. Did you know that the new assistant head of the Police is an Arab (named yesterday)?

Your outrageous lying statement that the Israelis overreacted in the Gaza conflict is immoral. No fighting army (against Hamas terrorists who use human shields and launch missiles from schools and mosques) has EVER acted with such restraint and morality as the Israeli’s.

Shame on you Bernie that you cannot tell good from bad; morality from evil. You are turning your back on the only democracy in the Middle East. You are turning your back on the country that is the nicest and best place for Palestinians to live (Syria, Lebanon and Jordan have them locked up in camps). You support those whose motto is “From the River to the Sea” (meaning that ALL of Israel should be Arab … and the Jews should live in the Sea). You just don’t understand the real world. You have bought into Arab propaganda and turned against the only Jewish country in the world.

written by Michael Waterman, teacher at Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles

Technological Unemployment

From Wikipedia: “Perhaps the earliest example of a scholar discussing the phenomena of technological unemployment occurs with Aristotle, who speculated in Book One of Politics that if machines could become sufficiently advanced, there would be no more need for human labour.”

It has been reported repeatedly that Queen Elizabeth I of England refused to grant a patent for a weaving machine because it would put the hand weavers out of work. She was correct. It did.

I was talking with an acquaintance about the effects of AI (artificial intelligence) and IT (information technology) on the work environment and the elimination of many jobs. A touch plate at a fast food ordering counter could replace an order taker. So could many other jobs.

One job I held for 7½ years was a scheduling supervisor in a factory. I had decided to quit after about four years. The work was tedious and very stressful. It took me the next 3½ years to find work that would pay more and appeared to offer a chance of advancement. I was responsible for all the production schedules and work orders in the factory. If something went wrong in the middle of the night, the night foreman called me. Today that job would be done more accurately by a computer generated program that could accomplish my 40 plus hour weekly job in minutes.

My father was a structural engineer. He retired just as computers were beginning to be used to calculate stress analysis. His calculation tool was a slide rule. He was a mathematical genius. Today those calculations can be more accurately accomplished using a computer that would provide the results in minutes not hours. The drafting of the structure can now be provided by a computer driven drafting machine rather than a draftsman.

Perhaps the order taker at the fast food counter will still have a job preparing the order. Perhaps the mathematical genius will be working on a program in Silicon Valley. One thing is certain. All jobs that can be mechanized and/or computer driven will result in fewer jobs.

I rarely take my car to a repair garage because they too have been fitted with longer lasting components. Thanks to a well-made furnace and plumbing in my house the need for service maintenance is reduced. That means there is no growing need for service industry workers.

I have yet to hear anyone, neither politician, corporate leader, nor social engineer, explain how even the brightest people will care for their families when the number of jobs is in decline.

We have a serious societal challenge and no answers. Joel Kotkin and other commentators have observed the issue. Now what?

$15 Minimum Wage: Booby Prize for American Workers

By Joel Kotkin

(Joel Kotkin is R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University. He is executive editor of New Geography … where this piece originated and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism.)

Almost everything that Mr. Kotkin has written is accurate. It is something those who pushed the $15 minimum wage law in Sacramento knows. The question Mr. Kotkin and everyone objecting to the new minimum wage fails to answer is: How does this society contend with a population that “has seen a rapid decline in traditional blue-collar jobs?” Those blue-collar citizens are the driving force behind the crowds drawn by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They may not have the answers but they understand that the masses are in dire straits. Or perhaps there is no solution and Mr. Kotkin is correct in concluding that we are going to return to a feudal society.

This article has been abridged.

NEW GEOGRAPHY–In principle, there is solid moral ground for the recent drive to boost the minimum wage to $15, with California and New York State taking dramatic steps Monday toward that goal. Low-wage workers have been losing ground for decades, as stagnant incomes have been eroded by higher living costs.

Yet if the campaign to boost the minimum wage reflects progressive ideals, the underlying rationale also exposes the failure of these high-priced cities to serve as launching pads for upward mobility for the vast majority of their residents. In effect, the fight for $15 is a by-product of giving up – capitulating on the idea that better opportunities can be created than the menial service jobs that increasingly are the only opportunities for the urban poor. Higher wages will make these jobs moderately more tolerable, while further cementing the wide gulf between the haves and have knots.

New York, San Francisco, LA and Seattle are at the forefront of a new urban economy, based on industries such as finance, technology and media, that generally creates jobs for the highly educated only. Virtually every region at the cutting edge of the minimum wage movement has seen a rapid decline in traditional blue-collar jobs — notably in manufacturing — which often paid well above the minimum wage, and offered potential for further individual advancement.

In these and other core cities, we are seeing something reminiscent of the Victorian era, where a larger proportion of workers are earning their living serving the wealthy and their needs as nannies, restaurant workers, dog-walkers and the like. In New York City, as of 2012, over a third of workers were employed in low-wage service jobs, a percentage that rose through the recovery from the Great Recession, according to a study by the Center for an Urban Future.

Given shrinking opportunities for middle and working class people, it’s not surprising that many seek a more direct redress from the government.

Essentially the minimum wage campaign rests on the notion that traditional middle class uplift cannot be achieved. The problem is, a $15 an hour income represents hardly enough to pay the rent for a small apartment anywhere near the blue cities where the new minimum will hit first.

The impact in California will, if anything be larger, as the wage hike will be imposed in a wider fashion on a hugely diverse state.

To be sure, higher wages could be a blip in wealthy and thoroughly de-industrialized places like San Francisco – if higher labor costs boost the price of beet-filled ravioli, it doesn’t undermine the market in a place where hipsters and elite workers still have dollars to spend.

Perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of the minimum wage hike will not be the bulk of lower wage workers in blue states, but the people who increasingly dominate their economies.

And as the American Interest recently predicted, those most likely to benefit down the line from the higher wages will be the tech companies that will come up with the software and automated systems that replace the service jobs now made less economically competitive by the wage hikes. It’s not a loony fringe concept: the President’s Council of Economic Advisers recently estimated that lower-wage service jobs have an 80% probability of being automated.

So in the end, a $15 minimum wage, set in the low growth economy of our times, may end up boosting the very class-based hierarchies that are already increasingly evident. Ultimately it may represent a case of a well-intentioned measure that, while sounding radical, only accelerates our road back to feudalism: a society dominated by the few where many depend on the generosity of their betters and the middle class, already shrinking, fades into the dustbin of history.

Peter Schiff and other Doomsday Stock Market Predictors

This advertisement has been appearing on many of the web sites I visit. Included is my daily visit to undergroundweather.com where it prominently appeared in two locations of the site’s main page.

There is a flourishing industry of financial doomsday predictors who make their living preying on the fears of smaller investors who fear losing their hard earned estate that provided them (or will provide them) a retirement nest egg.

Before you respond to the doomsayers it would be worth your time to investigate their backgrounds. Thus I researched and found the following about Peter Schiff simply by entering his name in a Google search. The first option that appeared was “peter schiff track record on predictions”

The first item:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/01/peter-schiff-was-wrong.html
in part the web site reads as follows:

Schiff’s Overall Thesis
• US Equity Markets Will Crash.
• US Dollar Will Go To Zero (Hyperinflation).
• Decoupling (The rest of the world would be immune to a US slowdown.
• Buy foreign equities and commodities and hold them with no exit strategy.

Schiff was correct about point number 1 above. The US equity markets crashed. That was a very good call. Unfortunately, his investment thesis centered on shorting the dollar in a hyperinflation bet, and buying foreign equities rather than shorting US equities.

Furthermore, Schiff made no allowances for being wrong and had no exit strategy whatsoever.

What happened in 2008 was that foreign equities sold off much harder than US equities, and a strengthening US dollar compounded the situation.

In other words, Schiff failed where it matters most: Peter Schiff did not protect his client’s assets. Let’s take a look how, and more importantly why, starting with charts
Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/01/peter-schiff-was-wrong.html#TVr1LG1LChQ9gxfc.99

The second item:

This youtube video is a compilation of Peter Schiff predictions. As you watch look at the dates that appear on screen.
Published on Nov 10, 2014

In 2009, Peter Schiff started predicting gold would go up to $5000 an ounce. At the same time, he predicted gold & the Dow Jones would soon be at the same level (eg, gold $5000, the Dow 5000.) Gold hit a record high of $1900 in August 2011. A year later, gold prices started plummeting. Schiff completely failed to foresee gold prices would eventually drop by over 35%.

For some context, on June 9, 2010 gold was $1257 an ounce. More than 4 years later, on November 10, 2014, gold was $1151 an ounce. During that same period, Dow Futures went from 10,674 to 17,613. Yet, all throughout, Schiff continued telling investors to buy gold & was very critical of any investment adviser who didn’t questioned his track record on gold prices.

During his TV appearances Schiff often tells people to go to YouTube to check his record. So here’s a compilation of Schiff’s various predictions over the past 5 years as gold prices were rising & falling & stock market prices fell, then soared to record highs.

The third item:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-05/market-forecasts-to-ignore-in-2015
Market Forecasts to Ignore in 2015
in part reads:
Stock-Market Crash: There have been so many erroneous calls for a stock-market crash that it’s hard to choose which deserves special mention. But I am going to give you two that merit attention: The first comes from Chapman University professor Terry Burnham, who predicted Dow 5,000 before Dow 20,000. He technically hasn’t been proven wrong yet, but during the years he has repeated this forecast, the market has gained about 40 percent. That makes him wrong enough in my book. The second was this article in Fortune, “Why the bull market could end tomorrow.” It was filled with forecasts explaining why “smart prognosticators” and “market timing precisionists” believed the top was just about in. That was some 2,000 points ago for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 200 points for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

Gold: I almost feel bad pointing out how awful the gold forecasts have been. But special mention must go to the loudest and highest forecast, and that means Peter Schiff of EuroPacific Capital. Last April, Schiff made the bold prediction that the “Federal Reserve’s quantitative-easing program will push gold to $5,000 an ounce.” How did he do? The shiny yellow metal began the year in the low $1,200s, rallied to $1,400, before plunging to $1,150. It closed 2014 just under $1,200 as the Fed’s program of QE was ending. Gold remains 80 percent or so lower than Schiff’s target.