Exports Could Add 5 Million New Manufacturing Jobs. NOT!
I’ve got to say that I have lost a lot of respect for firms like McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Accenture and the like. They have become nothing more than shills for corporations.
In many regards, just as corporate executives manipulate politicians through lobby and bribery, so too do management consulting firms manipulate CEOs and senior corporate executives. And, what has become the intent of all of these relationships? Glorification of the self. Personal gain. Profit. The me, the self, the I. All without considering the consequences to society or the greater good. The invisible hand of selfishness that Adam Smith waxed poetic about that is unregulated capitalism.
I have mocked this con job that politicians are trying to sell us that we are going to rebuild our jobs and our manufacturing through exports. In fact, for the last seven years I have said those most exposed to global economic dynamics in manufacturing, specifically Germany and China, are headed for very, very, very hard economic landings. While no one in the mainstream ever talks about it because they don’t understand, one of the main drivers of the Great Depression in the United States was that we were so exposed to manufacturing exports. Now we are exposed to financial exports. ie, Today our number one export is printing money. You might infer from those two comparisons that the shit has really yet to hit the fan in the U.S. financial bubble. You would be right Dog Breath. Hey, we haven’t backstopped Wall Street to the tune of 2-3x GDP in bailouts and backstops because this is a bump in the road.
This announcement by Boston Consulting Group is more corporate-manufactured hype that is not going to work. As I have noted on here before, the United States doesn’t need to export anything for our economy to recover. That is a fascist, corporatist political answer to maintaining global power for both status quo corporations and politicians. Who the hell are we going to export to? The world is awash with overcapacity and unemployment is, or soon will be, at crisis levels around the world.
So, let me get this straight. We are going to create jobs here and that is going to create wealth and hence drive new jobs to the country we export to? Wealth they need to magically create out of thin air in order to buy our exports? That sounds vaguely familiar. It sounds like Ronald Reagan’s Supply-Side Economics or more government-directed overproduction to keep a dying system from dying. There is little doubt that Boston Consulting Group’s report is driven in large part by Barack Obama’s endless rhetoric that he wants our nation to see job growth through exports. But, believing that self-important, economically-illiterate politicians know where investment and production should be directed, ie. exports, is simply another political example of Reagan’s failed policies. Some of Supply-Side Economics as theoretical principals have some merit but after thirty years of government-directed supply-side production – one of the massive failures between theory and implementation - I think we can safely say we are witnessing the collapse of that Soviet-style, state-mandated, overproduction ideology.
This is a last ditch effort of the status quo to save themselves. It will fail.
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