One word jumped out and slapped me in the face during the debate on foreign policy last Monday, “me.”
President Obama was making a point about his position on a nuclear Iran when he said this:
“They can take the diplomatic route and end their nuclear program or they will have to face a united world and a United States president, me, who said we’re not going to take any options off the table.”
Did he really need remind us that he is the president? Doesn’t the office speak for itself? That one word slipped into the sentence, a word not needed exposed the true character of this man. His ego is as large as China. It is baffling why the addition of the word “me” into his argument made it any stronger. Except, that he was trying to demean us with his power as president. Maybe he was trying to insinuate to the Iranians that he got Bin Laden and he will get them too. It is a mystery. Perhaps someone will be nice enough to help me figure it out.
Lathe operator machining parts for transport planes at the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation plant, Fort Worth, USA (1942). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The fashionable rhetoric today involves a lot of BS about bringing high paying jobs back to America. This seems like just another ploy to feed the masses with what they want to hear. Libs love unions and unions like high paying factory jobs. The problem is that the unions have driven high paying jobs out of the country. Where did they go and why? Talk to Government Motors and they will tell you it is the unfair practices of their competitors who do not have to pay union benefits. They claim that benefits add $1500 of cost to each car. The UAW argues the high cost resulted from stupid business practice by the management. Meanwhile the American car makers go bankrupt and foreign car makers build factories in the USA. Hello! Is there a message here? The foreign companies settle in states with right to work laws, and away from large metropolitan areas teeming with anxious workers ready to unionize at first chance.
During my career as an engineer, I saw many factories. They made things like construction equipment, farm equipment, heavy presses for the auto industry, mining equipment, thermostats, airplanes, and electrical components. Yes, there were many good jobs in these industries. All of them suffered from the same malady, high labor costs. One of my jobs was to calculate the cost of a machine. It was a rigorous analysis dealing with making parts, applying the time to complete an operation and to multiply the time by an appropriate labor cost. When I finished, the cost went to the accountants and they began adding administrative costs, benefits, sales, inventory, and whole slew of other things which I didn’t really understand. Finally, they added profit. The machine I was so proud of turned into something no one could afford.
Cutting cost became my mantra. Each penny I could cut from a part meant the product may become salable.
After a number of jobs in heavy equipment, I settled in the electrical component industry. Over the course of forty years, my job was to cut the cost of an electrical component. The owner began by hiring people to run molding machines. He designed and made small molds to keep his investment low. As sales grew, he made bigger molds and bought larger molding machines, but they were still operated manually.
During the nineteen eighties the government reduced capital gains taxes and the fun began. We couldn’t buy machinery fast enough to expand the business. Another thing happened. The owner shared his vision of a totally automated factory with us. It became my job to help him build a “lights-out” factory. That is a factory where there are no people just machines making product in the dark.
When I began work at this company, there were people running molding machines, handling product, inspectors examined the product for defects, people put product into plastic bags, they sealed the plastic bags, applied labels, put the bags into shipping boxes, taped the boxes, and moved them to the shipping department. There were people tripping over themselves in a very busy and noisy environment.
In the beginning, the company had two competitors, one in the USA and one in England. When I left the company, the number of competitors was over two hundred, and most of them were in the far east. On one visit to China, my boss visited a competitor’s factory. He examined the part and could not differentiate the competitor’s from our own. The Chinese factory owner told him “we copy you because you have the best product.” The man ran a factory in a two-story building. He lived on the second floor above his factory. His molds were simple low cavitation tools. He did not use any machinery other than a molding machine, but he did use many workers. He paid them about a dollar an hour,, which was good pay in their country.
When I finally retired, I left an automated factory that was just a few operations short of lights-out. The investment cost required to produce a single part cost between $500,000-750,000. The man in China invested $50,000 and used dollar an hour labor to do the rest.
When you here the politicians and unions demanding high paying jobs think about this: What kind of job is a high paying factory job today? What kind of people do we have ready to work? Do they have the credentials to work in a high paying jobs factory? Will those factories compete with Chinese labor?
Here are some videos to show you the difference between high paying factory jobs. The first one is an Apple factory in China, the second is a stamping plant in China (our stamping plants were never as crude or unsafe as this one), and finally a modern car manufacturer in Germany. When you watch the third video pay attention to the number of high paying workers assembling the cars.
1. Apple Factory ( a little long, but worth watching.)
2. Chinese stamping plant. Notice the six guys sitting around the die and ducking heads when the press comes down. During my 55 years of visiting factories I have never seen anything as crude or unsafe as the operation in this video in any US plant.
3. German car maker. The kind of jobs we envision when we talk about high paying union jobs.
The high paying jobs in the German factory involve skilled tradesmen far beyond the education level of the people we hope to use in our factories.
The USA is capable of matching the level of automation in the VW video above, I know, I worked to make such a process. We have the tool making, electronic, and engineering skills needed. What we don’t have are enough people who know how to read, and do simple math well enough to work on a complicated factory floor.
A good friend called me recently and said how amazing it is that Obama is knocking down all the barriers set up by the Founders to protect the country. She pictured a cartoon in which Obama begins as a normal citizen (we take that loosely) and destroys the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Rule of Law on his way toward assuming a throne in the White House as King of the USA.
She is not far from wrong, because he has worked successfully to knock down barriers. He certainly ignores the Rule of Law and openly dictates to his Bureaucrats about how to treat illegal immigrants, how to deal with Arizona Law Enforcement, New Black Panthers intimidating voters, abortion, voter ID, and more. He commissioned Hillary to work the UN to end run gun control to take away our Second Amendment Rights. He has ignored Freedom of Religion under the First Amendment within the Health Care Act. He has openly declared that if Congress cannot give him the laws he wants he will find a way to do it administratively via Executive Privilege .
No one can deny that he has divided the country by waging class warfare, and has neutered the USA in speeches saying that our exceptionalism is no different from the exceptionalism of an Egyptian or a Saudi. His attack on Capitalism is relentless. He regards Capitalism as a broken down old system that does not work. He does so while denying that the world is a better place because of Capitalism. One modern example is within Communist China’s short embrace of capitalism over four hundred million Chinese avoided starvation and have reached a decent standard of living. China’s success with capitalism came from a huge redistribution of wealth from the Western World. We sent them our entire manufacturing economy. Obama’s change toward Socialism is of course an older idea, proven to be a disaster by many countries. Socialism failed in spite of murdering over sixty million dissenters who stood in the way of trying to make it work. Obama’s problem is that he does not read history. He is too young to know first hand that Socialism existed and hated by those who lived it. So, in his mind Socialism is new.
Obama is hell-bent on obtaining a socialist agenda in the USA during his presidency. What is scarier is that he is setting up to neutralize the Congress with his end run Executive Orders. He is changing the Supreme Court by nominating über liberal judges like Sonya Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. In a second term he will probably replace a few more judges.
The result is that the hurdler is not running according to the rules. He kicks the hurdles down instead of leaping over them and changes the rules to make that acceptable. He has achieved a tremendous amount of success in making the transformation. As a side note, he attacks his opponent by arguing that Romney does not offer any detail on how he will bring back the economy. Yet, during the 2008 campaign, the only detail we heard from Obama was two words, hope, and change. Not once in his campaign did I ever hear him give any detail on what he wants to “transform the greatest country in the world” into. How could anyone buy that line? The logic escapes me. Change the greatest country in the world, doesn’t the “greatest” title imply change is not necessary?
Let No Hurdle Obstruct the Path
We cannot, we must not, allow this man another four years to succeed at his agenda. If we do, it will be you and I who suffer the consequences. King Obama will continue to have his meals served while the Secret Service chauffeurs him in armored cars, and flies him to vacations in Air Force One. We, on the other hand, will be fighting each other for a piece of bread, or a gallon of gas.
Spy novels always catch my interest. I’ve read a number of Tom Clancy novels, and gave them up because they began to sound the same. This month, I selected a non-fiction spy story. David Wise chronicles the escapades of the war to steal secrets between China and the U.S.A. The Chinese were a closed society for five thousand years, and as such are somewhat behind in modern technology, especially war technology. Chairman Mao forced them into communism. They continued as a closed socialist society. When Nixon made the move to open the West to China it changed everything; the secret stealing began. China is in hyper drive to gain knowledge without paying for it with money and time. Their wish is to compete as a modern war nation now.
This story would be totally dull if it weren’t for our FBI. Without giving away the details, the agent in charge of Bureau’s Los Angeles office was a one man agency. He recruited a Chinese woman to spy for us. A great idea, except she worked for the Chinese government. Add to the mix a love affair between our guy and their girl. They continued the affair for twenty years; what a mess. One affair wasn’t complex enough, so the China doll befriended the San Francisco agent to make it into a four-way affair: her, her husband, the Los Angeles Agent, and the San Francisco Agent. Most women are happy to take care of one man, this woman seemed to thrive on three. The best kept secret in the world was this affair.
Needless to say, too many classified memos and information passed to China. The whole affair finally became known to officials and the shit hit the fan, heads were to roll. The government prosecuted the agents, but the military didn’t want any of the secrets to come out in court and become really public. Most of it was swept under the table. Kind of makes a citizen want to bust into Washington with both guns loaded.
David Wise ends the story by revealing some of the cyber spying that is happening now. Most of it comes from China and attacks our CIA, and military. We read stories about hacking almost daily. There is a ninety-nine percent chance it is from China. What I got from the book, was that the Chinese will learn all they want from Chinese turned US citizens who want to help their homeland, and from US born citizens who get pissed at a boss. Wise cannot show much of the stuff the U.S.A. gets from China, or what they have gotten from us unless it is public. None of the parties want the public humiliation that comes with the revelations.
Nixon did us a huge favor by opening the East to Western trade. It took us thirty years to export our manufacturing to China, and they are happy to take it from us. Now they want us to give them our military technology as well. At the rate Obama is borrowing money from China, they will own the info and demand we produce what ever it is they want.
My boss of forty years made us work under some strict security rules. My workplace was so tight, our vendors joked about it all the time. I told them our biggest secret is that we don’t have any secrets. Our leader, however, paid a big price for successful processes; he wanted his competition to pay for their own development.
I recall once setting up a trip for an engineer to go to one of our vendors. I wanted him to learn how they made a particular product, so we could use the information in a major development project. Our leader got wind of it and I got in big trouble for suggesting such a stupid idea. Not only did I get whacked on the side of the head, I got my ass kicked and lived in the dog house for some time. Later, I learned that my plan was illegal and Big did not condone it. What can I say, the man taught me many lessons, one was ethics in business.
The U.S.A. needs to adhere to the same strict rules of security and ethics.
