No Christmas Without China Pathetic.

[TheMastersNemesis]

Watching an experiment using nothing that is made in China. A family took the challenge to take all Chinese made products out of their house over the holidays and replace them with other products. It is like they had little left or it got very sparse. And the other replacements were not made in USA but in other non Chinese countries. Virtually nothing was made in the USA.

This Christmas experiment shows what our supposed American businesses have done to us. We are creating a Chinese super power and our American CEO's are the ones betraying the country.

If we were cut off from foreign made products we would cease to function. There is virtually nothing made in the USA. Now even our food is being imported. The American flag is becoming a hollow symbol.

[targetpractice]

1. I'd be interested in more info about what you are watching...

American corporations do not care about the American consumer's anymore. They are very interested in developing other markets.

[TheMastersNemesis]

2. There Was A Special On Public Television

A young Chinese Producer recruited a family to take all the Chinese made products out of their home for the holidays and replace them. Almost all the replacement products they found which were few were made in other countries as well. Almost NOTHING was made in the USA.

[Recursion]

11. Their food almost definitely was, if they had soy or beef

Look, I know it's popular to say that China is screwing us here, but in addition to being the world's #1 exporter, they're the world's #2 importer, nearly all from us (heavy industrial plant, cereals, and animal hides, in that order).

US manufacturing is huge. If it were a separate country, just US manufacturing, it would have the 10th largest GDP in the world.

For the past four years, GDP growth in the US has consistently been led by one sector: manufacturing.

You're right that there's a problem, it just isn't what you think it is.

[On the Road]

3. Nothing Made in the USA?

The US is the #1 manufacturer the world by a considerable margin.

[TheMastersNemesis]

4. I Do Not Believe That Is Really True.

It is just a media and GOP talking point

[NuclearDem]

5. The US largely doesn't manufacture smaller or less sophisticated products.

Automotive and aircraft parts, industrial equipment, farming equipment, circuits, and other electronic components, yes.

Shirts or shoes, no.

And for the record, we're actually second behind China, and it's actually not that wide a margin.

[Recursion]

9. And yet, whether you believe it or not, it's true (though I think PRC passed us this year, barely)

We've been trading the #1 spot back and forth with China for a few years now, but we're definitely the world's leader in heavy manufacturing

[Agschmid]

15. Boeing, caterpillar, etc.

We don't do much ship building anymore...

[Agschmid]

14. It's likely true.

You have to consider what products we do make. It's better economically to make higher price/margin things rather than the small stuff. However there are some pride issues in manufacturing many things backs at home (4th of July flags come up every year).

[Recursion]

12. China just edged us out last year

But we're still manufacturing much more than at any point in US history.

[Keefer]

6. Manufacturers

aren't doing anything our government hasn't let them get away with.

[Recursion]

10. What have they been doing "wrong"?

The US manufactures more today than at any point in US history, an amount roughly equal to what China manufactures, a country with a billion people.

They employ fewer people to do it, but the same is true of agriculture -- should we not have moved people off the farm, either?

[SheilaT]

7. Among the reasons I stopped buying Christmas ornaments and decorations

about a decade ago was that they were all made in China.

As a crocheter, I'm glad to report that no yarns, so far, seem to come from there.

[Recursion]

8. The USA manufactures more today than at any point in history

I don't know where this idea that "we don't make anything anymore" came from, but the opposite is true.

We employ a lot fewer people than we used to, true, but we do make a lot, and in particular we make the heavy industrial plant that China, et al, use to manufacture consumer electronics. We also export soybeans, wheat, corn, and meat at an extraordinary rate.

Think about farms: we grow a lot more food than 100 years ago, but our farms employee a lot fewer people than 100 years ago (not just by % of the population, actually fewer people). That's because we have tractors (etc.) now. The same thing is happening with manufacturing -- we're doing more, using fewer employees to do it.

No country today could survive without trade. AFAIK that's been true since about 1600, if not earlier.

[AdHocSolver]

13. The most significant US export in the last 20 years has been jobs.

The next most significant export is technology. The technology developed in America that gave the U.S. a trade advantage is being given away to our economic competitors by the multinational corporations.

Producing consumer goods in the U.S. would provide jobs to support an educated middle class, the backbone of a democratic society. As it is, China's middle class is growing thanks to U.S. investment in jobs over there, while the U.S. middle class is shrinking.

The next most significant US export is capital to places like the Cayman Islands. Profits made off of Americans are hoarded by the multinational corporations rather than being recycled back into the U.S. economy.

The benefits of trade has been diverted from the 99 percent to the one percent, who use it to produce armaments and encourage wars around the world in order to have markets in which to sell those weapons systems. Excessive military expenditures have been the downfall of every empire in history.

The huge trade deficit that the U.S. has with China, so that this country has to borrow money from China in order to be able to buy Chinese goods, is NOT the sign of a healthy or sustainable economy.




.

[Recursion]

17. Wrong

Producing consumer goods in the U.S. would provide jobs to support an educated middle class, the backbone of a democratic society.

Nope. We'd just automate it the same way we've automated the heavy plant production that produces the factories China uses to make consumer electronics.

We just don't need as many manufacturers as we used to. We also don't need as many farmers. Welcome to the post-scarcity world.

[Sirveri]

18. We are not in a post scarcity society.

Our energy sources are not renewable, and we do not have a 100% recycle rate of metal products. Once we start asteroid mining for ore and have a complete renewable electrical grid where manufacturing is a trivial concern with fully automated mass production runs, then we might be able to call it post scarcity. But we're not there yet... but oh how I wish I could go out and get a CNC lathe with live tooling, a parts catcher, and a bar stock feeder and just run it in my garage all day long...

[Fumesucker]

28. The real bottleneck to what you want to do is still marketing

You can make all the stuff you want, if you don't find a buyer or buyers then you aren't any better off than you were before, arguably you are worse off since you are buried in parts you can't sell.

Speaking as someone who actually has a CNC machine or two, marketing stuff is harder than making it.

[Sirveri]

31. That is my problem, clients, that and I'm just starting out.

Could be an ass and go work for someone and poach all their clients, I know a guy who knows a guy who did that.

That I think is the saddest thing, so much talent in the new generation and so little desire to harness it. Should never have learned how to be a prototype machinist, should have gone into high finance and math. Just another con man who invents a new type of shell game.

[AdHocSolver]

19. In a post-scarcity world there would NOT be tens of millions of unemployed, hungry people.

In a sanely run world economy, there would not be tens of millions of people working 14 or more hours a day in dangerous, unhealthy sweat shops for pennies a day in countries such as China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, The goods produced in these sweatshops, whether high tech or not, is largely hand assembled..

Companies such as Foxconn are run like slave labor camps and are given carte blanche approval by the multinational companies to exploit their workers. There is NO technical reason for this to be the case. I worked several years programming computer applications and saw how overrated automation is.

There is NO technological reason for this type of operation. It is done largely to exploit and cheat employees and customers.

The number of manufacturers, banks, and retailers was reduced by the dominant corporations through mergers, acquisitions, and cutthroat business practices in order to eliminate competition and concentrate power in the hands of a few oligopolies. Technology was never a driving force behind a shrinking work force.

[Recursion]

22. That's *exactly* what there will be: mass unemployment

That's what "post-scarcity" means. The question is what we do with that.

Technology was never a driving force behind a shrinking work force.

That's absolutely absurd.

[AdHocSolver]

47. In a post-scarcity world, there would NOT be tens of millions of hungry people.

The entire thrust of the corporate system from the development of the assembly line to the inclusion of computer chips into every commodity was to dumb-down the work force to eliminate the need for large numbers of educated and skilled workers, and eventually, the need for large numbers of all kinds of workers.

Putting computer chips into every gadget was designed to replace parts and sub-asemblies, not so much to improve performance, but to reduce the number of people needed in manufacturing and repair, and to create unrepairable, throw-away commodities.

When electronic equipment is designed and built around modular, replaceable sub-assemblies, you can repair the device when any part of it fails. When all functionality is on one computer chip, if any part of it fails, it becomes useless and you just throw it away and buy a new one.

With all the huge amount of foodstuff being produced these days, it appears to be a puzzle as to why there are so many hungry, underfed people in the world. Actually, this is easy to understand if you consider "corporate economics". The agribusinesses use economies of scale to undercut the price obtainable by family farms driving the family farms out of business.

Companies like Monsanto patent seeds and produce GMO foods to deny the independent non-corporate farmer the ability to sell their products to people who don't want to eat Monsanto's "tainted" products.

Then there are corrupt politicians who mandate the useless practice of adding ethanol to gasoline (it does NOT save oil).

So, farmers, especially the big agribusinesses switch from growing and selling grain for food to growing corn to manufacture ethanol, because the oil companies can afford to pay a lot more for corn than food processors who convert corn and other grains for food. This "scarcity" of food grains drives up the price of food so that fewer people can afford to buy it, which is especially acute in areas where people do not have access to high-paying jobs.

[Recursion]

50. There might well be. But I didn't say "hungry", I said "unemployed"

It's only our scarcity mindset that means those two need to go together.

[Populist_Prole]

21. Whitewash and canards

No country today could survive without trade. AFAIK that's been true since about 1600, if not earlier

It's not an all-or-nothing issue of trade vs no trade and you damned well know it. The US thrived just fine with trade until the 1980's. A conscious decision to deindustrialize ( and to financialize ) was made and as a result, whole broad swaths of the working class demographic has been unemployed and underemployed owing to this, and it's not due only to automation but due squarely to rent seeking by US-based multinational corporations. If it were automation alone, then the resultant rise of productivity should have led to higher wages, producing more demand, producing a bigger pie that would offset the smaller piece. This has not happened, and rest assured that to the plutocracy ( and their "free-trade" concubines that carry their water ) this is a feature, not a bug.

[Recursion]

23. How can you say we "de-industrialized" when manufacturing keeps increasing?

We keep manufacturing more and more every year.

[Populist_Prole]

24. Because of population growth and the shrinking percentage it is of working class income source

You could say the US made 10 more widgets this year than it did in 1949 and be techincally correct as far as "more" but factoring the population growth the amount would be a drop in the bucket relative to the overall size of the economy, with shitty retail/service jobs being of larger percentage than manufacturing. Add to this the eroded power of labor and the threat of offshoring and even the lower end of manufacturing jobs are little better than the service/retail jobs....though the total number of stuff made looks good on paper.

Also, so many free-trade pollyannas are riding on inertia and still tout a company like Boeing making aircraft and exporting them but studiously ignore that those countries that said A/C are exported to demand signifigant subassembly content as a condition of sale, thereby eroding "export" bragging rights, as well as manufacturing bragging rights.

[Recursion]

26. You've still got it backwards

The growth in service jobs is a good thing in itself because it means we don't need nearly as many people as we used to to make the stuff we want. And the main difference now between the poor and the rich isn't what manufactured goods they can buy, but what services they can buy. So a big part of the problem is just that service jobs need to pay more. The problem wasn't that "manufacturing jobs are good and they're gone", it's not about manufacturing. It's that manufacturing jobs allowed for a certain type of labor organization that's less good at organizing service jobs for the most part, and we need to find the form of organization that works right (we haven't seem to yet) for the jobs we have now.

But there's nothing particularly magical about manufacturing jobs; services create value too.

[Fumesucker]

29. Rich people stay rich by being very, very cheap

The rich certainly want services but they have no intention of paying any more than they can possibly get away with for those services and they have the economic and political clout to make their wishes come true.

[Romulox]

35. This is just gibberish. You're asking people to believe your word salad over their lying eyes.

[Populist_Prole]

38. Not only that, the poster is moving the goalposts

First he/she claims that concerns over the de-industrialization of the US are illusory; saying basically "Hey don't worry, manufacturing is stronger than ever!"

Then as the empirical evidence stacks up against his/her claim; switches from "don't worry" to "So what, what's so good about manufacturing anyway?"

One wonders what his/her motivations are and what he/she is trying to "sell".

[Romulox]

39. The "third way" types wrap themselves into pretzels trying to make corporatism "progressive".

It's not hard to see it's not a good fit. At all.

[Populist_Prole]

41. Yes indeed, and it aint working anymore

Take care

[warrant46]

40. The good old USA still makes the world's BEST Cigarettes

And the Chinese import Billions of cartons;

Almost 80% of Chinese men smoke !!!

[Romulox]

44. I haven't smoked in years, but some of the world's best cigarettes are made in Germany.

And they're made of 100% Virginian tobacco. Just another wtf moment in international trade.

I hate to promote cigarettes, but I feel OK about sharing this image:

[warrant46]

46. Having lived in Thailand and the Phillipines for 5 years

I can only say Marlboros and Salems are the 2 most popular there.

China from what I understand loves to smoke

China clouded in cigarette smoke

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/01/07/florcruz.china.smokers/

Chain-smoking national leaders may have given smoking undeserved respectability. Chairman Mao was a heavy smoker, though he died at age 82. Deng Xiaoping, who preferred Panda cigarettes, died at 92.

More than 300 million people in China are regular smokers, most of them men, according to the Global Adult Tobacco Survey conducted in 2009-2010. Increasingly, large numbers of women and teenagers have also taken up the habit.

Smoking is estimated to kill more than one million Chinese a year. They die from chronic respiratory ailments like tuberculosis and emphysema, and from cancers affecting the lungs, mouth, liver and stomach.

Another report by Chinese and international experts led by China CDC deputy director Yang Gonghuan and Tsinghua professor Hu Angang projects that the deaths attributable to tobacco in China will rise to 3.5 million per year by 2030.

[Jetboy]

16. I work at an auction house and go to a lot of

second hand stores, garage sales etc. Most everything I own is NOT made in China and when any of it breaks, I'll have a quality (again NOT made in China) replacement within days. (often I already have the quality replacement)

One good picker can supply 20-30 people with actual quality items at a fraction of the price benefiting both parties considerably. Talk to your friends and neighbors, chances are that one of them is in the junk/second hand business. It's a win win win win win for everyone except little Chineese kids- oh wait it's a win for them too.

[Fumesucker]

30. Are you familiar with the DU forum Frugal and Energy Efficient Living?

Any input you might have would be welcome there.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1128

[Jetboy]

33. Hey that is right up my alley!

Thank you for pointing me there. It is my life and what I love to do.

[cherokeeprogressive]

20. What the fuck is China Pathetic?

[AuntFester]

27. This has been going on for years.

[Sheri]

32. we're a net exporter of food, afaik.

otherwise, yes. we're inundated with chinese junk. wal-mart forced all our manufacturers to lower their prices if they wanted to sell in their stores, so now nearly everything we buy is produced by people living in slave-like conditions.

i do not and will not shop at wal-mart for this reason.

[Dreamer Tatum]

34. Can you EVER cite actual data? nt

[Romulox]

36. The majority of Americans won't buy a UAW made car. Why should I care if Xmas is made in China? nt

[warrant46]

42. Not me I have 3 Cars all made by the UAW

I won't buy one of those Rice Cars made by Scabs

[Romulox]

43. Thanks. It keeps money in your own community. Too many drive imports and non union, then complain

about people buying Chinese goods. I'd truly like to understand how they reconcile the two things.

[warrant46]

45. I don't buy any of that other cheap Chinese shit either

I never go near Walmart either. In my opinion its the work of the devil or his spawn

Lots of places that make local crafts for all the holidays.

Almost everything that sells for less than $50.00 is made by slave labor some where.

It is difficult to buy clothes but here are several ideas ---expensive compared to walmart but its out there if you look

http://worldssoftest.com/our-story.html?SID=fe69f4de0922a7186fd8f91b61f18a70

http://www.allenedmonds.com/aeonline/AboutAEHeritage?catalogId=40000000001&langId=-1&storeId=1


I have no interest in either of these only to show you can find it if you look for it

[flamingdem]

37. I bought luggage and it smelled so toxic

that I looked up stinky luggage and found out that it's due to chemicals and fungicides, pesticides used in China.

Then I discovered almost all luggage is made in China.

Ugh. I returned it for a slightly less stinky brand.

[llmart]

48. I watched that last night....

Very interesting juxtaposition on the young man who conducted the experiment where his parents were so anxious to live just like Americans and lived in a huge house and tried to outdo the neighbors on his Christmas decorations. The father finally let his better sense prevail because the guy in the tree could have killed himself just to fulfill the father's dream of having the tallest tree decorated. Then at the end of the show the mother looked very, very sad as she watched an old video of all her family back in China. The son pointed out to her that here she had a huge house that could house her entire extended family but nothing could make up for the fact that her family was thousands of miles away in China.

[guesswho121]

49. Made in China

I am one of those people that used items from the stores without a thought about where everything was made, until, I watched Death by China. WOW did it change my thought. If we don't change this we will be a very poor country if we ever face sanctions on the US from China. We would be poor very fast. All of our companies including the ones that claim made in USA are Chinese made in China. An example of this is Craftsman. They claim made in USA but since 2001 they ran over and started making stuff in China. We opened trade and gave away jobs, businesses, and who we stood for.
We need to make a stand. We need to take back our name. We need to not buy from anyone that comes back to the US from china.Set a example that says we will not give you money when you ran to China.

[Le Taz Hot]

51. I find lots of "Made in the USA" items

in thrift stores. As for food, if I don't grow it I buy it from one of the local Farmer's Market. Sounds like somebody doesn't know how to shop anywhere but Wally World.