The Nineteenth Floor

I like to argue that I hold a manufacturing job here in the United States -- manufacturing electricity.

It's a pretty weak argument, but I do actually produce a physical something, a tangible good. I am engaged in the technical craft of protecting transmission lines, bulk power transformers and hydro power generators from destructive short-circuits. Without protection engineers there would be no power. There are no Mennonite protection engineers.

Compare this field with, say, a woman involved in raking fees and/or percentages from the financial churn of mortgage backed derivatives for a large investment bank on the nineteenth floor in some glass warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her profession can more suitably be referred to as extraction, rather than value-added production. Her livelihood is based on the skimming and churning and shuffling of digital digits representing the physical production of others inside a server-farm in Madison Park. She makes her living by having increased the cost of interest on a lath and plaster worker's mortgage, by enriching an already wealthy layer of managers and other financial winners including herself.

I recently watched a video of a production run at the JunTing power transformer production facility in China. The workers were shown layering the laminate steel core by hand. For emphasis, take note that this detailed level of manufacturing cannot be done by low-wage, low-skilled factory workers or robotic devices. Chinese labor is not just endless arrays of dour women in matching grey uniforms in football-field facilities sewing buttons on a 650,000 production run of apparel accessories for the next hot-shit doll for the 2011 American Christmas...although of course that does exist. No, it's not just that -- their manufacturing today is comprised of thousands of small facilities supporting an ever larger global industrial directive, which represents the loss of similar manufacturing jobs here.

Just as important is that the entire chain of assembly has also moved elsewhere, the entire value-added chain that feeds the worker layering the laminate steel -- steel manufacturers, insulation developers, tractor-trailer drivers, factory janitors and HVAC engineers...

In this nation we denigrate the skilled industrial worker and hail the CEOs of gaming software, smart phones, social media moguls and financial operators such as Citi and Chase as the only possible avenue for future wealth for our citizens. Germany and Japan have never lost on their skilled workforce. We've been doing it for forty years, through the new-found dominance of short term profiteering through quarterly earnings as the sole motivator. Fail to meet the next quarter estimates and management won't last long enough to pursue any long term capital investments in people or in facilities.

And then! Base your economy on housing and perpetual automobiling after you've fuckered away your manufacturing infrastructure. Develop new incentives in real estate financialization through favorable influences to government, such that the woman on the nineteenth floor can reap immense profits from the churn of perpetual re-fi's and HELOCs. Subsidize ever-larger, more wasteful homes on the suburban fringes by unlimited mortgage interest deductions, taxpayer funded road expansions and cheap gasoline, and fill them with non-productive citizens managing finance, insurance and real-estate related fields.

If you have any doubts that we've based our entire economy on the endless cycle of new housal units on the suburban fringe and the hollowing out of city cores through the wholesale dismantling of former productive jobs and the lack of investment in existing neighborhoods, then just review all the headlines of the last three years regarding "housing starts," Case-Shiller, and how far down from the hallucinated peak we are with respect to housal unit valuations.

I find this an enjoyable topic here on my little blog, because in many of the same ways we squander our energy, we also squander our future. I am a personal doomer -- prepared for the worst, but able to live comfortably in the moment. I like the idea of our "empire in decline." I like the notion that less than two out of every one hundred of my neighbors believe that our best days are still ahead of us. I've been positioning myself for the "best days are behind us" prospects for the last twenty years -- maintaining little debt, being more valuable to my employer than what they are paying me, holding physical assets, mentally equipped to live a lowered energy lifestyle as necessary, ability to ride a bike, ability to trade skilled woodworking labor with neighbors...

What, exactly, would those 2% be bullish about? Our $14,345,000,000,000 national debt and our $1,205,000,000,000 annual deficits? Double digit health care increases ad infinitum? Gas at horrors! $3.87? Some future economy based on vaporware or some other hot-shit 6-G smart phone? 43,000,000 on food stamps? Housal unit prices expected to crest 2006 valuations sometime in the spring of 2034? 120,000,000 new green jobs building windmills?

If you are one of those 2/100, what are you bullish about?