News Argus

It's not surprising when Vice President Dick Cheney disagrees with President Obama. But it is surprising when he takes a more progressive position than the president.

Said Cheney: "I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay, and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that... historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis... But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that."

What's the administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.

For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad -- something I don't recommend -- we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.

When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots. In a few years this factory won't have a single employee on site, except for an occasional visiting technician who repairs and upgrades the robots.

Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they're also becoming far more efficient at it. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don't need as many manufacturing workers as before.

Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002 -- before the asset bubble and subsequent bust -- 22 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline, and China had a 15 percent drop.

What happened to manufacturing? In two words, higher productivity. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In this, manufacturing is following the same trend as agriculture. A century ago, almost 30 percent of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5 percent do. That doesn't mean the U.S. failed at agriculture. Quite the opposite. American agriculture is a huge success story. America can generate far larger crops than a century ago with far fewer people. New technologies, more efficient machines, new methods of fertilizing, better systems of crop rotation, and efficiencies of large scale have all made farming much more productive.

Manufacturing is analogous. In America and elsewhere around the world, it's a success. Since 1995, even as manufacturing employment has dropped around the world, global industrial output has risen more than 30 percent.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

MORE...

The Dish was all over yesterday's big story - the assassination of George Tiller by a crazed Christianist. We traced O'Reilly's troubling rhetoric here, here, and here, and readers checked my reaction here. We chronicled the disturbing role of Operation Rescue here, here, and here, and commentary from the far right here, here, here.  A noteworthy voice on the far-right was Robert P. George, who struck the perfect chord. We also aired personal accounts of abortion here and here.

A traumatic Sunday, to say the least. For the right approach to religion, listen to Bob Wright.

A new FDU PublicMind poll in New Jersey confirms how most other polls see tomorrow's Republican gubernatorial primary: Chris Christie (R) leads Steve Lonegan (R) by a healthy 54% to 30% margin. Another 11% are still undecided.

Fabio Rojas has a theory:

by Jesse Taylor

But, pro-lifers, there may be something wrong with your movement when you have to send out press releases making clear that you don’t actually condone cold-blooded murder.

As Ezra and Ann Friedman point out, it is part and parcel of the activist anti-choice movement to proactively interfere with and intimidate people who are in the process of providing or seeking a medical procedure which is protected by law. 

The question I’ve heard over and over again is whether or not the pro-life movement bears responsibility for the murder of George Tiller.  It does.  There is no other “mainstream” political movement in this country which keeps as a part of its bag of tricks the intent to frighten those in the midst of a legally protected activity.

Pro-gun control liberals don’t show up at gun shows and hector attendees.  (And if your response is, “Damn right they don’t, because they’d get shot,” you’re proving my point.) Fundamentalists don’t have to worry about fleets of bike-riding hippies showing up at the entrance to their church every Sunday, telling them that their God is false.  Religious “family planning” clinics don’t live in constant fear of a Molotov cocktail flying through their plate glass window, don’t have to train their employees on how to handle bomb threats, don’t need to worry about their clients’ safety on the way from their car to the front door.  But if you provide abortion services - even if you’re not actually providing an abortion to the person coming in the door, even though it has been repeatedly declared legal - you live in fear. 

This culture of fear was borne and is bred by the way the pro-life movement conducts itself.  They certainly have every right to protest - and I mean that, and I truly believe that.  But freedom of speech and freedom of assembly does not create freedom from responsibility for your conduct.  A movement whose primary focus is intimidation through immediate and overwhelming physical proximity, coupled with hugely dishonest and inflammatory rhetoric cannot escape responsibility when it is embraced by an actor or actors who take that rhetoric to a logical, if extreme, end.  By declaring that “abortion is murder” and premising a movement on preventing that “murder” in increasingly radical and ostentatious ways (while oftentimes failing to propose or advocate for the more logical and responsible methods of preventing the alleged “murders"), the pro-life movement has built up over decades an angry base stewing in its own feelings of oppression and righteousness.  It’s the perfect environment to breed radicalism and violence.

This also puts into context the recent uproar over Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination.  She has made a mission of bringing to light racial injustice, particularly as it relates to Hispanics.  Her efforts are not designed to hold down white people, or designed to invalidate their experiences, but instead to bring to light the full range of experiences available in America.  She is not a radical, she is not a racist, yet the same movement that is rushing out to make clear that they don’t want people to murder just because it might seem like they want people to murder is trying to tar her some sort of Latina conquistador, rampaging through our suburbs in order to take away our Constitutional right to white dudes in power.  This same sort of decontextualized radical rhetoric is being used over and over again to stir up hatred and resentment so that Tony Blankley and Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist and the rest of their ilk can make millions off of this razor’s edge.  People must be angry - angry enough to act, but not angry enough to lash out; hopeful for a “better” future, but unwilling to accept anything but the total domination of their enemies as a victory. 

Lacking that, you’ll be able to make a pretty penny off of teaching every abortion provider in this country how to set up their speed dial for the bomb squad.  Never let it be said that terrorism doesn’t stimulate the economy.