Mission Accomplished

Once hailed as a model for the country's economic development, the Afghan Milli Boot factory now risks bankruptcy. NATO commissio

ned the shoe manufacturer to produce boots for the Afghan army but, ahead of the 2014 NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan government is now making such decisions.

In this case, it has chosen a cheaper deal abroad, overlooking the local producer.

  alJazeera

So they have learned something from us after all.

Education

[A]mericans are told that education is the answer to unemployment. Get that university degree and live happily every after.

As RT recently reported, the truth is that more than half of recent US university graduates are unemployed or very underemployed. So much for the mantra that “education is the answer.”

“Education is the answer” serves the colleges and universities who want the tuition payments. It serves the companies who make student loans. It helps the offshoring corporations disguise that they are the main cause of unemployment.

Education is not the answer when high value-added, high wage manufacturing and professional service jobs, such as software engineering, are moved offshore in order to enhance short-term profits for shareholders and multi-million dollar bonuses for CEOs, while domestic employment and purchasing power are destroyed. Unless American university graduates can emigrate to China and India, there is no one to employ them. Yet, we still hear the call to run up student loan debts beyond the ability of salaries to repay the loans.

  Paul Craig Roberts

Not to mention that education is increasingly difficult to get because Americans don't want to finance it.

But hey, this country runs on debt.  The debt-financing industry is doing well.

What Am I Missing?

Deutsche Bank’s Alan Ruskin observed that the rate at which productivity — the amount of goods and services produced per worker — is growing is beginning to slow down in the United States.

  Salon

Yeah, we’re getting old.

In other words, stock prices could slump because an increase in the demand for labor will put upward pressure on wages. For the vast majority of Americans, this is fantastic news. For the 1 percent, not so much.

If the “vast majority” think that’s fantastic news, are they unaware of the stream of corporate jobs going overseas to cheaper labor?? Sounds like really bad news for American labor to me.