Tapsearch Com EditorGreenspan works Corporate American and Washington DC crowd (LINK)
December 26th 2007 18:19
Bizarre Politics Reports:
Greenspan sells Greenspan
A view of Greenspan from the trenches continues... His book The Age of Turbulence is reviewed from the streets of USA
Greenspan sells Greenspan
1965 to 1980 represent the best economic model in our times. In the early 1970s, Greenspan was selling Greenspan. He was a top economic consultant in high demand by many top corporations and by the powers in Washington DC. His best product was himself. He sold a mirage. He created economic branding and images. It was an art form.
In our city and surrounding regions, we had many top corporate offices and production facilities. Companies employing 5,000 workers were considered to be medium size companies. In our city, we had more than fifty top corporations that no longer exist or reside in our city. Today, the largest top employers in the city and county are related to governments and education. The private sector has been ravished by Globalization and Free Trade.
I went with a major computer manufacturer in 1969. They sent me to their corporate schools to learn all about computers. The colleges did not have courses yet. Data Processing Manager came up from the ranks. Some came from the factory floors. They knew the practical part and mixed it in with the new ways of processing information.
IBM trained a very large number of people. They then quietly layed off about 10,000 of the highly trained workers. They kept things quiet so the public would not become nervous about workers losing their jobs to computers. The newspapers had stories how workers should prepare for more leisure because the computers were coming to take over the hard parts of the workday.
The 10,000 workers layed off by IBM were quickly absorbed in the corporate world needing expertise for computerization. This gave IBM the edge because these new experts just knew the IBM way. IBM philosophy was to centralize data processing in a company as fast as possible whereby they could market their larger computers. The Data Processing Managers stature grew as they made up budgets in the millions of dollars for the latest IBM equipment. I sold against this approach and ended up selling distributive and off line processing. I was one of the first to sell national networks. I thought everyone would tune into what IBM was really trying to do - they wanted to capture the whole market place at the expense of pratical data processing. I believed that once you computerized a local operation and centralized it in a big computer far away from the actual operations, you end up with systems frozen in place. The world found this to be true years later when the micro computers took on the mainframes and demonstrated how much better distributive processing is. About thirty years later, IBM layed off 150,000 workers with more than a million workers losing their jobs in the computer industry. This set the stage for the Y2k crisis because nobody was at home to do the systems housekeeping.
Back then, the economy was jumping with all kinds of activity. Besides all the major corporations residing in local added value economic settings , millions of workers got new jobs in computers. Computer companies like RCA, Univac, Sperry Rand, Honeywell, NCR, Burroughs and IBM had thousands of sales and support people in all major cities across our land. Our economy enjoyed good paying jobs through about five to seven levels from the raw product level up through to the retail or end user stage and then it recycled back down again to the raw product level. Greenspan followed a crowd that pushed a different kind of economy. They start chopping up the Golden Goose that laid the Golden Eggs and started to ship the pieces around the world for the sake of cheaper labor. They used the carrot on the end of the stick to attract companies away from ordinary competition and enticed them with the taste of cheap labor and more profit at the expense of labor. Workers were fired instead of hired for the sake of stock vallues.
In 1970, a first class stamp cost 8 cents. A new medium size automobile cost about $3,500. A nice home costs about $25,000. A vast middle class of workers were making about $10,000 to $12,000 a year. In the ensuing years, the post office used the inflationary statistics to raise the price of a first class stamp. The one statistic they did not use was wages. Greenspan does not tell us about this in his book. The real facts would reveal that our inflation rates were slowed down by the deflation of wages. Today, a vast working poor class has replaced the middle class production workers. The underclass goes unreported with millions missing in action from the economic charts. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans exposed this vast underclass living in a silent depression.
If we compared wages with the 1970s, there should be many individual workers making from $50,000 to $60,000 a year. Today, even total family incomes are much less than that.
Today, news is made when a few hundred jobs are offered. About 50,000 workers applied for just over a thousands jobs at Wal-Mart's new stores in Northern Ohio and Chicago. Greenspan ignores things like this and tells the choir a story about crunching numbers that do not include the stories from the streets of USA. What else can you expect, when workers have no voice in the process.
Greenspan sells Greenspan
1965 to 1980 represent the best economic model in our times. In the early 1970s, Greenspan was selling Greenspan. He was a top economic consultant in high demand by many top corporations and by the powers in Washington DC. His best product was himself. He sold a mirage. He created economic branding and images. It was an art form.
In our city and surrounding regions, we had many top corporate offices and production facilities. Companies employing 5,000 workers were considered to be medium size companies. In our city, we had more than fifty top corporations that no longer exist or reside in our city. Today, the largest top employers in the city and county are related to governments and education. The private sector has been ravished by Globalization and Free Trade.
I went with a major computer manufacturer in 1969. They sent me to their corporate schools to learn all about computers. The colleges did not have courses yet. Data Processing Manager came up from the ranks. Some came from the factory floors. They knew the practical part and mixed it in with the new ways of processing information.
IBM trained a very large number of people. They then quietly layed off about 10,000 of the highly trained workers. They kept things quiet so the public would not become nervous about workers losing their jobs to computers. The newspapers had stories how workers should prepare for more leisure because the computers were coming to take over the hard parts of the workday.
The 10,000 workers layed off by IBM were quickly absorbed in the corporate world needing expertise for computerization. This gave IBM the edge because these new experts just knew the IBM way. IBM philosophy was to centralize data processing in a company as fast as possible whereby they could market their larger computers. The Data Processing Managers stature grew as they made up budgets in the millions of dollars for the latest IBM equipment. I sold against this approach and ended up selling distributive and off line processing. I was one of the first to sell national networks. I thought everyone would tune into what IBM was really trying to do - they wanted to capture the whole market place at the expense of pratical data processing. I believed that once you computerized a local operation and centralized it in a big computer far away from the actual operations, you end up with systems frozen in place. The world found this to be true years later when the micro computers took on the mainframes and demonstrated how much better distributive processing is. About thirty years later, IBM layed off 150,000 workers with more than a million workers losing their jobs in the computer industry. This set the stage for the Y2k crisis because nobody was at home to do the systems housekeeping.
Back then, the economy was jumping with all kinds of activity. Besides all the major corporations residing in local added value economic settings , millions of workers got new jobs in computers. Computer companies like RCA, Univac, Sperry Rand, Honeywell, NCR, Burroughs and IBM had thousands of sales and support people in all major cities across our land. Our economy enjoyed good paying jobs through about five to seven levels from the raw product level up through to the retail or end user stage and then it recycled back down again to the raw product level. Greenspan followed a crowd that pushed a different kind of economy. They start chopping up the Golden Goose that laid the Golden Eggs and started to ship the pieces around the world for the sake of cheaper labor. They used the carrot on the end of the stick to attract companies away from ordinary competition and enticed them with the taste of cheap labor and more profit at the expense of labor. Workers were fired instead of hired for the sake of stock vallues.
In 1970, a first class stamp cost 8 cents. A new medium size automobile cost about $3,500. A nice home costs about $25,000. A vast middle class of workers were making about $10,000 to $12,000 a year. In the ensuing years, the post office used the inflationary statistics to raise the price of a first class stamp. The one statistic they did not use was wages. Greenspan does not tell us about this in his book. The real facts would reveal that our inflation rates were slowed down by the deflation of wages. Today, a vast working poor class has replaced the middle class production workers. The underclass goes unreported with millions missing in action from the economic charts. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans exposed this vast underclass living in a silent depression.
If we compared wages with the 1970s, there should be many individual workers making from $50,000 to $60,000 a year. Today, even total family incomes are much less than that.
Today, news is made when a few hundred jobs are offered. About 50,000 workers applied for just over a thousands jobs at Wal-Mart's new stores in Northern Ohio and Chicago. Greenspan ignores things like this and tells the choir a story about crunching numbers that do not include the stories from the streets of USA. What else can you expect, when workers have no voice in the process.
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