|
Post by mrsonde on Feb 5, 2019 10:13:06 GMT 1
That's the sort of thing the US used to tell the Marshall Islanders, as they cued up at the overflowing DoD supplied cancer and birth defect clinics. That my friend is a totally different matter. The radiation on the Marshall Islands was the result of deliberate nuclear explosions/tests, not accidental or incidental release. I am working back through my memory but I think I am right in saying it is the particles of plutonium which are lethal, and they are contained. The radiation occurs after it has been forced into a critical mass by the surrounding high explosive in the bomb. The radiation from igneous rock is different, mainly radon gas which in itself is active. But far more knowledgeable people on here will explain it much better. I understood your point, jj, but think you're mistaken. The disastrous effects of the tests on the Marshall Islanders were not due to direct radiation, but from radioactive contamination: in the soil, the water, the fish they ate. Much harder to measure, and predict the effects of - which is why the US spent so much money studying those effects on the inhabitants they chose not to evacuate but to use as guinea pigs. This is now admitted. The plutonium in a warhead is contained, of course. But for how long, resting on the seabed? Moreover, in a river estuary, exposed to relentless tidal erosion? No one would be insane enough to allow any government to dump their nuclear waste in the sea, even in containers designed to withstand such an environment.
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Feb 5, 2019 10:34:20 GMT 1
"Globalisation", not "privatisation", is the appropriate villain, then, I would suggest. The reason any sort of tariff regime exists anywhere, including in the EU. The answer to a faltering economy is not for the State to come in and own and run everything, but for the State to establish and maintain the conditions that enable and promote competitive activity. A crazy idea, but I just throw it out there. In the case of the nuclear products industry, it was originally owned by the state as a spinoff from weapons and power generation, then privatised under EU/Thatcher dogma, and the majority shareholding was eventually bought by GE (the American General Electric, not GEC which had been broken up and bankrupted by Weinstock). From GE's point of view it's better to build a new factory anywhere (i.e. Germany, where money is cheaper) than to decommission an old nuclear plant whilst you try to build a new one on the same site, so the UK loses a key industry whilst US and German shareholders make a profit. It would seem you agree with me then - globalisation, not privatisation per se. More pointedly, you agree with Jimmy Goldsmith, who used to campaign relentlessly in the 80s and 9Os against the doctrines promulgated in GATT (the precursor to WTO, which you could very reasonably argue is causing all our Brexit problems at the moment), pointing out these inevitable effects, and the populist "Nazi", Donald Trumpf, who was principally elected because he proposed using the tariff and tax system to counter this threat to national security by rampant corporate capital.
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Feb 5, 2019 11:59:09 GMT 1
All directly connected to these points, it's worth pointing out that the enormous investment incentives, aka bribes, paid to Nissan to encourage them to do us the favour of building their erstwhile planned diesel model here - including a £350 million bridge - exceed by a considerable margin the capital Musk spent (less then $50 million) to get his Tesla factory (abandoned by Toyota, incidentally, who scuttled off to Mexico for the same reasons Nissan are bleating about) up and running in California (now worth getting on for three billion.)
Is it really beyond the capabilities of this country's entrepreneurs, manufacturers, engineers, designers, businessmen, politicians, and capital investors to kickstart a truly British car industry? Not building defunct diesel or internal combustion dinosaurs, but something that will actually make this country a profit? Of course it isn't. In the 50s we were the largest car exporter in the world, making dozens of marques the Japanese, Malaysians, Koreans and Indians then copied for their own markets, and - with massive government investment - developed to out-compete us. Would the EU allow us to so re-create our manufacturing industry? No - the rules say no. Unless you're German or French, that is.
|
|
|
Post by alancalverd on Feb 5, 2019 17:11:11 GMT 1
I have nothing against globalisation. If you have a good product, why should its benefits be limited to one market, and if you are a good employer, why shouldn't you employ people in more than one country? It makes perfect sense for a manufacturer to own all the mines, forests or whatever he needs to make his product, wherever they may be. The problem with Amersham Radiochemical Centre (as it then was) is that what was created as a national strategic asset was sold off for the sake of dogma and ended up being closed down in the interests of someone else's bottom line. Now, come the UK's secession fom the EU, it has suddenly become a squandered national asset again!
Funnily enough, I was thinking the same thoughts about the car industry as you were writing that. Years ago I came up with a wheeze. Civil service salaries are supposed to reflect the company car that civil servants don't get. So why not create a strong home market by the government buying British cars for civil servants?
|
|
|
Post by jonjel on Feb 5, 2019 17:34:54 GMT 1
A good idea Alan, but is there a British car anymore? The only one I can think of is McLaren. I did a job for them on the P1 a couple of years ago and the only way to describe that is engineering as an art form. Just stunning. Civil servants driving around in those might be interesting.....
|
|
|
Post by alancalverd on Feb 5, 2019 23:35:35 GMT 1
At the time I proposed it, Minis were British and Ford was turning out various functional machines in Dagenham.
All is not lost. Bristol, Morgan, Aston Martin and Lotus make perfectly good cars and AFAIK the Vauxhall Corsa windscreen washer still comes from Luton.
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Feb 6, 2019 8:20:10 GMT 1
I have nothing against globalisation. If you have a good product, why should its benefits be limited to one market, and if you are a good employer, why shouldn't you employ people in more than one country? Well, that's a very limited, in the sweetest of capitalism red in tooth and claw ways, analysis of "globalisation". That's not what it's generally taken to mean. Usually, it refers to capital's ability to locate wherever labour costs are cheapest and least organised, and wherever the tax overheads are most lenient. On top of that - whoever pays the most bribes for the privilege of having them locate wherever, and exploit their labour market the most profitably for whomever is paying the bribes. For most manufactured products - for most products full stop since the invention of container shipping in the late 50s, and its worldwide accommodation through the 60s and 70s - the savings thus made can easily outweigh transport costs, from anywhere to anywhere in the world. The only preventative factor restraining the freedom of capital to roam in the most profitable exploitative way are tariffs imposed on their goods - hence the inexorable pressure by corporate capitalism to form GATT, WTO, and Free Trade deals between trading blocs to eliminate this last remaining hindrance. It makes sense from the viewpoint of capital, comrade. From the viewpoint of the indigenous people it's an invidious practice, that historically has usually been at the root of populist revolutions, of both the left and right. Large parts of South and Central America has had to endure decades of poverty followed by leftwing corrupt dictatorship because of this perfect sense of United Fruit, US Sugar, and the Ford Motor Co (who before synthetic rubber owned a stripped area of the Amazon rainforest the size of Wales, and ran it, from the viewpoint of the natives, pretty much as a slave state - as did United Fruit in Guatemala, Cuba, etc etc) to name just a few. I'm puzzled why I'm having to recount these basic facts of history to a communist, comrade, i really am. I'm beginning to suspect you're not even a fellow traveller. Good well-argued dogma, in the aim of sound liberating values, not some sort of senseless catechism. I don't know how much of a "strategic asset" it was, really - hardly Porton Down. Well, there you go. Your "perfect sense" comes back to bite you in the arse. I think Britain must be about the only country in the G20 that would ever dream of doing anything else. And police cars, military vehicles, buses and trains and underground carriages and ambulances...Merkel came up with a spiffing wheeze (copied from Obama) to get round the state support rules after the crash, and then the multi-billion trouble VW got themselves into...A government handout to anyone buying a new car (as long as it was German, of course), disguised as a "Green" initiative, and thus allowable - through some exception to the rules they made up - encouraging the scrapping of old vehicles. What I was really getting at was the essential utility and national value of the ability to impose tariffs. Such regimes typically limit the number as well as beneficially balancing the market price of imports, thus protecting - and nurturing, when it's needed - one's home industry. Of course, Britain managed to trash its motor industry nevertheless - thanks to the complacency and Statist incompetence of management after the war and Attlee had imposed a nanny-state infantilism of the nation's managing class, followed by the inevitable labour unrest unleashed by irresponsible, uncontrolled, politically suborned unions. Those fatal conditions have been laid to rest thanks to Thatcher - but apart from the ill-fated Delorean venture, no one's had the wit and gumption to foster into a rebirth our manufacturing base once again. Certainly not the Labour governments of Blair and Brown in the interim, who oversaw a greater reduction in manufacturing in this country than any period in history.
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Feb 6, 2019 16:04:36 GMT 1
Every time Tusk or Juncker and now this new Lurch caricature open their mouths to pronounce on Brexit I'd guess at least another 1% of the country come over to the Leave side - and leave with no deal, blast your eyes! They're like the villains in an old-style Bond movie. SPECTRE's No.2 and No.6, busy working their maleficent extortionate schemes, as Merkel strokes her purring white long-haired puss behind the scenes. Oh stop it - Bond, I said, not Grace Brothers. As for this creepy Varadkar oddity...I thought gays were supposed to be charming, and cooperative? he rings a bell too, one I can't put my finger on...that strange flesh-creeping mix of threatening arrogance and mincing servility, the ineffectual sidekick pretending not to be puny while his bigger bully boss looks on behind him, reminds me of another henchman figure from my childhood TV - Stingray, I think, or Thunderbirds. He even looks as if he's made of plastic, or latex. The Hood used to have a majordomo like that, I think...or maybe I'm thinking of Lady Penelope's Parker, who I always found distinctly creepy, rather than the intended cheekily likeable. He was cockney though, not Irish effeminate...it'll come to me. Nah...I do believe it was Stingray. Played by Peter Lorre a la his Casablanca character - or someone doing a very good impersonation of him, no doubt. The Teasock is Peter Lorre, reanimated by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson!
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Feb 6, 2019 17:15:31 GMT 1
Sadly, can't find a clip - I may be confused in my old age. The villains in Stingray seem to have been reptilian fish. Varadkar may be creepy, but that's overstating it.
Found this though. Leo Varadkar reading for Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, in the dramatic personae of Britain and Ireland, in the coming smash hit Selznick production of Gone With No Deal.
|
|
|
Post by alancalverd on Feb 6, 2019 18:54:35 GMT 1
By Hugh Pym Chief economics correspondent, BBC News 8 April 2013
But why listen to the whingeing leftie luvvies of the Beeb, when the Daily Torygraph (Friday 01 February 2019) said
Apropos globalisation, it's difficult to equate all overseas capital investment with slavery nowadays. I don't think the Chinese government, for instance, is very keen on its citizens being enslaved by wicked westerners, but if Apple can undercut US wage rates and still offer Chinese workers a better standard of living than they had yesterday, you have a win-win-lose scenario.
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Feb 6, 2019 19:36:20 GMT 1
By Hugh Pym Chief economics correspondent, BBC News 8 April 2013 Simply not true, unless you discount oil for some bizarre reason. The decade of the 70s in manufacturing exports was an even steeper decline, so the 80s were not a "hastening" at all, but a slight slowing down of a long-running decline since the early 50s. What the Thatcher years really marked was an enormous increase in the pretty sort of "globalisation" you referred to earlier - massive investment abroad, in particular in the States, and a simply huge increase in the exported services sector - in particular in financial services, thanks to her "Big Bang". This reversed our balance of trade difficulties, putting us in profit for the first time since Wilson's 60s administration - a surplus that we didn't lose until the banking crisis. Why indeed. Listen, but question. They have an agenda, a perspective, a limited understanding, sometimes a blatant prejudice, if they realise it or not. You will, for just one small recent example, hear endless repetitive reportage about Nissan deciding not to produce their new model here, a clearly grudging acknowledgement that this might be down to the worldwide turn against diesel cars, but a closing assertion that this is a result of Brexit, in one unspecified way or another. But you will not hear any report about Toyota starting last month their production of the new Corolla model here, in Derby - the best-selling car in the world, projected for manufacture here for at least six years. "Despite" - any positive news is always despite - Brexit. No one ever considered the recession of 79-81 as any sort of "achievement"! Getting inflation down was the achievement. That recession was not a "side-effect" of that battle - it was a worldwide recession, that can be traced back to OPEC's punitive oil sanctions on the West after Yom Kippur, leading to a recession in the US that was worse than the 1930s. The bracketing of our recession in just those two years is simply perverse - technically correct, thanks to the dead-cat bounce we received after the IMF insisted on monetarist, Thatcherite measures following our 1976 emergency loan, and, at the other end, the marginal technical growth in GDP we inevitably measured once Reagan's (thoroughly Thatcherite) measures had produced a dramatic recovery surge in the States. No one's done that. With the internet, people are too news savvy for corporations to get away with it for long today. But the working consitions and pay rates for Nike workers in Bangladesh, Laura Ashley machinists in Algeria, Pretty Polly workers in China, etc etc etc can not really be fairly described as anything other than indentured labour. I don't know what a win-win-lose scenario means, but I do understand that the loser here is the home country of, in this instance, Apple - who have managed to establish themselves and grow in the first place by the benefits of investment in the US, from the Government - the taxpayer - initially, and by investors - pension funds, primarily, your mom and pop Main Street small investor, or public sector teachers, policemen, etc. They lose in a variety of different ways - fewer jobs, of course, but also vastly less tax revenues. Apple has reputedly over a trillion stashed offshore, if I recall correctly - the last carefully investigated estimate I heard (last week, as it goes) was American corporations have over 120 trillion dollars in tax havens overseas. So - who wins? The corporate fat cats running this exploitative scam, primarily. Yes, you could argue that the poor workers in China and Kuala Lumpur etc are earning a crust in their sweatshop conditions, rather than starving. But that's the same sort of argument as the Remainers make when prognosticating about our future economic prospects out of the EU - yes, looks very grim, if nothing changes. But in new and different conditions, things do change, so don't pretend existence depends on current circumstances, and it'll stop if those circumstances cease. Existence could very well and probably will be better, if those current circumstances are, in fact, damaging to development and prosperity. But of course on the whole your rose-coloured picture is unobjectionable - I don't think there's much objection to be made about manufacturers running plants abroad to profit from overseas markets. Fine - not ideal, but mainly as you say it's a win-win. But sell the stuff so manufactured in that and related markets, pay your taxes there, pay a fair wage commensurate with the value workers are generating on your profit sheet. But don't simply move the business your country has enabled you to establish abroad to make your products cheaper because the societies there pay their labour a far lower price, and charge you lower taxes than the home that so enabled you to prosper necessarily charges - and then re-import those self-same products back to your home market! And evade the taxes on the earnings you thereby generate, because you're now established abroad! Happy to see Dyson move to Singapore to compete in the Far East market - but don't start selling us your machines made there here, as imports, thanks. Do you realise until Trump reversed this perverse incentive, American corporations were given a tax-break to move offshore in this way? Obama was paying US business to move abroad! The main reason that despite managing 2% growth in GDP - thanks to his multi-trillion corporate giveaways - he lost six million jobs in manufacturing during his tenure.
|
|
|
Post by alancalverd on Feb 7, 2019 15:30:13 GMT 1
If the Daily Torygraph thinks the death of manufacturing in the UK was an achievement, who am I, a mere taxpayer, to dispute it?
|
|
|
Post by jonjel on Feb 7, 2019 16:42:34 GMT 1
If the Daily Torygraph thinks the death of manufacturing in the UK was an achievement, who am I, a mere taxpayer, to dispute it? I think we are all heartily (polite word) sick of the mongers of doom whipping up fear and despondency. We will have to stockpile food and toilet rolls. We should fill the bath with clean water and cover it with cling-film. Markets will collapse and migrant boats will be desperately trying to sail from the UK to France, or Ireland. As a small time manufacturer I see no signs whatsoever that markets are collapsing, or about to collapse in the UK. We are flat out here, and business is increasing, and the 'stuff' we produce is the same or similar to what was produced perhaps two years ago, so it is not due to new products or new markets. The same is not true in other parts of Europe. We are suddenly finding the lead times from Italy and the Czech Republic are increasing, because their economies are in deep doo doo. I don't buy a lot from France or Germany but friends tell me much the same story from dealings they have there.
|
|
|
Post by alancalverd on Feb 7, 2019 20:50:32 GMT 1
I heard a Belgian commentator on the radio a couple of days ago saying that they are stockpiling medicines!
Somebody remind me, please: what always begins with the invasion of Belgium?
|
|
|
Post by mrsonde on Feb 10, 2019 23:34:05 GMT 1
If the Daily Torygraph thinks the death of manufacturing in the UK was an achievement, who am I, a mere taxpayer, to dispute it? Manufacturing didn't die. It faltered a bit, as over-leveraged slow-reacting heavy industry firms couldn't keep up with their interest payment costs. When the dust cleared that left manufacturing as a sector leaner and fitter - I suppose that's an achievement of sorts. Whatever - at no point did manufacturing cease to make greater profits, and at no time has it ever earned more for this country than today. You have to give Thatcher a lot of the credit for that, making it possible. You could say she should have done more - but the country, when she took over, was skint, when being skint meant you were skint (it still does, but you can hide it better.) She did what she could - something you cannot say about her successors, particularly Blair and Brown, who enjoyed the dividends of her wise guidance, but utterly squandered it. I'm painting with a broad brush, admittedly - but it's as true a picture as you get in politics.
|
|