All The World's A Factory 6 comments

26 Sep 2005 @ 12:24, by Richard Carlson The farther you enter into the truth, the deeper it is. ---Bankei To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up. ---Oscar Wilde If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. ---Rene Descartes Some 30 years ago, I took my bag of teaching out of public and private schools and into a factory. The name of the company was TRW, which is about as nondescript as you can get, but I soon learned the initials represented the first letter of the last names of the 3 men who founded it. I also learned the 2 factories in our town, which were the last remaining major industry there, were only a toenail clipping in the vast global body of this corporation, headquartered in Cleveland. I decided TRW must stand for The Real World. At one point I even thought those guys could control the weather. Ho ho, clearly I was out of my mind. Anyway, when I took the job I had a more naive view of manufacturing America. The place had a tutoring and education program especially for returned Viet Nam vets, who were trying to get back on their feet to support that wife and kid(s) that had come along during our "police action" over there. Most of these guys had put a payment down on a house, were settling in to a secure job with high pay and lots of benefits, and needed a program to improve some skills they had that might move them up into management. I thought this was a wonderful way for a corporation to share its wealth with the community of workers upon which it depends. My dumb ass, the whole program was Federal, something called CETA, paid for with tax dollars and nothing much out of corporate profits. As soon as Reagan was elected, he shut the program down...and 600 of us lost our jobs in a single day. My hometown was ruined for the next 10 years, becoming a typical Appalachian depression. TRW didn't like the atmosphere and soon moved out...leaving Jamestown, New York desolate. Dana, our newborn son, and I no longer could make a living there, and like many others we moved away too. Another reason I took the job, however, was to see a different kind of decision-making than I had experienced among school administrators. I was correct they are different kinds of people, almost a different species. Educators like a leisurely life, with coffee and lots of chat. You always can put off reviewing that syllabus until next year. Manufacturers like hanging around too, and share a yearning for the life of the country squire. But their jobs are on the line constantly, and one screwup with materials or dimensions and you're out the door. Of great interest to me was how the factory kept getting changed around. Sure, the big machines were bolted to the floor...but even they could be carted off to another area if need be. The bosses and their little shacks inside the main rooms were always on the move. Everything was collapsible, walls came down, computers and desks were packed up, and moved closer to or away from the action. Engineers and of course Quality Control seemed to manage this stuff. Our Quality Control guy, Marty Kuhre---some distant cousin to my wife---had no background in industry but did have a Masters in Psychology. I was struck with how like a theater a factory is. Everything is scenery, built to be "struck," which is a theater term...and not a labor union joke. The big bosses come and go, just like movie stars. Shipped in from LA and New York, the managers oversee for as long as it takes for them to be noticed for an innovation---like moving the offices all around---and then they move on up...or hit the bricks. Nobody starts at the bottom and works all the way up, learning the business as you go. You come in as a star...maybe because you were a jock on the college team---or a cheerleader. The factory, like the entertainment business, is all for the buck in the moment...planned obsolescence. People and cubicles go up and down, come and go, with the mystery of the market, the speed of profit and loss. The higher in the hierarchy, the less one cares about the people involved below you, the community around you. The company moves you on, buys you a new house and sells the old. (You haven't been truly blind until you buy a house from a megacorporation.) You go to the party in the new town welcoming the new guys, and there you parade your trophy wife. It's all part of the show. So Trudeau's Doonesbury today struck a chord obviously. [link] Sucked dry Iraq, like my hometown, will be abandoned by the big benefactor, in this case Halliburton, always looking for the best corporate welfare deal. Unaccountable to anything but their Free Market Gods, no excuse need be made. Global companies can continent hop...and extend their subsidiaries endlessly. Probably one tentacle will remain in Baghdad just in case a new oil well is found. Is this how we helped rebuilding Europe? I wonder. Three days before he left public service in 1961, President Eisenhower said, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." [link] Today Bush proposes the Defense Department be placed in charge of Disaster Relief. In this morning's New York Times, "The first detailed tally of commitments from federal agencies since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast four weeks ago shows that more than 15 contracts exceed $100 million, including 5 of $500 million or more. Most of those were for clearing away the trees, homes and cars strewn across the region; purchasing trailers and mobile homes; or providing trucks, ships, buses and planes. "More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency alone were awarded without bidding or with limited competition, government records show, provoking concerns among auditors and government officials about the potential for favoritism or abuse. "Already, questions have been raised about the political connections of two major contractors - the Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton - that have been represented by the lobbyist Joe M. Allbaugh, President Bush's former campaign manager and a former leader of FEMA." [link] Their editorial today begins, "As the nation reels from Rita's devastation along the Gulf Coast, any hope for a thorough investigation of government's gross mismanagement of Katrina is quietly ebbing away behind the political levees of Washington. The White House and Republican-controlled Congress, resisting popular support for an independent, nonpartisan commission, remain determined to run self-serving, bogus investigations. "President Bush has designated his domestic security adviser to deliver the supposedly no-holds-barred investigation he promised after his early embarrassment over Katrina. In a similar retreat, Congressional Republican leaders' ballyhooed promise for a special two-house select committee to fathom government's failures has already been scrapped. Democrats are understandably demanding equal membership and subpoena power - if not a 9/11-type independent commission - for such a task. But the House majority refuses to yield its edge in dominating this politically explosive issue. And the Senate goes its own way, advancing some helpful but totally inadequate ideas for post-hurricane oversight by an inspector general and a reconstruction financial officer." [link] So much theatre to watch. Is the play still the thing to catch the conscience of a king?

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