Oh, brother, here it comes. Competitiveness

going to work, work, work!

It looks like Obama got a head start on his “competitiveness” meme.  Note: whenever you see a buzzword like this, the first thing you need to ask is “what *exactly* do you mean?” and the second thing is “how are you going to screw up my life with it?”.  Julian Assange got it wrong when he thought that releasing secret documents would lead to greater honesty and transparency.  To reach that goal, what you really need to do is figure out what the executives are hiding beneath all that bizspeak.

From the NYTimes, we get this:

President Obama, declaring that the United States can “outcompete any other nation on earth,” called on Saturday for a new era of American innovation and competition, using his weekly address to deliver a pro-growth, pro-trade message that is likely to be at the heart of the State of the Union speech he gives to Congress on Tuesday.

Picking up on themes from a Friday appearance in Schenectady, N.Y., and last week’s state visit with President Hu Jintao of China, Mr. Obama said that one of the most important things he could do in his presidency was to “open up more markets to American goods around the world.” He struck an optimistic tone, even as he described the challenges the nation still faces in a difficult economy with unemployment above 9 percent.

“We’re living in a new and challenging time, in which technology has made competition easier and fiercer than ever before,” Mr. Obama said. “Countries around the world are upping their game and giving their workers and companies every advantage possible.”

“But that shouldn’t discourage us,” he continued. “Because I know we can win that competition. I know we can outcompete any other nation on earth. We just have to make sure we’re doing everything we can to unlock the productivity of American workers, unleash the ingenuity of American businesses and harness the dynamism of America’s economy.”

Is this a SOTU address or the annual CEO Town Hall meeting speech given at every large company in the nation?  I can just picture it now.  The professional consultant industry brands a several new bizspeak words and phrases and the top executives roll them out and the next level down executives parrot them so they look knowledgeable and with it and so they can flatter the higher ups and then those bizspeak words trickle down to the midlevel managers who use them to kiss up until they reach the rank and file who just roll their eyes and fume in frustration.  Doesn’t anyone know how to actually *manage* anymore without resorting to fricking slogans???

Here’s some more slogans from the above to watch out for:

“unlock the productivity”  I don’t know what Obama has been up to but everyone I know is on overdrive right now.  There aren’t enough hours in a day to get everything done.  How much more productive are we supposed to get?  And why hasn’t all this excess productivity been unlocked already?  What are the executives doing with it?  Keeping it in a jar?

“Unleash the ingenuity”  I just spend a grueling week in California learning about the ingenuity of the American worker.  We are incredibly ingenious.  But as soon as the ingenuity is automated, it’s off to Chindia!  WHAT, Mr. President, are you going to do about that?  Please note that getting Jeffrey Immelt onboard as an advisor on labor is not part of the answer.  Wah-wah-wahhhhh.

“harness the dynamism of  America’s economy”  Hmmm, if dynamism of the American economy was the desired goal, then the first stimulus package should have been about twice the size that it actually was.  Horse, barn door and all that.  Too late for dynamism.

So, what we have here is a man who does not know what American workers are already doing and does not understand how many American workers used to be ingenious and innovative and dynamic and are now out of work because people like Immelt come from companies that see workers in terms of quotas on some kind of vitality curve.  How about we get rid of those damn quotas that encourage office politics and demotivate people who work their asses off all year but who can’t get into the blessed realm because there are an insufficient number of spaces for them- according to the fricking curve?

Somewhere, there is a an article about how companies whose managers indulge in bizspeak are the most poorly run.  Sooo, I don’t have a lot of hope for this White House.  But more than that, I doubt there are many of us who want to sit through another meaningless Town Hall meeting where the guy in charge says things he doesn’t mean and means things he doesn’t say.  “Blah-blah-blah, workers! Blah-blah-blah-Compete!”

PLEASE SPARE ME THE BULLSHIT

Krugman is sounding a similar theme:

It’s OK to talk about competitiveness when you’re specifically asking whether a country’s exports and import-competing industries have low enough costs to sell stuff in competition with rivals in other countries; measures of relative costs and prices are, in fact, commonly — and unobjectionably — referred to as competitiveness indicators.

But the idea that broader economic performance is about being better than other countries at something or other — that a companycountry is like a corporation –is just wrong. I wrote about this at length a long time ago, and everything I said then still holds true.*

The hopeful interpretation of Obama’s embrace of the idea that he’s the CEO of America Inc. is that it might help fend off right-wing attacks on government action as a whole, helping him sell the need for public investment of various kinds. On the other hand, as Robert Reich says, this could all too easily turn into a validation of the claim that what’s good for corporations is good for America, which is even less true now than it used to be.

All in all, it’s kind of sad. And the less said about Jeffrey Immelt’s vacuous op-ed, the better.

Yep, pretty much.  The more I hear Obama, the more validated I am in my initial impression of him as the biggest executive office, good old boy schmoozer and ass kisser that ever was.  I know everything there is to know about the guy and that’s why I didn’t want for him for president.

And here’s another thing to think about:  So much manufacturing went to Asia and now it’s hard to find  appliances made in the USA.  Theoretically, this was done because the costs of production and labor were so much lower in Asia that the goods would be cheaper.  But the last time I compared one of the few American made appliances with an Asian competitor, the price wasn’t a whole lot lower.  I expected to see a dramatic difference in price to reflect the lower cost of labor and no medical bennies or pensions or, you know, stuff that working people actually care about.  But the price difference wasn’t there.

Where is the money going?  Oh, sure, it could mean that American brands have finally reached a plateau in price because the workers are seeing their benefits and lifestyles erode.  But I’m guessing that a big chunk o’change goes into some deep pockets.  And the inside of those pockets, I’m guessing, never sees a tax bill.

So, before I hear anything more about competitiveness, which has been unlocked and unleashed for a couple decades now, I want to hear how Obama is going to make sure that the fruits of our labor come back to US and not some wealthy person who has enough Swarovski crystal cases for their iphones and $60,000/night hotel rooms.