Duluth News

What's the administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.

For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad -- something I don't recommend -- we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.

When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots. In a few years this factory won't have a single employee on site, except for an occasional visiting technician who repairs and upgrades the robots.

Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they're also becoming far more efficient at it. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don't need as many manufacturing workers as before.

Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002 -- before the asset bubble and subsequent bust -- 22 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline, and China had a 15 percent drop.

What happened to manufacturing? In two words, higher productivity. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In this, manufacturing is following the same trend as agriculture. A century ago, almost 30 percent of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5 percent do. That doesn't mean the U.S. failed at agriculture. Quite the opposite. American agriculture is a huge success story. America can generate far larger crops than a century ago with far fewer people. New technologies, more efficient machines, new methods of fertilizing, better systems of crop rotation, and efficiencies of large scale have all made farming much more productive.

Manufacturing is analogous. In America and elsewhere around the world, it's a success. Since 1995, even as manufacturing employment has dropped around the world, global industrial output has risen more than 30 percent.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

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by Mark Silva

On the eve of President Barack Obama's address to the Muslim world from Cairo, where he will deliver an appeal for mutual understanding, the Arab world has heard from another voice: A recorded audio-tape attributed to Osama bin Laden, fugitive leader of al Qaeda, accusing Obama of fomenting "hatred'' with military action in Pakistan.

The purported broadcast of bin Laden's words, aired by the Arab-language Al Jazeera satellite television station as Obama was arriving in Saudi Arabia today, stood as a stark reminder of the hurdles that the United States still faces throughout the region.

While the president is intent on "resetting''' U.S. relations with the Muslim world in his planned televised address from the campus of Cairo University in Egypt, some of the long-elusive sponsors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist assaults against the United States remain at large and refocused on overturning the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"I don't think it's surprising that al Qaeda would want to shift attention away from the president's historic efforts ... to reach out and have an open dialogue with the Muslim world,'' Robert Gibbs, Obama's press secretary, said as the president was holding private meetings with the king of Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden, son of a Saudi family that gained enormous wealth in construction and built the royal palaces of the late King Saud, became involved in the militant Jihadist movement in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union invaded that nation. After returning to Saudi Arabia, he was confined to house arrest, and left the country in the early 1990s - his Saudi citizenship publicly revoked in 1994.

If Obama's mission in the Middle East has a clear purpose, the administration maintains, so does the timing of al Qaeda's message.

The tape's broadcast follows comments from al-Qaeda's second- in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urging Egyptians to shun Obama and contending that the "torturers of Egypt" and "slaves of America'' had invited the American leader to speak in Cairo.

The administration has attempted to draw a contrast between an al Qaeda in hiding and an American leader taking a high-profile stance with his appeal to the Muslim world.

"You have, you know, the leader of the free world speaking from one of the great cities in the world, and you have, you know, bin Laden speaking from an undisclosed... location,'' said Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary of state for public affairs. "That speaks volumes in terms of the contrast.''

How much is NBC's Brian Williams in the tank for President Obama?

Well, at the end of part I of the Nightly News's "Inside the Obama White House" special report Tuesday, Williams, as he was saying good night to the president, actually bowed his head.

I kid you not (embedded video and partial transcript below the fold):?

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Now it is first family time and time for us to say good night. Mr. President...

Pres. OBAMA: All right.

WILLIAMS: ...that's your elevator.

Pres. OBAMA: It is. Thank you.

WILLIAMS: Thank you, sir. (bows head) Have a good evening.

Pres. OBAMA: Appreciate it. Thank you very much.

WILLIAMS: We'll see you Tuesday. Thank you.

Pres. OBAMA: Thank you.

Any questions?

"I am Rahm Emanuel, so people say that a lot."

-- White House chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, quoted by the Reliable Source, to a woman who asked him if anyone ever tells him he looks like Rahm Emanuel.