Short News and Commentary
By Dave Cloud, Jane Mack-Cozzo, Joseph Knippenberg, and William Tucker

MISSING FACTORY JOBS

Since 2000, over 4.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost nationwide. Labor and political activists are agitated. Some wonder if the country should limit its connections to the global economy.

But the country in question isn't our country--it is China. Those manufacturing jobs disappeared in the Asian country that is supposedly stealing all of our factory work. So how can China also be experiencing a net loss of blue-collar jobs? The answer, in a word, is productivity.

It is conventional wisdom that outsourcing has robbed millions of American workers of their positions. The factory numbers would seem to bear this out: Before the last recession there were 17.2 million U.S. manufacturing jobs and today there are 14.2 million. People like CNN's Lou Dobbs would have you believe that all of those jobs have been spirited away to China, India, and other foreign locales. While some undoubtedly have, many blue-collar jobs disappeared simply because of increased efficiency. U.S. productivity growth in manufacturing has averaged more than 5 percent annually over the last three years. At that rate, in a little over 13 years American workers will be twice as productive as they are today. They'll be able to fill their orders with better and cheaper products without as many laborers.

Our factory sector is not hollowing out: Total manufacturing output in the U.S. is actually at its highest level ever. What we are seeing is a continuation of a healthy productivity trend that has been going on in this country for many decades. Only 13 times since 1947 has overall U.S. productivity failed to advance at least 1.5 percent on an annual basis. Greater productivity means lower prices and fewer people needed to produce the same--or more--goods.

This is happening in all economically healthy countries. Of the top ten industrialized economies, only one--Italy--hasn't shed manufacturing jobs since 2000. A couple of years ago, a study by the Conference Board found that from 1995 to 2002, the U.S. lost 2 million manufacturing jobs. But China cut 15 million over that same period. In textile manufacturing, the American job shrinkage was 202,000 jobs; in China it was 1.8 million. In steel processing, China shed 557,000 jobs.

This is what happens in increasingly efficient factories. So what happens to those workers? They get service-sector jobs instead. The process has been visible for generations, and it has led to dramatically rising standards of living--in our country, and all others as well.

--Dave Cloud is a contributor to TAEmag.com.

WONDERWOMAN

Syrian-born psychiatrist Wafa Sultan has taken on the Islamic establishment, and she is formidable. Now a resident of southern California, she went verbally mano a mano with an Egyptian theologian in an interview broadcast on al-Jazeera earlier this year.

Sultan argued that the "clash of civilizations" is not an invention of the West but a concept originating with Muslims. She noted that Mohammed said he was ordered to fight people until they believe in Allah and his messenger. The idea of subjugating infidels and forcing the whole world to embrace Islam comes right from their prophet.

Today's terror war, according to Sultan, is "a clash between opposites"--between civilization and backwardness, rationality and barbarity, freedom and oppression, democracy and dictatorship, human rights and the violation thereof. Other religions have not destroyed churches or mosques or embassies, she notes, suggesting, "Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind before they demand respect."

In an earlier debate on al-Jazeera with an Algerian cleric, Sultan criticized the religious indoctrination that motivates young Muslim men to volunteer for homicide/suicide missions. In other appearances and interviews, she has challenged the oft-repeated notion that Islam is a peaceful religion. She asserts instead that it is essentially violent.

She should know. Her epiphany occurred in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo in northern Syria. She recounts witnessing the murder of her professor by members of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. With shouts of "Allah Akbar," members of the group burst into her classroom and gunned him down.

Sultan had been raised in a devout Muslim family that taught her to hate Jews. "I used to believe that Jewish people were not human creatures, that they had different features, different voices than the human race." Only after immigrating to America in 1989 and interacting with new people did she come to realize how wrongly she had been taught.

Today, Sultan, her husband, and three children live in the Los Angeles area, where they have all become U.S. citizens. After taking a job as a cashier and studying English, she earned her American medical license. But Sultan's first passion is speaking out on the subject of Islam. Only since coming to the States has she had the freedom to do so.

She has received death threats, yet remains unfazed. She advocates rapprochement between Arabs and Jews. She implores Muslim women to throw off their shackles. She looks forward to a world in which all Muslim women will be able to speak freely and openly--not just in the United States but also in the Arab world. Ironically, she notes, more Muslim women than men criticize her apostasy, and call for her death.

--Jane Mack-Cozzo is a TAE contributing writer.

BELTWAY BIGOT

When I moved to Atlanta in 1985, I thought I was going into exile. I was a dedicated bicoastal, secular intellectual who'd moved to a giant suburb full of people who prayed before meals and drawled while doing so. How could I survive without the urban sophistication to which I'd grown accustomed?

I never hesitated to regale friends and colleagues with my opinions about Atlanta's shortcomings. The native Atlantan who later became my wife shut me up with an old advertising slogan: "Delta is ready when you are."

I confess this, sheepishly, to establish that I know all about dissing the South. I've been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt, worn it out, and thrown it away. But D.C. pundit Kevin Phillips still wears the anti-Southern shirt with pride in his new rant American Theocracy. For Phillips, the South's distinctive contribution to America is fundamentalist, anti-rational, anti-modern, ultimately theocratic religion.

You see, there's an American "Disenlightenment" going on, and its epicenter is somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line. While the North has its symphonies and universities, not to mention a higher IQ (yes, he really says that), the South has a "religious citizenry, more caught up in fecundity and the idea that children are gifts of the Lord." Southerners spend so much time poring over the Bible that they can't possibly participate constructively in a modern knowledge-based economy.

The lived truth in the South is rather different. Every time I turn around in my conservative evangelical church, I bump into an engineer. Some even have--gasp!--doctorates and jobs at major research institutions. Atlanta--home to 67 megachurches, and hundreds more of the plain-old variety--also has a vibrant high-tech sector. Some of us even read novels.

In Phillips's vitriolic view, any public policy consistent with Scripture is evidence of creeping theocracy. The Iraq war? He insinuates that the secular justifications offered by George Bush and his cabinet are actually subterranean attempts to play to scary evangelical Apocalyptic and crusading themes. Apparently Donald Rumsfeld has been taken over by Left Behind.

With self-declared high-IQ saviors like Phillips, the coastal liberal elite doesn't really need enemies.

--Joseph Knippenberg writes regularly for TAEmag.com.

CLIMBING YUCCA MOUNTAIN

"As you can see, Yucca Mountain isn't really a mountain," says our guide as we near the end of an hour-long bus ride north from Las Vegas. "It's only a ridge. No one knows how it got the name 'Yucca' either. There aren't many yucca plants around here," he continues. "It's mostly mesquite bushes."

Once every month, the Department of Energy offers a public tour of Yucca Mountain, the once and future (perhaps) site of America's nuclear waste repository. At 7:30 a.m., our group has picked up our box lunches and boarded four tour buses headed for the remote site. It's an interesting collection of people. They all profess neutrality and insist they are just looking for facts.

"We should have gone nuclear 20 years ago," says Tom Lipiec, a film equipment manufacturer who has driven up for the day from Los Angeles. "We wouldn't be putting all this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We wouldn't be dependent on foreign oil either. We could have hydrogen cars by now."

If our group seems relatively unfazed by the idea of storing stainless steel canisters 1,500 feet underground as the price for resolving several major environmental and geopolitical dilemmas, we are an unrepresentative sampling. Almost everyone in Nevada is passionately opposed to the project. "I went to a public hearing a few months ago and it was awful," says my seatmate, Dick Telfer, an 83-year-old former science teacher. "Anybody who spoke in favor of it was shouted down."

At the foot of the ridge, we disembark and clamber into a fleet of minivans that takes us up a bumpy rock-strewn road to the summit. There a DOE geologist with a ponytail to his waist discourses passionately for 25 minutes on why the risks of any radiation escaping from the area bedrock are infinitesimally small. "We've found that small water deposits trapped in this rock haven't moved significantly for 10,000 years," he reports.

The reason Yucca Mountain is not moving forward at the moment is because last year environmentalists convinced a federal judge that the 10,000-year standard established by the EPA for radioactive emissions from the site was not adequate. The EPA has been ordered to prove emission will not exceed 360 millirems for the next one million years. There was no mention of how the court plans to monitor the results.

Our next stop is the north entrance to the five-mile "exploratory" tunnel that DOE drilled into the mountain between 1994 and 1997. The boring tool was a 100-yard-long freight-train-like vehicle fitted with a 25-foot-radius drill bit that had to be replaced almost every day. It now sits at the south entrance. "We're trying to sell it," says our guide. "Want to make an offer?"

Proceeding at an average of 185 feet a day, this enormous auger drove a mile downward into mountain, swung south for three miles, and then turned back to the ridge face, emerging only five feet from its target. A video at the information center shows the drill face breaking through the cliff like a submerged diver coming to the surface as 100 staff members in hardhats stand and cheer.

"The big mistake was bringing along the scientists," says our guide in retrospect. "They wanted to stop the drill every ten minutes and examine the rock." A series of alcoves has now been constructed off the main tunnel where geologists can experiment in peace. They sealed off one section for three years and heated it to 400 degrees--the temperature that will be produced by the radioactive decay--in order to find out whether the heat changed the pattern of water migration. It didn't.

The discouraging news is that the real work at Yucca Mountain hasn't even begun. Right now the DOE is still seeking a construction license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission--of which the EPA's million-year emissions standard is only a small part. If and when the license is ever granted, the DOE must bore six more miles of passageways, then begin the honeycomb of "emplacement tunnels" where the nuclear material will eventually be stored. Construction is expected to take another four years. Then DOE must secure an operating license--an opportunity for more environmental intervention that could stretch out a decade. At best, the entombment of the nation's spent fuel will not be complete for 28 years.

What makes this effort so bizarre is that 95 percent of the material scheduled to be buried at Yucca could be recycled as fuel. Why heat a mountain when the same heat could be used to generate electricity? "We've had people come out here and offer to build a power plant," says one of the young scientists doing a show-and-tell at the information center. "The only real 'waste' here is all the heat energy that will be wasted in the mountain."

The fatal turn came in 1976 when Jimmy Carter cancelled the nation's fuel reprocessing efforts under the quaint notion that burying the small amounts of plutonium produced in commercial reactors instead of recycling them would prevent other nations from developing nuclear weapons. Somehow North Korea, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, and Iran all missed their cue.

As a result of Carter's choice of coal over nuclear, our coal plants now produce 10 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, while we forever increase our reliance on foreign oil. Only nuclear power is held to absurd standards of purity. If we refuse to face the relatively minor risks of harnessing nuclear energy, there will be additional penalties to come.

--William Tucker writes the "Right Idea" column at TAEmag.com.

LONG LIVE THE JAPANESE

In Western countries we hear constantly about the longevity of the Japanese, and therefore assume that the quality of Japanese health care is very high. Living in Japan for more than 12 years brought me up close and personal with that system. And I found it to be a disconcerting experience.

For starters, hospitalization in Japan can be a bit frightening. You are required to bring your own bedding, towels, and soap. It falls on a family member or friend to bring clean bed linens and towels and wash the used ones. There are hardly any private or semi-private bathrooms. Eight beds to a room is not uncommon. Often, you must brush your teeth at a common "trough" where several patients do the same.

Nurses are instructed that they must always ask the sensei (doctors) before undertaking any procedure. Initially, this seems proper. But the same deference applies even when emergencies happen. One friend told me of his wife receiving an IV to ease labor, and watching her go into convulsions because she was allergic to the drug. The attending nurse refused to disconnect the IV "until sensei doctor authorized it." Terrified of losing her, he finally pulled it out himself.

Procedures done on an out-patient basis are no less daunting. Sigmoidoscopies and colonoscopies are routinely done without any kind of anesthetic. One friend, wracked with pain from such a procedure, was exhorted by the attending nurse to grit his teeth and hang on. Enduring pain and suffering without complaint is a hallmark of Japanese culture, even during routine medical procedures.

One time, I was at a dental surgery clinic with an impacted molar that needed to be removed. The head dentist was called in. His disheartening comment after examining me was "I'll try." And he did--as is customary, without general anesthetic. My queries were clearly considered impudent. In Japan, one does not question any doctor.

Waiting to see a physician is an exercise in patience. Two to three hour waits are a regular occurrence. Most Japanese accept this as a normal part of their nationalized health service. (There are few private clinics or practices in Japan.) Many use the time to gossip with friends and neighbors.

Since abortion is used as a method of birth control in Japan, the sound of suction machines is often heard in gynecological clinics. Contraceptive pills were only made legal in Japan in 1999, due to the lobbying efforts of Japanese abortionists and condom manufacturers. The Pill continues to be unpopular in Japan--only a small percentage of women use it--perhaps in part because women are required to see their gynecologists every three months to renew prescriptions, and the national health service doesn't cover these costs.

So what accounts for the longevity of the Japanese? Probably good genetics and, to a lesser extent, diet. Not superior medical care.

--Jane Mack-Cozzo was a professor in Tokyo from 1986 to 1999.