- It took generations of hard working, sacrificing Americans
to build our economic system, a system now being dismantled by small-minded,
greedy globalists.
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- As Americans witness the flight of their manufacturing
and now white-collar service sector jobs to Asia and Latin America and
other nations with low wages, some are asking, "What is the real intention
of the U.S.-based multinational corporations?" Perhaps economic globalism
represents an attempt to equalize incomes of the First World and Third
World. Yet this policy is impoverishing American workers and providing
highly exploitative, low-paying jobs elsewhere. This could be discounted
as just misguided economic policy if the policy was not making the highest
investment incomes in the world higher still.
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- When the United States shifted from a nation where most
personal wealth came from some form of productive labor to one derived
from the value of stock holdings, short-term thinking and shallow, self-serving
policies took root. At that point the very nature of the game of capitalism
changed for the United States and for the world. The speculative economy
can be reported as doing well, while the productive economy and its workers'
incomes are marginalized. Hence, we have our current "jobless recovery."
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- Today IBM contemplates firing thousands of American software
engineers so that the company can employ thousands of Indian software engineers.
The Indian professionals will work for a fraction of the salaries currently
paid their U.S. counterparts. This is what commentator Kevin Phillips calls
"the race to the bottom." In theory, minimized wages yield minimized
costs which result in maximized profits. Unfortunately, this also increases
unemployment and reduces the quality of life in the United States.
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- Such short-term economic thinking has the potential to
turn the "race to the bottom" into a race to global ruin. Men
are not angels, and appeals to the marketplace or to modernism are only
a thin coating of gloss on the ugly surface of unchallenged greed. When
coal miners went on strike in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt asked
mine workers and mine owners to come to the nation's capital and negotiate
in good faith. Representatives of the mine workers arrived, while representatives
of the mine owners refused, citing a sort of "divine right of capitalists"
as their reason. Roosevelt threatened to nationalize the mines if the owners
continued to refuse to negotiate. Divine right took a fast turn and the
owners sent their men to Washington and the matter was resolved.
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- Even in this age of lightning-fast communication, there
remains such a thing as the national interest. Until globalist corporate
America understands it is the national interest, and not short-term profits
and stock market prices, that represents the ultimate "bottom line,"
this erosion of the economic infrastructure of the United States will continue.
More jobs will disappear here and the gains to our neighbors will be small
and temporary. The clock is ticking off a countdown to the end of the political-economic
system that took so much of America's strength and heart to build. At least
two hundred and fifteen years of innovation and sacrifice is being downsized
to nothing.
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- Lawrence McNamee is a History Instructor and writer in
San Antonio, Texas. He is the proud son of a retired American industrial
worker.
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- Copyright © 2002 Intervention Magazine
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- http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.
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