Getting My Rant On

and then, back to my regularly scheduled life. But first, a word of thanks to the many kind folk who left me lovely comments on yesterday's entry on the loss of my friend. Knowing that I have you as my friends too is very comforting.

So, the rant. I promised to talk about "the Chinese Poison Train, aka, How the American Economy Fucked Itself." They are very closely related, if not, in fact, the same thing.

It was Calvin Coolidge who said, as president in the 1920s, that "the business of American is business." In other words, what's good for our big corporate entities is what's good for the everyday working man. This has been part of the philosophy of American capitalism for quite some time. However, in the era just before Coolidge's, the average working man had achieved a great many advantages through the protection of the American government. First and foremost, labor unions had developed to protect him. He had to be paid a decent wage, work decent hours, and in time, receive decent benefits. Legislation had been passed so that he knew that he and his family were consuming safe food and drugs. It was all tied in together. The cost of consumer goods was passed along to the buying public, and the cost reflected labor and the safeguards required by the government. And so it was for some time. All we had to worry about, we were told for years and years, was the dreaded red menace: Communism! If communists succeeded in their goal of world domination, capitalism as we know it would cease to exist, and we would all drown in a sea of socialized farms, factories, and *gasp* medical care.

So where are we now? Let's see. This whole "global economy" thing has been an absolute disaster for this country. It means that anything than can be more cheaply done or produced in another country is outsourced. One of the reasons that Wal-Mart does this is so they can sell goods more and more cheaply, which undercuts the ability of anyone else to produce the same goods, thereby giving WM a complete monopoly over that item. Once they have that, they can charge whatever they want. But as long as they have any competition at all, their goal has to be to lower their prices. How do they do that? By having goods manufactured in other countries, where

there are no labor unions
there are lax safety regulations, if any at all.

(Wal-Mart, of course, is not the only offender here, but they are the entity most famous for doing this to drop their prices and undercut the competition. All the other companies do it primarily to increase their corporate profit, which of course, WM gets also.)

We all know how terrible it is that goods used in America come from foreign sweat-shops, child labor, and so forth. What we tend to forget is that these are all jobs that used to be done by Americans, in American factories. Those jobs are gone, mostly. It's a lot cheaper to pay an Indonesian child 50 cents a day with no health insurance or pension than it is to pay a full-grown American adult what he or she would demand for the same job.

What about China? China, of course, is a Communist country which is now the biggest driving force in the global capitalist economy. Funny, eh? They can get away with a lot because their people have no recourse because they live in dictatorship. (Hey, why didn't we think of that? Ooh, coming back to that one.) This Poison Train thing is just a little bit too ironic, I think, and would even be funny if it weren't so serious.

(But I have to say, I am getting a real perverse satisfaction watching what's happening to Mattel. Because once they're finished with all the recalls and all the lawsuits, I bet they're going to find out that it would have been cheaper to make their Barbie dolls in the good ol' USA after all.)

Either China is collapsing under its own weight, or they won. It would seem that the Communists somehow have won control of the American economy, they just did it by remote control, by appealing to the greed of corporate America and the opportunities allowed them by the "global economy." And America? Soon it won't matter how cheap the goods are that our corporate giants are producing, because there won't be Americans who can afford to buy them anyway, because they won't have jobs. Ah, they forgot about that. Gotta have consumers if you want your shit consumed.

And the good old American work ethic? It's still there, I think, but it's getting harder and harder to practice it. If you have to work like a dog and end up with fewer benefits and less money than if you were on welfare, well, why would you? The presidents of Wal-Mart and Mattel can even do that math. So who on earth is going to do that stuff?

Well, the only people who will are the people for whom it's still a step up. The people who would make less doing the same work in their home countries. But for some reason, we don't want to let them in (although we want them to work for us when they're here, because they work cheap -- no unions -- and we don't have to pay any benefits for them.) I believe that for the most part, Americans will not do the the jobs that Mexicans, for example, are eager to do, and do well. These are people with a work ethic, let me tell you.

I have no answers. I believe that the cause of all this, really, is the belief not among ordinary Americans but among corporate America that "the business of America is business." Corporate America believes that as long as they are in charge and they are getting rich, nothing else matters. It will, though, sooner or later.

By the by, I have read many articles recently -- I can find the links, but can't get them now -- about a very quiet movement that took place in the 1930s in the hearts and minds and boardrooms of corporate America to support the kind of changes that were taking place in German and Italy and to try to bring about those same changes here. In other words, they were hoping to stage a quiet Fascist coup that would take over the United States. I am not making this up. Many large corporations, including, I think, Proctor and Gamble, were in this group. They thought things would just go better in the U.S. if they were in charge. They even had support from some members of government, including, notably, the senator from Connecticut, who was ... drumroll, please ... Senator Prescott Bush, whose son and grandson went on to ... well, you know.

This is deep and this is bad. But because I am the eternal optimist, and I just added a quotation from Barbara Jordan to my title header the other day, I think it will be okay in time. We have just got the best damn Constitution, and I think the people of America are essentially good. Not too smart all the time, but good. I think we'll be okay.

But this sure stinks, doesn't it?

WATCHING ROSEANNE :: ENTRY #1563