Posted on 05/03/2013 1:09:31 PM PDT by Kaslin
"This is called slave labor," said Pope Francis.
The Holy Father was referring to the $40 a month paid to apparel workers at that eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed on top of them, killing more than 400.
"Not paying a just wage ... focusing exclusively on the balance books, on financial statements, only looking at personal profit. That goes against God!"
The pope is describing the dark side of globalism.
Why is Bangladesh, after China, the second-largest producer of apparel in the world? Why are there 4,000 garment factories in that impoverished country which, a few decades ago, had almost none?
Because the Asian subcontinent is where Western brands -- from Disney to Gap to Benetton -- can produce cheapest. They can do so because women and children will work for $1.50 a day crammed into factories that are rickety firetraps, where health and safety regulations are nonexistent.
This is what capitalism, devoid of a conscience, will produce.
Rescuers at the factory outside Dhaka have stopped looking for survivors, but expect to find hundreds more bodies in the rubble.
The Walt Disney Co., with sales of $40 billion a year, decided -- after an apparel plant fire in November took the lives of 112 workers -- to stop producing in Bangladesh. "The Disney ban now extends to other countries, including Pakistan," says The New York Times, "where a fire last September killed 262 garment workers."
Not long ago, the shirts, skirts, suits and dresses Americans wore were "Made in the USA" -- in plants in the Carolinas, Georgia and Louisiana, where the lower wages, lighter regulations and air conditioning that came after World War II had attracted the factories from New England.
The American idea was that the 50 states and their citizens should compete with one another fairly. The feds set the health and safety standards that all factories had to meet, and imposed wage and hour laws. Some states offered lower wages, but there was a federal minimum wage.
How did we prevent companies from shutting down here and going to places like today's Bangladesh to produce as cheaply as they could -- without regard for the health and safety of their workers -- and to send their products back here and kill the American factories?
From James Madison to the mid-20th century, we had a tariff.
This provided revenue for the U.S. government to keep other taxes low and build the nation's infrastructure. Tariffs prevented exploiters of labor from getting rich here on sweatshops abroad.
Tariffs favored U.S. companies by letting them compete for free in the U.S. market, while a cover charge was placed on foreign goods entering the U.S.A. Foreign producers would pay tariffs for the privilege of competing here, while U.S. companies paid income taxes.
Foreigners had to buy a ticket to the game. Americans got in free.
After all, it's our country, isn't it?
But in the late 20th century, America abandoned as "protectionism" what Henry Clay had called The American System. We gave up on economic patriotism. We gave up on the idea that the U.S. economy should be structured for the benefit of America and Americans first.
We embraced globalism.
The ideological basis of globalism was that, just as what was best for America was a free market where U.S. companies produce and sell anywhere freely and equally in the U.S.A., this model can be applied worldwide.
We can create a global economy where companies produce where they wish and sell where they wish.
As one might expect, the big boosters of the concept were the transnational corporations. They could now shift plants and factories out of the high-wage, well-regulated U.S. economy to Mexico, China and India, then to Bangladesh, Haiti and Cambodia, produce for pennies, ship their products back to the U.S.A., sell here at the same old price, and pocket the difference.
As some who were familiar with the decline of Great Britain predicted, this would lead inexorably to the deindustrialization of America, a halt to the steady rise in U.S. workers' wages and standard of living, and the enrichment of a new class of corporatists.
Meanwhile, other nations, believing yet in economic nationalism, would invade and capture huge slices of the U.S. market for their home companies, their "national champions." The losers would be the companies that stayed in the U.S.A. and produced for the U.S.A., with American workers.
And so it came to pass. U.S. real wages have not risen in 40 years.
In the first decade of the century, America lost 5 million to 6 million manufacturing jobs, one in every three we had, as 55,000 factories closed.
Since Bush 41 touted his New Word Order, we have run trade deficits of $10 trillion -- ten thousand billion dollars! Everybody -- the EU, China, Japan, Mexico, Canada -- now runs a trade surplus at the expense of the U.S.A.
We built the global economy -- by gutting our own.
Private property is a means to an end. It is not the end itself. It is not a moral absolute.
You have the intellectual development of a two-year old.
And you think that makes you holy.
It’s not crap. I got some Donald Trump shirts, and was surprised to see that they were made in Bangladesh, after all his rants about China. They were surprisingly well made, and of nice material.
“Christians, a fortiori the Pope — have the right and the duty to speak out on moral issues. Pope Francis is well within his competence in pointing out that a reductionist view of human life in which everything must give way to the free market is anti-human and irrational.”
Nice straw man since no one is arguing that everything must give way to free markets. Giving people jobs and paying the prevailing wage in their country is not immoral. I do think not providing a safe work place is immoral. Considering the cost of labor and the large profit margin on the products being produced the cost of putting up a solid building that is not a fire trap should be relatively inexpensive.
Milton Friedman once said that free trade is a hard sell because it’s beneficiaries are many, and they do not know who they are, but it’s victims are few, and they know who they are.
“Private property is a means to an end. It is not the end itself. It is not a moral absolute.”
Actually, Thou shall not steal, says that it is, much the same as Thou shalt not murder,confirms the sanctity of life.
I’m going to guess that the Pope is going to get slammed here for suggesting that these workers were being exploited as slave labor. Okay, I’m sure that plenty of both democrats and republicans are perfectly fine with financing sweatshops in the third world. Now, would anyone here reading this be willing to work under the exact same conditions and for the same exact wages that these people working in these sweatshops? Of course not! That’s why we exported all of these jobs in the first place! Why do you think the feds are fighting so hard for amnesty? We need dirt cheap compliant labor! Everybody knows that Americans are too stupid and lazy to do these jobs (although they did not too long ago). At least that’s what the government and their financial interests keep telling us. I really have to say that we have finally outdid the socialists and communists in destroying our own economy, and our country in the process.
Sorry; you are mistaken. Human life always has priority over the rest of creation. Your money will not be going to heaven with you. Nor to the other place. Man is made for God, and all of creation exists only to help him achieve that end. Everything else in this world is passing away. God created private property not because it has absolute and eternal value, but to enable us to make free decisions to use it to give him glory. One of the chief ways we glorify God is in assisting the poor for his sake, and in exercising our endowments and faculties as advocate for the lowly and powerless.
Our Lord is quite clear about what becomes of people who assign an absolute value to their private property, imagining that it exists for their benefit and enjoyment in an absolute sense.
The problem is that in many countries “prevailing wages” are not set by anything resembling a free market. They are imposed by the powerful upon the weak, who are left with the choice of being cruelly exploited or else starving. It is the poor who are deprived of their property rights, because they’re being stripped of the only thing of value they have to sell, which is their labor. That is not justice, and it is likewise not just to support such structures of sin. In the world we inhabit, it’s frequently impossible to avoid buying from China or similar hell holes. But we can do our best — especially by making a moral decision to consume less.
$40 a month in many third world countries is a living wage. I don’t know about Bangladesh, but I suspect it might be one of them.
The South almost seceded in the 1830’s over high tariffs artificially raising the prices of goods. High sugar tariffs for the benefit of American sugar producers has cost us tons of jobs as candy companies move out of America to where they can get sugar at the real world market price.
Of course, I doubt Pat's a 100% Federalist. They supported a national bank, and we all "know" who runs those, don't we??? [/sarcasm]
People defending exploitive labor practices are doing no favors to capitalism.
Also, the pope has always said that “social justice” comes from just or moral individuals doing what is right. You can’t possibly argue that this guy was doing what was right, moral or just.
$40 a week there ain't the same this as $40 a week here.
Or are you a good Communist and think that everybody should be payed a "living wage" regardless of the actual value of the product they are producing?
Yeah, but $40 a year isn’t. As a matter of fact I got an email forwarded to me which was about the 1910 Ford and the statistics for that year. For example in 1910 the average US wage in 1910 was 22 cents per hour and the average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year.
Really?
The Commandments say what they say, and are not subject to your interpretation.
You’re right. Buchanan is a nut ball. I haven’t read him in a while.
Calling you obtuse would be far too generous.
Thanks for posting the article.
“This is what capitalism, devoid of a conscience, will produce. “
Might I suggest is isn’t capitalism that is devoid of a conscience. Like ‘assault rifles’ and ‘reckless SUVs’ , these terms seem to apply the blame to inanimate objects.
The problem is, and always has been (as was oft lamented by God and the Angels in the Christian Bible) that man becomes devoid of conscience.
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