Posted on 08/05/2003 6:05:13 PM PDT by comnet
It took generations of hard working, sacrificing Americans to build our economic system, a system now being dismantled by small-minded, greedy globalists. By Lawrence J. McNamee
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Lawrence McNamee is a History Instructor and writer in San Antonio, Texas. He is the proud son of a retired American industrial worker.
Yeah, that is what most businesses are about. Maybe we should follow through on the logic of your post and attempt to eliminate the profit motive like the Communists did for 70 years in the Soviet Union.
The Earth is flat.--unknown.
By the way, have you ever owned stock in a publicly traded corporation?
And who takes your tax dollars? Here is a hint -- it is not a corporation.
A small roof to keep the rain off your head in a climate not too hot nor too cold . . .
A change of clothes and a body of water to wash them in (who needs a tub?). . .
A large expanse of nature in which to hunt, hike, climb, fish, and gather . . .
Affordable health care . . .
Self-defense . . .
Some books (though a perversion, a necessary one today) . . .
And a steady source of a modest income to afford the modest expense of it all . . . .
That's what's really important; that's all one needs--and we had a lot more of it thirty years ago. The rest is crap.
But the rest is what Globalism offers at the expense of the foregoing.
Now adays, these large corporations (most of them) are nothing more than mini regime conditioning.
I presumed from this statement that you are arguing that corporations somehow form a threat to the average person. You then followed this statement up with a remark to me about large publicly traded corporations getting lots of easy money and then going out of business.
Now, if your argument is the former that corporations have too much power, that is at least an argument that can be responded to. If, however, your argument is that most large publicly traded corporations are evil because people invest money in them and then some of them go out of business, that is not an argument that can be responded to because it is simply not true.
As the CEO for Boeing commented after revealing their plans to move jobs to India, "Americans are not entitled to their standard of living".
We are being lied to. The income tax is by far the biggest non manufacturing cost for every business.
When you make a business act as an unpaid agent for the government, and you make these businesses spend money on collecting this tax, you destroy the productivity of the worker and the profitability of the business.
Don't forget all the government regulations and the unfunded mandates and you have a mess that we have today.
Time to get the central planners the hell out of government and kill the IRS and the central banks once and for all.
Import of cheap labor by corporations seen driving wages down
Posted: August 1, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Jon Dougherty © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
Corporations allowed to import large numbers of lesser-paid foreign workers to fill jobs in the United States, coupled with numerous "free trade" agreements, have caused depressed wages and unemployment for American workers, say economists and experts.
Worse, they say, some firms are set to import even more foreign workers, despite current unemployment levels standing at their highest in years.
According to Eagle Forum founder, syndicated columnist and author Phyllis Schlafly, the "scandal" of the H-1B and L-1 visa programs "is why this year's college graduates face the worst job market in recent memory."
"The big argument for the tax cut [recently] signed by President Bush is that it will create much-needed jobs," she writes in the June issue of "The Phyllis Schlafly Report," her organization's monthly newsletter. "But one big question remains: Will those jobs be created for Americans, or will corporations simply hire more job-seekers from India and China?"
The visa programs, authorized in the 1990 Immigration Act, "allow corporations to import up to 65,000 cheap skilled workers from foreign countries to fill alleged labor shortages," said Schlafly. The common claim of a labor shortage advanced by some corporations, she said, "was always a fiction and now is nonsense."
In June, unemployment rose to 6.4 percent, up from 6.1 percent in May, representing 9.4 million jobless Americans, the Labor Department reported. Though the department said new claims for unemployment fell last week to 388,000 – the third week in a row new jobless claims have dropped off – a separate report said U.S. corporations are reporting cheaper labor costs.
"U.S. employers incurred a much smaller increase in the cost of hiring and retaining workers during the second quarter of 2003 than they did in the previous three months," said the Dow Jones news service, rising only 0.9 percent from April to June. "The cost of wages and salaries grew even more slowly, rising just 0.6 percent."
Schlafly, in her report, says some U.S. job sectors are being hit harder than others, resulting in unemployment rates surpassing the national level.
Citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, Schlafly wrote: "Unemployment among American electronic engineers has soared to 7 percent, and among computer hardware engineers to 6.5 percent."
"Despite hundreds of thousands of unemployed American engineers and computer specialists, corporations continue to import foreigners at the same time … they lay off U.S. citizens," said the report.
Recently completed free-trade deals also have some lawmakers and economists concerned about the future of American workers and wages they are paid.
Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Thomas Roeser, quoting banker and manufacturer John E. Jones, is critical of free-trade policies because, he claims, they have depressed American wages for 30 years.
"Jones says one reason is that 'free trade economists preach that whatever produces the lowest possible cost is best. All things being equal, everyone would agree that this is true. But if you need not consider anything but cost, a slave economy is better because it is lower cost,'" Roeser writes.
According to Roeser, Jones says "real wages" for Americans peaked in 1973, ''shortly after the U.S. became an unprotected economy in 1971," when they were 176 percent of what real wages were in 1946. Jones also says real wages have fallen to just 92 percent of what they were in the mid-1940s.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported in July illegal immigration was "undermining American workers" and pulling down wages while pushing taxes higher, especially in California – now saddled with a $38 billion budget deficit.
Also, immigration-reform group Project USA criticized Bush administration trade policy last week as further endangering American workers.
"The Chile/Singapore free-trade agreements will allow 'American' corporations to move an unlimited number of 'employees' from those countries to ours," the group said, in a statement. "In other words, multinational corporations not the American people will dictate the number of foreigners allowed into the United States."
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, another group opposed to unrestricted immigration, also criticized the trade agreements as detrimental to U.S. workers.
Said FAIR, "making these provisions especially dangerous, the Bush administration is touting them as a model to be replicated in future trade agreements with numerous other countries."
Longtime critic of corporate work-visa abuse Rob Sanchez, writing in May 2002, said, "These trade bills are unique from other types of immigration laws in one major way: They cannot be repealed by Congress without the consent of the country the agreement was made with.
"Once these agreements are passed, American workers will be powerless to stop the flood of workers that will arrive to compete with them in the job market," Sanchez said.
On his website, Sanchez says over 17 million visas to allow foreigners to work in the U.S. have been issued since 1985. "By the end of the year 2001, more than 890,000 H-1B workers were employed in the United States," he said.
"With 18 million Americans struggling to find full-time employment, the Bush administration has no business making agreements with foreign nations to flood the labor market with an unlimited amount of imported labor," added ProjectUSA.
Schlafly believes Americans were duped into accepting the loss of millions of jobs, mostly in the manufacturing sector.
"When U.S. corporations built hundreds of plants in Third World countries, we were told not to worry because we were keeping the service jobs," she writes. "Now the high-paying white-collar service jobs are going overseas, too, particularly jobs for engineers and computer specialists." "Follow the money," says Schlafly. "The big corporations hire aliens from India and China at half or a third the [U.S.] wages, work them long hours without overtime pay and treat them like indentured servants unable to quit for a better job.
"What makes this racket possible is the partnership between corporations and government," she said.
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