Always low wages. Always.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. once described America's economic system as "socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor," so it's fitting that our political and corporate business leaders have taken full advantage of opportunities over the last decade to climb in bed with Chinese Communists.I hope you had the chance to watch last night's "Frontline" special on the growth of Wal-Mart. Reporter Hedrick Smith, in a balanced report, profiled the company's sales, production, and import strategy. He traveled to southern China and witnessed the staggering growth of American-owned factories designed to serve "box stores" such as Wal-Mart.
In the late 1990s, President Clinton swung the door wide open for trade relations with China. He did it under the guise of opening up a large new market for American products-- "from commodities to chemicals to computers," but what he really meant was that he was opening up a permanent link between American corporate boardrooms and China's ready-to-use slave labor supply.
Almost a decade later, the results of free trade with China show record profits for many large corporate stockholders, and an influx of cash and political clout for China's oppressive government. Meanwhile, Chinese workers slave for 30 to 50 cents an hour (or less,) and American communities cope with the estimated loss of a million jobs to that one country alone.
The world was seemingly less tolerant of totalitarianism in 1989. We were horrified as we watched Chinese authorities massacre a pro-democracy student demonstration in Tiananmen Square. Seven years later, Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) still reported on-going rights abuses in China, including torture and the denial of medical treatment to political prisoners, yet the U.S. State Department rolled out the red carpet in Washington for a Chinese military delegation that included General Chi Haotian, "the butcher of Beijing" during the student uprising. During the General's visit, he made the preposterous statement, "Here I can tell you in a responsible and serious manner that at the time not a single person lost his life in Tiananmen Square."
Pay close attention to the phrase at the time. I suspect, by that, he meant-- while the cameras were rolling on the street and the world watched.
Today, American corporations like Wal-Mart fatten their purse strings on the backs of this regime that tortures political dissidents, incorporates prison labor, and applies total restriction upon speech and religion. By denying workers' rights and undervaluing their currency, the Chinese are in specific violation of their membership in the WTO, yet they enjoy full privilege in the secret, autocratic body-- just another reason why the organization needs to be abolished.
For Wal-Mart alone, Clinton and Bush 43's free trade relationship with China has meant $25 billion in annual imports. It allows the discount store chain to charge U.S. prices for goods, while paying Chinese wages. It has been a well-documented boon for Wal-Mart executives and investors while American Main Streets collapse, and a large percentage of Wal-Mart employees continue to toil at or below the poverty level, even as they file grievance after grievance with the National Labor Relations Board, and face stiff opposition from their employer to the collective bargaining process. (If they were lucky, though, they got rewarded with large court settlements because of the company's widespread corporate strategy of discriminating based on gender.)
As for Clinton's claim that free trade with China would open an unprecedented new market for U.S. producers...? The U.S./China trade deficit reached $150 billion in 2004.
posted by CM @ 10:32 PM
2 Comments:
So, you don't shop at Wal-Mart right? Because you are so outraged at how they profit by buying products from cheap-labor China and sell them here. Forget of course that most of the parts in the computer you are using to create your blog probably came from China.
Wal-Mart employes over 1.3M people in the US alone. And let's face it, most of these people are not the cream of the intellectual crop and could be collecting unemployment (which we pay for) rather than making an honest wage.
And of course Wal-Mart is going to fight against unions getting into their company. Have you seen the airline industry lately, or how about the US automakers? How about we ask the steelmakers how great a thing unions are?
Wal-Mart is the perfect example of capitalism and free markets. You find the cheapest priced supplier and pass most (but not all) of the low cost onto consumers. Think how much poorer everyone in this country would be if Wal-Mart had to buy/produce all their products here instead of in the lowest cost economy (China today, Mexico 20 years ago, maybe somewhere in Africa 20 years from now).
I say good job to Wal-Mart and keep it up. I only wish my last name was Walton.
What a loving ode to the slave labor trade.
First of all, I do believe many Wal-Mart employees indeed are the cream of the intellectual crop, or could be, if we had a better system in place to educate and train them.
It's the oldest corporate propaganda in the political debate about paying out in unemployment. Just how many 'welfare mothers' would it take to equal in food stamps the billions we throw away by subsidizing these companies in their attempt to flee America. How many to equal the amount of billions hijacked in employee pensions just from the Enron debacle? How many to equal the amount of money we lose by not taxing foreign companies that do business here?
And how about the 40 million people in this country who work 40 hours a week, and still live below the poverty line at less than $8 an hour? Are they not working hard enough? Maybe we simply need to take away their right of expression and political dissent to push them to the top of the global heap.
As a taxpayer, I'm sick to death of bailing out your buddies in the airline industry every six to 12 months to the tune of several billion dollars each time. Like every other corporate behemoth, they claimed that deregulation and increased competition would lead to lower prices, but the price of an airline ticket has gone up seven times the rate of inflation over the last two decades.
The automakers in Detroit are getting the shit beat out of them, not because unions demand fair payment for their work, but because bonehead designers are forcing gas-guzzling monstrosities off the line that Americans correctly have no use for.
Corporate board rooms in this country are little incestuous families, unbeholden to stockholders who surrender control by proxy, who can then only watch even as the most remarkably incompetent corporate leaders steal from the public and make off like bandits with hefty severance packages, regardless of market success.
"Think how much poorer everyone in this country would be if Wal-Mart had to buy/produce all their products here instead of in the lowest cost economy"-- you cannot be serious! Fortunately, we've tried it both ways in this country. The robber barons and the "corporate socialists" gave us a great economic collapse called the Great Depression. It was government programs like farm subsidies, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance, and especially the GI Bill that built the middle class in this country, and it's the corporate hucksters who will take us back to 1929.
And yes, that's right. I never shop at Wal-Mart. Not one penny since at least high school.
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