Sunday, January 8, 2017

WHY GLOBALIZATION IS THEFT

Shareholders in US-based global corporations such as Apple, IBM, GM, etc., have done well out of globalization, replacing high-wage workers at home with either sweatshop labor abroad, or immigrants who undercut American workers.

For the capitalist class, therefore, globalization is good and they want more of it.

And why, you may ask, should a company not take advantage of lower cost immigrant labor or cheap labor abroad: after all, those foreign workers need work just as much as over-paid native-born workers in the West, and we all benefit from the lower costs of goods and services provided by cheap foreign labor.

Well here's a reason.

Those high-wage Western workers who are losing their jobs to Third Worlders are the same people who through their taxes pay for government services provided by compatriots benefiting from a generous package of health, pension and other benefits plus a salary higher than they could earn in the private sector.

Globalization thus entails a fundamental inequity: those in the public sector are free, via agents such as WalMart, to give their business, whether for shoes or shirts, cars or computers to the cheapest foreign suppliers, while their neighbors, who through their taxes pay public sector wages, cannot offshore public services.

Globalization for the developed nations means those in the public sector living well by depriving their private sector neighbors of a decent living.

Abandoned steel mill, Bethlehem, PA. Source: Daily Mail.
And this is not a conflict of interest between a small favored group in the public sector and the mass of the people. In the US, for example, there are more Federal public servants than there are people employed in manufacturing. In addition, the public sector includes tens of millions more in education, public health, defense, tax collection and other branches of public service.

That is why the political divide in the West, between liberal globalists and conservative anti-globalists, runs pretty well exactly between those in the public sector and global business management, on the one hand, and the Trump/Brexit-supporting private sector workers on the other hand.

In other words, free of all ideological trappings, globalization amounts to theft. Theft by those in protected sectors of the economy from those in occupations subject to global wage arbitrage.

From this underlying reality, liberals attempt to distract attention by calling those opposed to globalization economic illiterates, white nationalists, or just racists.

And it is not only the blue-collar class, white, black or brown, that suffers from globalization. Virtually every professional job can be off-shored, and many have been in software development, for example, accountancy services, automotive design and many other fields beside.

And where jobs have not been off-shored, native job-holders have by the million been displaced by immigrant labor willing to work for less, mass immigration being the other arm of the globalist drive to lower the cost of labor.

There is, however, a way to level the playing field between most of those who now benefit from globalization and those who do not. It is to offshore everything.

Why not? Government work? The Indians can do that. They know the English language and are no doubt gifted at all the bureaucratic arts of obstruction, delay, obscurantism, budget busting and generally giving everyone an endless run-around.

Healthcare? No prob. Build a fleet of hospital jumbo jets and off-shore surgery and hospital care, both acute and long-term. China could do it all, triple bypass ops., organ transplants — organs extra but in plentiful supply, and surgery of every other kind. And they'd no doubt do it gladly at a tenth the US price.

And then there's education. As the Anglo nations slide down the international league tables of academic performance it becomes clear that they have no lock on good educational practice, so why not outsource the business to Singapore, Hong Kong or some such place where they still have decent standards: with in-home delivery via the Internet.

The downside to offshoring everything is that there will eventually be no jobs for anyone other than hair-dressers, masseurs, and part-time Walmart store clerks. In other, words, off-shoring taken to its logical and fairest conclusion means national bankruptcy for the US, for Britain, for Canada or any other developed nation.

Offshoring is a policy of national economic suicide that enriches only a handful of corporate managers, investors and workers in protected sectors of the economy.

Both in Britain and America, the majority of ordinary folks now realize that globalization is a scam that is driving them into poverty. Hence Brexit and Donald Trump.

Not only is globalization a scam, but it is fundamentally anti-democratic, being hugely detrimental to the well-being of the mass of the population. The grotesque efforts being made in the US by Obama, the Clintons and scoundrel Republicans such as McCain and Lindsay Graham to keep the globalist bandwagon on the road, represent the the death-throws of a vicious plutocratic conspiracy against the people.

If the Trump revolution fails, there will be blood in the streets.

Related: 

Baltimore Sun: Federal workers worry about their jobs under Trump

Andre Vajra: Can American Patriot Donald Trump Save the World From Transnational Oligarchy?

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