GLOBALIZATION, MULTI-NATIONALS, AND
THE AMERICAN WORKERS’ DIGNITY, RESPECT, & EQUALIZATION TAX
By David G. Hanger
August 07, 2013, 2013
Wednesday PM
Wednesday PM
In the nineteenth and the early twentieth century we brought the “chink” and the “wetback” to the factory via massive in-migration. In the early twenty-first century we have reversed the process and now via outsourcing bring the factory to the “wetback” and to the “chink.” The intent in both instances is, nonetheless, the same, to degrade labor to the point of a peonage as close to slave labor as is humanly possible.
As first conceived in the mid-1980s the concept
of “globalization” meant increased profits and opportunities to large
business concerns by opening up overseas markets, in other words
producing and selling more product; but it quickly morphed into
“multi-nationalism,” a beast of far different and much more sinister
character. In the hands of the corporatists “multi-nationalism” has come
to mean simply “above and beyond” nations, and absolutely beyond any
set of national laws. To the multi-nationalists the very concept of the
“nation” is obsolete; and they are hell bent to destroy the concept as
quickly as possible because it suits them; they want to be masters and
monarchs of us all. A “super monarchy” is where this crap is headed, and
damned fast at that. These are the most treasonous creatures in the
history of the world; they have contempt for everything and everybody
except their own larded asses.
They have set out very consciously to convince
you that their greed is good for everybody else; and damned any parent
among you if this crap is the legacy you intend to bestow upon your
children.
For they degrade and demean the very act of work itself.
This is by conscious intent, not some accident or inadvertence occurring as consequence of some phenomena.
In 1981 Robert Welch first verbalized the mantra
of this abomination, “The purpose of business management is to maximize
the wealth of the shareholders.” It seems so simple it has to be
logical, but what it really is saying is that “capital” is everything,
and everything else is meaningless. The very purpose of the concept of
the “corporation” is to accumulate capital, allocate the profits to the
fewest individuals possible, and to hell with who or what you crap all
over in the process. Nations can fall, democracy destroyed, millions
killed by pollution and by industrial accidents, and none of that
matters because “the purpose of business management is to maximize the
wealth of the shareholders.”
In other words, if one is to truly adhere to
this mantra, the whole purpose of human existence is to create corporate
institutions that enrich beyond the wildest dreams of Midas or Croesus a
few hundred individuals out of hundreds of millions, and to impoverish,
if not kill, the rest. That cannot be the purpose of any business
activity.
To corrupt the concept of “corporatism” to have
that meaning is precisely what the multi-nationals have been doing for
quite some time now.
On a radio visit last year the host asked me how
any country could impose tax laws or minimum wage laws on any
corporation that has as its choice relocation to some other country
where such laws do not exist, as if this was the natural way of things.
What is actually much more natural is that Hershey’s is located in
Pennsylvania because that is where the family started the business, not
because of its proximity to the raw materials of the business. Detroit
in the meantime is conveniently located respective the raw materials
needed to produce automobiles. In most instances with American
corporations, though, they were originally located proximate to the
location where their founders lived, nothing more complicated than that.
Whatever else can be said historically it has not in any sense been
“natural” to take U.S. corporations and transfer their operations
overseas to exploit slave labor provided by dictators, just so they can
avoid minimum wage laws. Nothing natural about that at all.
Corporations do not exist in a vacuum, and it
cannot be the purpose of any corporation “to maximize the wealth of the
shareholders” at the cost of the nation or of its citizens. In the first
instance a corporation can exist at all only because of the rule of law
operating in a secure society where safety of person and property is
guaranteed. Without transportation networks and massive quantities of
other types of infrastructure, all created by someone else, and much of
that by government, i.e. the people as “collective;” without prospective
employees and markets, a corporation cannot begin to function.
So to assert that everything gravitates to the
top, and the rest be damned is a lie on its surface. If a corporation is
not of great value to the society and to the individuals of that
society, it has little justification for existence.
Not that long ago as the decades are counted the
right wing in this country had a campaign motto that went like this,
“America, love it or leave it,” generally alluding then to the same
group of people right wingers allude to now, i.e. everyone who disagrees
with their point of view. Now, of course, these same right wingers have
discovered the advantage of crawling into bed with Communist dictators,
Muslim dictators, and right wing dictators all over the world, all that
cheap slave labor.
Red China used to be the name for this mess in
China, and I don’t see any reason why that name should be changed. They
have put up a lot of gloss and façade, but Red China remains in the
clutches of the nastiest dictatorship on this planet, a dictatorship
that killed at least 20 million of its own people as recently as the
Cultural Revolution of 1966, and that employs the bulk of its people in
unsafe working environments under slave labor conditions. Twenty-four
cents an hour and a minimum work week of 86 hours is slave labor.
Last I looked we are at war with Islam. I
realize we claim otherwise, and I actually believe we are just at war
with ourselves at this point. Terrorists have and will always exist, and
according them “nation” status is stupid; treat them like the criminals
they are. But until further notice all of Islam has been placed in the
“red zone” of danger and badness; Shariah law, not secular law,
government by Mohammed. It’s not just a terrorist under every bush; are
we not supposed to be perpetually terrorized by the prospect of being
governed by the Koran?
And look at who all these “multi-national” U.S.
corporatists are employing? Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia, the slave
labor of a Communist dictatorship, anyone but a U.S. citizen. Then they
wrap themselves up in an American flag and call themselves patriots.
Nor can one legitimately argue that these
products can only be produced at a retail cost that sells the product
only with slave labor because every one of these products was being
produced by U.S. employees at U.S. wage scales before the factories and
the jobs were shipped overseas. The “false profits” created by the
employment of overseas slave labor is treason in two directions. While
simultaneously weakening this country in their efforts to trash the
American middle class, they strengthen Communist, Muslim, and right wing
dictatorships the world over.
All this just to pocket the difference, and to
use this money politically to destroy democracy in this country. But one
way or the other their overreaching greed will destroy them. These
morons don’t know how to fix their own toilets. Destroy the middle
class, and they destroy their own markets. Destroy their own markets,
and they will not be able to replenish their filthy nest with further
profits. If they expect to survive on their hoarded largesse, bad news
again; the pissed off folks who built those gated communities will
dismantle them bolt by bolt and board by board; and all the
nickel-plated .44 mags in existence don’t mean squat when your
opposition can drop you from 650 meters and out with one shot.
The denial of consciously intended class warfare
by the rich and the super rich is the biggest lie of all. These
traitorous bastards have as their specific and obvious intent the
destruction of the American middle class and the very nation itself,
while hoarding such massive accumulations of wealth as will assure their
hereditary social, economic, and political power in perpetuity; in
short, a return to monarchy.
But that is not enough. The value of work must
be degraded to the level of slavery and peonage; in other words, as the
rich get richer and richer and move away from us in terms of increased
wealth, so, too, we move away from them at almost equivalent velocity as
our wealth, the value of our work, in relative terms is decreased, is
degraded into something less than nothing.
Life is not a lottery with odds of ten million
to one determining who makes it while the rest suck. Life is too
precious for that kind of conceptualization. Life is the battle against
the void, against the nothingness of non-existence, and a world of
limited resources cannot limit those resources to the few at the cost of
the detriment of everyone else. I had hoped we had advanced a bit more
than that in the last century or so, but this is a clear regression.
Dug out from whatever evil recesses they have
been hidden, long discredited social theories have recently been re-
popularized by the super rich to justify the greed and the treason of
the super rich. Eugenics, social Darwinism, the insipid “objectivist”
teachings of Ayn Rand, in many ways more Hitlerian than Hitler. She
claimed, of course, to lack racial bias; but her thinking was very
white; and in her world only the “prime movers” (read “job creators”)
had the right to exist; all others should “perish as they should.” Her
views fit nicely with the theories of the environmental right wing, that
only 500 million humans will be alive in the year 2100.
When you consider that Great Britain recently
announced it expects one-third of its babies born in 2012 to live to be
at least one hundred years old, one does have to wonder who isn’t going
to make the cut.
The purpose of business and business management
is not to “maximize the wealth of the shareholders.” The purpose of
business is to nurture our posterity. The latter formulation may at
first byte seem as trite as the former, but as in science the simplest
observations often result in the most complex theorems. Each corporation
profits by providing a product or service that society thinks it wants
or needs. A product or service must be produced or provided in some way,
and that requires the merging of capital with materials and labor. Thus
at the first level of intersection a corporation interfaces with its
market, with its materials vendors, and with labor. Each group has its
interests, its needs, and its desires. At the second and third levels of
intersection there is the community in which a corporation is
physically located and the local, regional, and national governments and
the laws they enforce.
To say that any corporation operates in a vacuum
is simply not true. The purpose of any corporation supersedes the
corporation at a point where the product or service is perceived as a
“need” by these other groups. It’s just like any invention; once turned
loose in the hands of its users it quickly, virtually immediately,
becomes something else. No matter that the “need” is only perceived; a
fabrication; not real. The corporation has long since become more than
the sum of its parts.
“Maximizing the wealth of the shareholders” has
its place; it is not, however, a dominating value. It is a relative
value that generally demands superiority of “place” in the pecking
order. Capital perceives itself as being more important than labor; to
an extent that is true. Capital is in greater demand, labor is in
greater supply. Rare are the moments when the opposite is true.
A corporation’s relationships with its vendors
are often far more complicated and consequentially far-reaching than its
relationship with labor; and with government exist the most complicated
relationships of all.
It remains a curious question whether
historically the armies and navies of Western Europe followed the
traders to the New World, or whether the traders followed the armies and
the navies; and the answer to that question in the modern world remains
as curious today; but in general terms it appears the case for the time
being that a nation can decide whether a corporation exists, but a
corporation cannot decide whether a nation exists. The fact that appears
to be changing is, of course, what we are concerned about here.
Current corporate management would have us
believe that none of these other groups’ interests or concerns has any
merit whatsoever; that they are interchangeable nodules of
inconsequential nonsense. That’s crap.
When a U.S. corporation relocates its operation
to China to exploit slave labor, it is displacing American laborers with
that slave labor, pocketing the difference in cash (No, the retail
price will not go down.). The ripple effect of damaging consequences to
labor, to vendors, to American communities, and to government
institutions is profound. For the excessive greed of a handful, an
incredible amount of real economic damage is inflicted.
These people claim in most instances to be U.S.
citizens, but they support slave labor in overseas dictatorships. They
finance dictatorships to the detriment of this country. They finance
themselves to the detriment of this country. By their own historical
standards they are the most hypocritical of traitors, aggrandizing a
Communist dictatorship at the expense of their own country. Then they
claim maximum rights of U.S. citizenship.
What I see is a group of people who don’t give a
damned about anybody or anything, who think they live in a vacuum, and
our job is to take whatever crap they dish out.
They want to own the world, give it to them. The
world I am told is four-fifths water, so let them rule the waves.
Revoke their citizenship, rent some cruise ships, and send them packing,
on perpetual world cruises. Then they just have to stare each other in
the face; they don’t have to worry about us, and we don’t have to worry
about them. True multi-nationals; no country at all.
In the meantime boycott their products and them
right out of business. Apple is one of the worst offenders with this
garbage, but the perceived “need” for their product is also great.
Boycotting Macs out of existence would be difficult, and probably not
preferable. There are plenty of substitutes, however, for Etch A
Sketches and Peppermint Patties. Boycott them to hell. Why would you
even think of giving your child a toy that you know was produced by
slave labor for twenty-four cents an hour with a minimum work week of 86
hours? How can you even consider such a thing?
The U.S. Tax Code is on occasion punitive. The
tax system is invariably designed to encourage certain types of economic
behavior, while discouraging others. At the extreme are such entities
as personal holding companies, which the U.S. government considers so
intolerable the tax rate is 108%. You pay the government more than you
make.
To stop the treason that so much of this
outsourcing in fact is I recommend to the U.S. Congress the imposition
of the “American Workers Dignity, Respect, and Equalization Tax,” a 108%
tax on the differential between slave labor wages paid overseas and the
American wages and benefits displaced by this outsourcing, the specific
intent being to stop U.S. right wingers from crawling into bed with
overseas dictators of whatever ilk to exploit their slave labor because
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal…………………..”, etc.
And these greedheads are not really us.
Read and forward; let others see.
David G. Hanger
Ketchikan, Alaska
Ketchikan, Alaska
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