Topical analysis of current economic trends stated as complaints. Hey, if you can't change the world, at least complain about it as well as you can.
It seems like the Corporate Accountability campaign I've been working on with Amnesty International has been turned into Economic Globalization and Human Rights. There is a zeitgeist that focuses on globalization; I think it started with those Thomas Friedman books.
It’s as if we should focus on countries instead of companies--countries in the "developing world (translated: over-exploited by Anglos and Ashkenazi אַשְׁכֲּנָזִים)"
to be more specific. We should not focus on countries we should focus on corporations, they are the principals, initial-actors, and benefactors. It is they, in their own internal processes for their own prerogatives that should focus on countries--we should be concerned with them as objects of inquiry.
The reason I believe there is a shift in focus, in general, on globalization is because powerful interests externalize their production requirements. It just so happens that in America those dominant interests are big business, as opposed to Europe where big government dominates, or at least did so in the past. Part of externalizing production requirements is externalizing innovation, so they homogenize our collective inquiry in their terms and manipulate us into addressing issues in a way that suits them. "If you get everyone to think in terms of globalization, who knows what kind of innovation and development people will achieve for us at a tidy profit."
Amnesty says that, "Human rights violations destabilise the investment climate." That isn't really a general truism, and it was written by a Redcoat or an Anglophile. If it was true in general businesses would be more concerned with human rights violations. If fact, I think that is why the developing world is more appealing to them.
As a case study, we can look at NAFTA and CAFTA. Companies shifted their manufacturing base to places with lower human rights standards. Canadian companies moved to Alabama or some shithole state and American companies moved to Mexico. It all makes sense though, under the theory of low-cost production. That is a corporate prerogative, but I mean it is virtually a necessity for smaller manufacturers. So of course they're on board, and that way Clinton, Reagan, Bush or whoever can say "look we're supporting small business--the 'small-business economy.'"
But, you know if 81% of businesses are small businesses but 87% of sales are corporate, then it is not a small-business economy by any rational standard. That is an example of a concentration of income because in economics output and income are synonymous, interchangeable concepts. But that says nothing of how those corporations distribute their concentrated income.
It’s really more concentrated than that, because even though wages encompass the bulk of distribution by factor of production the wealthy elites get a great deal of the wages and the profit, and thus this concentration causes social problems.
So, if we are going to oppose companies, we can't address issues in their terms. We can't look at countries as the source of problems, we have to look at them as recipients of problems, and it is the corporations that cause the problems.
You know, politics in America is about the distribution by factor of production and by type of industry. Republicans tend to support policies for capital-intensive business (like oil and defense) and Democrats tend to support policies for labor-intensive business (like the steel industry or mining). That is why Democrats are usually the lesser of two evils--they're more about wages and less about profits, but overall we get "the evil of two lessers." And there are certain systemic imperatives that keep it that way, like the way American labor unions rarely give the laborers real power.
Behind it all are the investment bankers and equities corporations. They can't totally get behind Republicans because they will cause too much economic growth (in the most wasteful ways of course) which is bad if you are in the money market because the inflation that comes from economic growth devalues your holdings. And they can't totally get behind the Democrats because it’s not good for business is tax money gets distributed in social programs; that money is for subsidizing the cost of doing business--like the prison-industrial complex. Socialism for the upper-echelon. So they pit the two against each other and try to balance the equation.
Companies with big labor forces are trying to become more capital-intensive though. I guess because it is a more efficient way of turning a profit, even though it results in less real production. They are trying to become financial institutions, but they are failing, like Wal Mart who made an unsuccessful bid to become a bank. And private equity companies are being made public (translated: a little less private), like Blackstone. The institutions of high finance are protecting their monopoly through government regulation. Even Wal Mart can't jump through that glass ceiling.
There is also more immigration in the U.S. which big business is supporting, but that is not just because they want cheap labor. They want to bring in high-skilled immigrant laborers who are enthralled with the "American Dream" so they can have a supportive segment of the population in order to balance the disorder that may come from income inequality. That's my guess, anyway--meaning that's what I would do if I were them and wanted to maintain social control. Of course, this is all going to result in a diminished quality of life for most Americans; the third-worldization of American poor and middle classes.
I was hoping those of us in the Amnesty Corporate Accountability campaign were working to stop this. But we may just end of contributing to it. Oh well, I've still got my gun...
Dedicated to Penny Smith♥♥♥