Tapsearch Com EditorIt's really all about you in the global economic arena. (LINK)
October 26th 2007 16:54
Adam Smith held labor as something sacred and the core of all societies
( Free Traders use Adam Smith in a different way ignoring the above and the fact he spoke prior to the industrial revolution. )
So far in the history of the world, nothing has surpassed the power of the Free Enterprise system. However, today it is dangerously flawed. The Free Enterprise system should make it easier for people to be good. It should be a simple system and not complex as it is today where the manipulations have taken over the ideals. Free Enterpise is about owners enjoying a decent living while at the same time extend similar benefits to all the people they employ in the venture. We now have upside down economies with local value added economies destroyed. Local value added economies have be chopped up into pieces and sent around the world. This has created a new form of Colonialism where nations find they must protect their interests worldwide. Instead of being partners in a Free Enterprise ventures, workers are used as just tools for the sake of others to make millions of dollars.
Globalization and Free Trade use branding and images for reality. Today, we have products where only the brand and image remain as the face to the customer with the manufacturing in some far away place. Shoppers still buy as if the brand name are still produced in their own economy.
Branding and imaging is not confined to economics. The U.S. invents a war against terrorism where the targets can be anything they choose to call terrorists. The term Shock and Awe covers the killing of innocents replacing the old term of Colateral Damage. This originally replaced the the phrase - killing of innocent people. The terms resistance fighters and rebels have been replaced with the word insurgents
Free Trade and Globalization have made human beings the main commodities - not products. Workers who have no voice in the process of Globalization and are put on a world trading block to compete with one another for the same jobs. Their only voice is to take it or leave in the choice of impoverished or slave wage jobs.
Even if everyone in the world received high tech skills and a high standard of education, it means very little if all have to compete for the same jobs. There will always be someone who will work for less in a race to the bottom level.
Only local value added economies in balanced geopolitical settings will work. Local communities need about 5 to 7 levels of added value from raw product up to the retail or end user level. This way the values are in sync with everything else up and down the line. There is an economic ecology too. We need to duplicate success in local situations and not have chopped up economies spread across the globe. The Marshall Plan helped restore local value added economies around the world. It was based on the awesome industrial might of the U.S. Now that might is chopped up into pieces. The U.S. has to act as if they still have it in a protective mode. The U.S. is becoming a paper tiger even privatising war where there are more contractors than soldiers fighting wars.
Globalism means a centralization of control over the flow of commerce. When anything is centralized, it also centralizes all the negatives and make them more of a rule rather than the exception. Survival of the fittest takes over. We also have international enitities like the WTO that controls the flow of commerce outside of any real democratic process and act as if they are above individual nations laws.
We have things like the New Deal subsidies being used by giant trans national corporations cutting off the livelihood of subsistent living farmers in places like Mexico, South America, South Korea and Afghanistan. The cash crops turn into illegal drugs.
View the Cross 9/11 tangle of terror. Who can untangle the terror Globalization and Free Trade have bred?
( Free Traders use Adam Smith in a different way ignoring the above and the fact he spoke prior to the industrial revolution. )
So far in the history of the world, nothing has surpassed the power of the Free Enterprise system. However, today it is dangerously flawed. The Free Enterprise system should make it easier for people to be good. It should be a simple system and not complex as it is today where the manipulations have taken over the ideals. Free Enterpise is about owners enjoying a decent living while at the same time extend similar benefits to all the people they employ in the venture. We now have upside down economies with local value added economies destroyed. Local value added economies have be chopped up into pieces and sent around the world. This has created a new form of Colonialism where nations find they must protect their interests worldwide. Instead of being partners in a Free Enterprise ventures, workers are used as just tools for the sake of others to make millions of dollars.
Globalization and Free Trade use branding and images for reality. Today, we have products where only the brand and image remain as the face to the customer with the manufacturing in some far away place. Shoppers still buy as if the brand name are still produced in their own economy.
Branding and imaging is not confined to economics. The U.S. invents a war against terrorism where the targets can be anything they choose to call terrorists. The term Shock and Awe covers the killing of innocents replacing the old term of Colateral Damage. This originally replaced the the phrase - killing of innocent people. The terms resistance fighters and rebels have been replaced with the word insurgents
Free Trade and Globalization have made human beings the main commodities - not products. Workers who have no voice in the process of Globalization and are put on a world trading block to compete with one another for the same jobs. Their only voice is to take it or leave in the choice of impoverished or slave wage jobs.
Even if everyone in the world received high tech skills and a high standard of education, it means very little if all have to compete for the same jobs. There will always be someone who will work for less in a race to the bottom level.
Only local value added economies in balanced geopolitical settings will work. Local communities need about 5 to 7 levels of added value from raw product up to the retail or end user level. This way the values are in sync with everything else up and down the line. There is an economic ecology too. We need to duplicate success in local situations and not have chopped up economies spread across the globe. The Marshall Plan helped restore local value added economies around the world. It was based on the awesome industrial might of the U.S. Now that might is chopped up into pieces. The U.S. has to act as if they still have it in a protective mode. The U.S. is becoming a paper tiger even privatising war where there are more contractors than soldiers fighting wars.
Globalism means a centralization of control over the flow of commerce. When anything is centralized, it also centralizes all the negatives and make them more of a rule rather than the exception. Survival of the fittest takes over. We also have international enitities like the WTO that controls the flow of commerce outside of any real democratic process and act as if they are above individual nations laws.
We have things like the New Deal subsidies being used by giant trans national corporations cutting off the livelihood of subsistent living farmers in places like Mexico, South America, South Korea and Afghanistan. The cash crops turn into illegal drugs.
View the Cross 9/11 tangle of terror. Who can untangle the terror Globalization and Free Trade have bred?
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Working poor streching pay to the breaking point ( reference: Plain Dealer article Oct 24, 2007)
Free Trade has produced a working poor class in the USA. They are finding it more and more difficult to survive economically. Free Trade depends on large consumer class with enough money to pay for the products. However, as Free Trade evolved, more and more workers in the USA lost their middle class jobs. A working poor class was created. This class is finding it harder to afford even the cheaper imports.
The upper middle class is doing well in the United States but there are not enough of them to make Free Trade work. It is obvious, even if the upper middle class totals 50 million people n the USA, it is too small of a group to keep Free Trade afloat.
According to the article titled Working poor stretching pay to the breaking point, living from paycheck to paycheck in America is getting harder. What used to last four days might last half that long now. . they eat less for lunch so the kids con have a healthy dinner. It's starting to affect what is left of the middle class in the USA as well as the poor. It has reached a point where merchants like Wal-Mart, 7-Eleven and the Family Dollar Stores are feeling the pain. Sales data show a marked and more prolonged drop in spending the days before shoppers get their payday checks, when they buy only the barest essentials before splurging around the payday. Wal-Mart, the worlds largest retailer who is the largest distributor of imported goods, said the imbalance in spending before and after payday in July was the biggest it has ever seen.
Retail consultant Flickinger reports, "They are buying more peanut butter and pasta". Food costs have increased in the past 12 months radically. Food Pantries, which distribute food-stuffs to the needy, are reporting severe shortages and reduced government funding at the very time that they are seeing asurge of new people seeking help.
Free Trade is indeed a race to the bottom and the above report confirms it. The working poor class in the USA that has been created by the most massive dislocation of jobs in U.S. history including the Great Depression, are finding it difficult to afford even the cheaper imports while the workers who make the products outside the USA can not afford to buy the very things they make let alone have anything left to buy what the U.S. has left to sell.
It is now becoming an endless hole of failures - a real race to the bottom.