Globalization

Today’s globalization represents little more than an unregulated extension of capitalist ruling class power.  Corporations tell us globalization raises people out of poverty.  Yet globalization today is based almost entirely on price and, in reality, the helping hand of price-based globalization is difficult to hold on to.

In America, price is not supposed to be the only consideration.  For example, American consumers understand the hidden costs to society that are associated with receiving stolen property.  We understand that even though one doesn’t personally steal a product, purchasing a stolen product provides an unjust enrichment to the criminal and costs society in other ways.  To confront those ills, we as a society criminalized the knowing consumption of stolen property so a bargain on stolen goods is no bargain at all.

At the same time, unjust enrichment of corporations continues without regulation, much less criminal prosecution.  In fact, corporations have been encouraged to flood America’s markets with products that were built in conditions that are illegal within our own borders.  As a nation, we must look away from the bright light of distorted logic that has convinced us to compete with countries where workers have no occupational safety protections, workers compensation, unemployment, protections for women or children, or right to organize.

Corporations have not only been enriched by human exploitation that would be illegal in America, they made windfalls in the process.  For many, many years Americans were conditioned to the cost of things.  We knew those costs included the overhead of security for the workers that created a product or performed a service.  We understood that without the requirement for this security most employers would not provide it, and that without it our citizens would suffer.  We agreed that, if unregulated, the exploitation of capitalism would destroy our country.

Having been conditioned to believe they were paying for those social considerations, American consumers were easy targets for globalization gouging.  When products that had traditionally been priced at $10 were introduced for $8, Americans simply could not imagine that in reality the product was created in a poverty-stricken country for $1.05.  Still today, most American consumers do not fully comprehend the harsh desperation and poverty on the other end of globalization; they cannot even imagine a wage of 80 cents an hour, much less 80 cents a day.

As globalization crawls across the globe in search of cheaper labor, price has become subjective and easily distorted by exchange rates - especially exchange rates for manipulated currencies; currencies that do not compensate for the actual cost of exploitation.  American workers can never win in that game and it’s showing up in our economy.