Mr. Conspiracy forgot to tell you, first, that alleged American corporations don’t believe in free markets, free enterprise, or free people. The reason many products in your Walmart, Kohls, Targets, Toy r Uses, etc. are made in China is because the Chinese government keeps some 90 percent of its money out of the world money-speculations trade.
Second, his custom Keds are made and customized in a Chinese factory.
I have nothing against international trade or governments keeping a tight hold on their currency. In fact, I’m all for both. But if our society, its economics, politics, and culture are going to promote the ideologies of free trade, free enterprise, and neo-capitalist business investment risk reduction and subsequent tax shifts from taxpayer to business, we ought to understand that’s what we are doing.
But many of us don’t see that. We fall in line behind laws that allow corporations and businesses to get bigger. We give incredible amounts of tax incentives and outright cash for job creation to businesses that move their money overseas to avoid any threat of taxes from the communities they have just fleeced. We don’t get it because we are all learn from a very early age to accept, without question, that capitalist endeavor is part-and-parcel of being a free people.
I am all for that, as well. At no time, will anyone turn me against another worker–not Chinese factory workers, undocumented immigrants from Mexico or elsewhere, not even those workers from more prosperous economies whose money is invested in real assets and our national debt.
I will not bite on the bait thrown to us, that enticing blend of belief that somehow we lose when workers work, when wages increase, and when lives get better. I will not fight another worker, be it the Mexican in the roofing industry, the Biafran accountant who works on the cheap, or the Iraqi who has done well with his convenience store down the block.
I work with my hands, head, and back, and own next to nothing. people in a similar struggle are there, in part, due to divisions that we did not necessarily create for ourselves, and which, in many ways are artificial. I am loyal to workers. I always come to their aid, regardless what they think or believe of me.
But while Americans lap up the ideology of capitalism, capitalists don’t believe in it. All that Milton Friedman, free-market rhetoric we here from conservatives, business people, and corporations is good enough for us workers. In fact, it allows them to continue to make products in a place where money is kept artificially cheap. We buy, work, and get poorer, not just as Americans, but as workers all over the world. Meanwhile, those “with” get more.
And in this, we are forced to buy Chinese goods kept cheap partially due to Chinese government money policy. American business and corporate greed mongers–and all that small business that’s supposed to be so good for us is not exempt from the Chinese-goods scam–benefit. American workers, and workers all over the world, including China suffer.
Chinese workers are better off than they were 20 years ago. China has a growing middle class. I’m as proud of the Chinese worker as I am of my fellow Americans. But until the terms of trade are equal between China and American workers, and workers in Brazil, Mexico, Germany–workers everywhere–American corporations, medium and small business, stock traders, in fact all aspects and participants in the structures of big-business neo-capitalism are on the hook for fucking workers around the world and here at home.
Glenn Back is a liar, cheater, and participant in screwing the American worker, and workers around the world. He wraps the anti-worker rhetoric beneficial to greed and human exploitation in anti-American rhetoric, and we buy it–making us participants in our own oppression.
This, sadly, is typical American story.
The history of poor and working Americans shows that it will take miracles and mountain moving to get them to look past the next paycheck. But that I won’t convince you to do better, reach farther, and dream bigger for your success as a loving people who want meaningful work, living wages, and healthy families doesn’t relieve me of the responsibility to keep trying.
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