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Implications for the Developing Countries.
"The Great Robber Barons" of the 2000's
Time Magazine reported in September 2003 issue that under the Bush Presidency there have been averging 80,000 jobs lost every month. And 90,000 lost in September 2003.
We gave up in 2001! The dumping continues month by month... January thru September 2001... 100,000 to 200,00 per month!
First Union Dumps 5800 jobs! - WOR Radio - BusinessWeek Report - 3/19/99
This has been an on-going process since 1980. Tens of millions of educated middle to top executive management jobs have been dumped by the Super Rich Capitalist Elite's to drive the stocks and capital markets for their advantage only! The same people dominate and own the News TV Channels and continue to tell Americans that “Unemployment is down and jobs are being created at an all time high rate.” They are also hiding the accelerating bankruptcies and the jobs with NO BENEFITS and TEMP-TO-PERM jobs, which NEVER go permenant.
The process of “Globalization” is causing a massive transformation and marginalization of the workforce of the developed countries. Even Japan, once known for their protective companies, loyal workers, and life long employment, is about to start “dumping” tens of millions of workers. The more developed countries of Europe are already into the process, by a few years, which the U.S.A. has been conducting since 1980. And it is nonstop even today (December 31, 1998). . .
“So far through November 1998, American companies have let go over 860,000 workers, more than last year at the same time. This Christmas (1998) there are hundreds of thousands (100,000’s) of “pink slips”(firings of workers) to their loyal workers.”- Nightly BusinessNews, PBS, Channel 13, NYC December 30, 1998.
This is causing a rapid rise in the separation of the Rich (power for corporations) and the Poor. And also leaving the Middle Class workers to fend for themselves. Some (few) will be able to climb on to the coat tails of the Rich for the ride up. Most will be marginalized down into a much lower middle class or even into the ranks of the poor. The poor have no chance in this climate.
The workforce is being fired and then rehired (if you can find a job) by ‘temporary agencies” into a “temp” status with much lower pay and with little to no employee benefits. Low paying service jobs. Usually being promised that the job is “temp-to-perm.” And, when it comes time for the “perm” you are “dumped,” rather than a pay increase and or any benefits or a secure job. Those days are over for most workers in America and soon the rest of the more advanced developed countries.
The unions have been systematically dismantled, starting with the signal by ex-President Ronald Reagan in 1980 (Air Traffic Controllers Union.)
The news media (Now controlled by America’s largest corporations (the main "dumpers" of jobs in America) or the benefactors of their growth-through-dumping policies, projects a “rosy” picture of job opportunities.
“The 400 largest corporations in America will be expanding their hiring by a whooping 10% in America in 1999.” Mostly entry level jobs for young college grads in technology areas.”- Bloomberg Radio broadcast December 31, 1998.“Don’t look for jobs at America’s largest corporations, they don’t have any, they are going overseas. Look for jobs at America’s fastest growing and biggest hiring companies now . . . Women Entrepreneurs Startup Firms!”
- 1998 quote at the United Nations by a U.S.A. Mission staffer in response to a NGOs question about the job situation in America.
Ross H. Perot suggested that after the NAFTA Agreement with Mexico you would hear a great “sucking” sound of jobs going to Mexico. They are building a new plant every day in Mexico along the Texas border and paying workers a dollar a day and the working conditions for women are beyond description! Many UN meetings have discussed these conditions by bringing Mexican Women workers here to tell their stories.
After deliberate government policies to “cut” funds to education in America since 1980; The businesses are crying for a relaxation of the immigration laws to be able to allow technicians better trained than Americans (Russian and Indian - I wonder why or how that happened?) into the country. If you are creating the “New World Economic Order” and “Globalizing” by “dumping” your workforce to get the world’s cheap labor. . . why would you want to educate your workers or their children?
American corporations are using rapidly advancing technologies to replace as many of the workforce, that’s left over after the massive “dumpings,” as they can. It has been reported that over 100,000 Secretaries have been dumped or downsized to “temp-no-benefits” status. The figure seems deceptively low if one considers the fact that even General Motors executive offices have dumped their secretaries and given their managers a desktop computer with Microsoft’s Office 98, and told them their on their own. (Remember, "As General Motors goes, so goes America. Does that mean since it is "bye-bye" General Motors, as they move overseas, Is it, "bye-bye" America?) The switching of humans for computerized telephone answering at even America’s largest corporations and the rude, obnoxious attitudes of the temps (can’t blame them under their new work conditions) is a good indication of the corporations interest in their own customers. But when you can “dump” millions of workers and make more money off your stocks, why should you be interested in your customers? . . . unless they are your shareholders.
This massive “dumping” of workers in America would normally get the attention of the religious organizations, and yet you hardly hear a peep from them about this. We can only assume that the “flocks” are coming home! A quick check of the various temples of worship are quite full these days as compared to just a few years back. So “dumping” and marginalizing even suits the churches.
The major television networks have been reporting that, “The 1998 Christmas shopping retail business was off considerably this year.” Seems the consumers are not buying. I wonder why? Maybe NO JOBS, or LOW PAID JOB'S means NO MONEY!
Even one of America’s largest PR and Advertising firms (Saatchi & Saatchi) has been telling their customers (the large corporations) to “only spend your advertising dollars on the top (Sak's Fifth Avenue) and the bottom (K-Mart) of the markets, and to forget the Middle Class (JC Penny and Sears).” I wonder what they know?
It’ not the economy, Stupid! We know the rich are getting richer. See UNDP’s, “Human Development Report’s.” Even Forbes Magazine has stopped printing their latest “Richest List” showing how successfully richer they are getting. Steven Forbes , a presidential candidate, wants to cut the taxes for the rich even more. According to their magazine America’s greatest problem is “Bed Bugs(mites)!” and the need to “build people-proof bunkers in the homes of the rich” and to “fortify your estates.” (1998 article's). The Mayor of New York took it seriously, and has commissioned his own bunker for the Mayor in New York City. Actually, it should be a great tourist attraction.
It’s jobs, Stupid!
There is a “New World Economic Order” (Remember the "Contract With America.") which is Cold, Hard, Crass, Non-Compassionate, quick to Build More Prisons, Put More Police on the Streets, and the Bully Attitude all under ”Rules of (their) Laws“ and “Holier that thou” Attitudes; "Get the President" for his personal sexual affairs, strictly between husband and wife and the third person who is willing to come between the two bound in marriage. The current “you (they) are not Entitled to it” and “if you don’t like it . . . Tuff!” philosophy.
This is a period of massive transformation on a global scale and a period of “consolidate the wealth and power” in the hands of a few. It is not a period of “share the wealth.”
There is building a tension between the Rich (and Corporations) and the rest of humanity.
I wonder where this is headed? Could we be seeing the beginnings of the end of “Capitalism” as we currently know it? What might replace it? Even some Rich folks like; Soros, Jeff Gates, Warren Beatty and many others are speaking out about this.
Recommended Readings:
“The Post-Corporate World” by David C. Korten 1999
Author of “When Corportations Rule the World.”“ . . is a powerful attack aimed at the heart of the Transnational Corporations, Their Ownership, The Super Rich Elite’s, and the Whole of the Capitalist System.
". . . is a book about an important, grievously underreported (until now) social phenomenon, the shutting out of a whole generation of young Americans from opportunity. You can't read it and fail to be persuaded that the prosperousness and optimism of this moment in national life, which can seem pervasive, actually haven't penetrated past the top layers of society.
. . . the oppressive sense of reduced opportunity - is more general, I think , than some indices of social progress might suggest.
I believe that nearly everyone, young and otherwise, feels these downdrafts, feels their fetid, chill breath on the streets and in their culture if not closer to home.
The truth is, for the working middle classes once broad avenue of opportunity has been inexorably narrowing, with far-reaching social consequences.
Middle-classness is a tenuous, contingent, unstable condition. Social mobility in America runs in every direction, and these days it does not necessarily run upward.
Globalization is one of the major reasons for the stagnation, or worse, of most Americans' incomes and economic prospects.
In terms of large, impersonal economic forces, the deteriorating position of American workers sounds unfortunate but inevitable, almost a tidal flow, ordained by the laws of nature. But it is governments that decide to deregulate, to accommodate capital rather then labor, to tax one constituency and not another. Political agency, while not always evident, and not always accountable, drives much of what passes for necessary pain under capitalism. Poverty in the United States, which is easily the wealthiest nation the world has ever seen, is no longer a matter of scarcity. It is a matter of political economy, of deciding how wealth will be distributed.
Young people sense the rot in the structure of opportunity more acutely than the rest of us simply because they are its main victims.
60% of America's adults blame their children for a lack of moral vales. For young people the negative views of them held by their parents generation - expressed in public policy as well as in opinion polls - must constitute a harsh lesson in the moral limitations of adults. As Walter Kirn, a young writer, recently put it, "First the members of the 60's generation hated their parents. Now they hate their kids."
I blame the government. There has been a disastrous lag in policy response both to deindustrialization and to changes in the American family - particularly, in the latter case, to the fact that more and more mothers have entered the paid work force. The failure to publicly subsidize child care has been shortsighted. Now welfare "reform" is forcing millions of poor mothers into the work force. . . millions of American children already are injured by being poorly supervised or unsupervised.
America is in a grotesque orgy of imprisonment of its citizens. America leads the world in incarcerated citizens. Six times higher than Britain, Seventeen times higher than Japan. Even for an old-school fan of the public sector, it's become difficult to feel any enthusiasm for a government whose activism seems to consist mainly of harassing and jailing citizens. Those who hoped that a Clinton administration might slow or reverse this trend have been bitterly disappointed.
Young people sense a growing measure of class consciousness. Kids sense that class lines in America are hardening.
[World Bank and IMF policies of "Structural Adjustment" have deliberately force...] Labor unions membership has been falling globally. Welfare states have been scaled back or dismantled throughout the industrialized world. Poverty and inequality are growing in much of Western Europe, as are all the modern social ills. Young people in Europe face a wall of generational economic disadvantage and future downward mobility at least as high as that faced by their American counterparts, along with chronically high unemployment.
It is often said that in this "Age of the Global Corporation", there can be no coherent political response, at the national level, to the eroding position of workers everywhere.
What price are Americans willing to pay for social peace? This seems to me a central question? We jail the poor in their multitudes, abandon the dream of equality, cede more and more of public life to private interests, let lobbyists run government. Those who can afford to do so lock themselves inside gated communities and send their children to private schools. And then we wonder why the world at large has become harsher and more cynical, why our kids have become strange to us. What young people show us is simply the world we have made for them."
Heard at the United Nations:
From an ambassador/minister of Bangladesh to the heads of the IMF and the World Bank. "You're Globalization and Structural Adjustment policies have no human face!"Response from the head of the IMF. "Globalization and Structural Adjustment is much bigger than any of us. And it is well on its way. Therefore, my advice to you is to Adjust or Perish!.
If you "dump" tens of millions of workers, and you force both husbands and wives to work to equal what the husband use to make by himself. If you leave millions of male workers without jobs, or low paying service jobs (the wonderful new "service economy") You can guess that there will be a lot of divorces impacting the children. and a lot of children left at home alone to watch all the great educational television programming from GE-NBC Ch4, Disney-ABC Ch 7, Westinghouse-CBS Ch 2, Fox-Metromedia Ch 5, Warner Bros.-WPIX Ch 11. It becomes a no-brainer to be able to criticize and tell families that they, "have no family values."
Is that "family values" or "human values" or "corporate values"?
For more insights, See Globaloney!
See the Quotes section of this web site.
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