General Discussion
Showing Original Post only (View all)Free traders, and I mean all of them, worldwide, do you understand what's wrong here? [View all]
Offshoring of jobs is meant for one purpose: to reduce wages without reducing prices.
It is why Germany outsources some of its car production to anti-union zones in the United States, and why the United States outsources... well... everywhere.
Globalism exists for no other reason but to use one nation's poor as a spear to pierce the heart of another nation's job security and livable wages. It is the primary weapon of mass destruction against unions - why bother negotiating against unionized factory workers when you can close it down and move it to China? Globalization was designed as a superweapon - a nuclear bomb, a Death Star - against the working class. It is nothing else, it serves no other purpose, it achieves no other effect, but to fatten the corporate bottom line by reducing workers' wages.
For America, globalization does NOTHING but reduce standards of living. NOTHING.
Why? Because nobody ever pursues offshoring to pursue places with better working conditions. Nobody ever pursues offshoring to pursue places with better wages. Nobody ever pursues offshoring to pursue eco-friendliness. In fact, globalism exists to eliminate all three of the above, to do exactly one thing: to make the captains of industry rich.
If you are for free trade you are missing this basic and ever-present reality that lives and breathes at the very expense of America's working class.
Globalization is that which robs Peter to pay Paul. America's working class is Peter. You will never, ever get the allegiance of Peter to such a system. Not ever.
When you tell Peter that he must sacrifice to help Paul you will only make Peter angrier. Especially when the third guy in the equation, Mitt, the guy who's doing the foreign outsourcing, is getting obscenely rich at the cost of Peter.
Write that down. Globalism is making Mitt fabulously rich and is bleeding Peter dry. Peter is America's working class.
When you tell Peter that he is being a xenophobe because he's tired of being bled dry, think about that for a second. You're telling American workers that they should be happy that blue-collar factories and white-collar offices are closing and they're going unemployed with precious little hope of finding an equally good-paying job. You are telling them that they are xenophobes if they have a problem with that.
You might as well ask someone to attach a thousand mosquitoes to their arm and let them suck away at them, and if they say no, then they're xenophobes. That's the logic of your xenophobe argument in a nutshell. In short, you are swimming upstream against basic survival instinct. Nothing ever wins against survival instinct. Anything that does try to win, loses because predators take it out of the game. That predator's name? You guessed it... Mitt, the only guy in the equation who is getting rich off of globalism.
There is no argument you can ever make that will convince America's working class to agree to continue to be the prey of Globalism. Protectionism is a natural survival instinct expressed in political context. You cannot justify opposing protectionism any more than you can justify white blood cells ignoring a disease. A disease injected into our economic bloodstream not by poor people in Mexico, but by people like Mitt. Ever wonder why support for protectionism has grown so explosively? It's because it is a natural immunological response to a deadly pathogen. A pathogen introduced into the environment by the Plutocrats.
When you argue that globalism is not a zero sum game, you are correct on that point: globalization is not a zero-sum game for America's workers, because it is a negative-sum game for America's working class. There is no amount of stretching your imagination, not even in your wildest dreams, that gets you to showing a plus-sum game for America's workers. There is none. Globalism is a negative-sum game for America's workers. They know that. You know that. To deny it is to engage in sheer delusion.
You even bring up the specter of a trade war if America resorts to protectionism. What the rest of America understands, however, is that America has been the target of a relentless GLOBAL trade war for several decades now. A trade war which can easily be seen in the form of our monstrous trade deficit - half of which is NOT oil imports. Without the oil imports it is the largest trade deficit in the history of nations, in absolute if not relative terms. That is a trade war already in progress. Telling America's workers that tariffs amount to a trade war is like telling a kid it's wrong to hit back at a bully. Ever wonder why that doesn't work? Like I said... you're up against survival instinct, and survival instinct only ever loses with an organism that is best suited as prey. America's working class is not best suited as prey.
And the worst joke of it all? While you are trying to sell benefits of globalism that do not exist by any stretch of one's imagination, the globalists you are defending, are brazenly fighting wage increases in the very poor nations you say depend on stealing American jobs. You have nothing to say about that. You can't say anything about it. It's as important a part of globalism as the brain is to the human body. If other nations aren't fighting wage increases, then globalism cannot exist; if wages go up, then jobs can't move overseas. It becomes too expensive to do so. Globalism dies, production becomes more local. Please, free traders, get familiar with the term Ouroboros. Globalism is that. You support a system that either sustains itself by ruining entire nations, or which will devour itself into nonexistence. How is that logical?
Globalism will ruin America. It has destroyed America's working class, it is why we've lost all concept of job stability, it is why a record number of Americans are on welfare, and most of all, it is part of why people like Mitt Romney are getting filthy rich. It is a major contributor to our national debt, a millstone around the value of our currency, and it has done absolutely nothing for America's working class except drive it into ruin.
If you are for Globalism then you really do not care about America's working class. You really don't care if the ranks of America's poor continue to swell. You don't care about the Plutocracy capturing 90% of all economic gains while American workers sleep in forests in 22 degree weather because their wages have been driven into the dirt. You don't care because you defend the very system that enables all of this to happen.
You only have yourself to blame for how hostile America is now to free trade. If you were to scream loudly about how Globalists suppress wage increases in other nations, then perhaps your argument would have some credibility. But free traders worldwide, have scarcely ever done such a thing. If you would come out and protest the environmental pollution and poor working conditions where jobs are outsourced to, then you might have some credibility. If you would speak out against the captains of industry who get ultra rich while Americans go unemployed and Chinese workers commit suicide to escape their jobs, you might give protectionists pause. If you were to protest when Plutocrats complain about workers not wanting to work for $2 a day, and if you were to admit that there simply aren't enough "new industry" jobs to support America's swelling ranks of the unemployed, you might have some common ground. You can't do these things because to do these things is to question the need for globalism to exist. It can't exist without cheap labor, exploitation or environmental ruin.
Finally, one thing is true down to the last person when it comes to people who support free trade: they never, ever express any feelings of regret or sympathy for America's working class as they pay the ultimate price for globalization: joblessness and increasing poverty, and living in the woods in 22 degree temperatures, even as absolutely everyone in the third world and especially the Plutocracy, enjoy growth and increased prosperity. One thing that is common to all free traders is that they don't even TRY to feel sorry for American workers. Globalism has told America's working class to find a spot under an overpass and go fuck themselves or die trying. How can you be surprised, then, that American workers are now saying the same thing to globalism?
Listen to America's working class. They don't want globalism. The harder you push it, the worse things will get.