Thatcher, Reagan & Mulroney - And Their Snake Oil
As a person ages it gets harder to believe. With time the disconnect between belief and reality, between perception and fact, becomes inescapable, undeniable. Some truths, usually value notions such as kindness and compassion and the like, weather the scrutiny of passing time better than other concepts, particularly the ideological sort. You begin to do the unthinkable - you look down at the narrow, slippery ledge and realize how easy it is for all of us to lose our footing.
In my time we were sold the illusion of globalization. We were conned into believing we could abandon those menial, manufacturing jobs and instead embrace the information age, the "knowledge economy" of the future. We were no longer people of thermoses and lunch pails and steel toed boots. Let the developing world have those chores. We would be a society that extracted great wealth through processing and transmitting information. This would be the line by which we maintained the divide between the new world and the old.
And who sold us this nonsense? A big-haired ideologue, a rank opportunist and a borderline senile B-movie star. Thatcher, Mulroney and Reagan. Why did we believe them? What were we thinking? These three tore down vibrant, resilient societies and created a schism that perpetrated a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-rich. The rich got oh so much richer by outsourcing all those once expensive manufacturing jobs to poor nations with low wages and lax regulations. In their wake they left us with the promise of a glorious future in the knowledge economy.
Fair is fair. We yielded our manufacturing sector. We even dropped our trousers on trade and tariffs and surrendered our markets to ever less than fair competition. And, having done that, having undone ourselves, we waited for our new legacy, the knowledge economy. In the meantime we flipped burgers and kept busy selling each other those runners from Vietnam.
Today it's obvious that Thatcher, Mulroney and Reagan duped us on that knowledge economy business. That too has been outsourced. Most of us have had to deal with those technical service call centres where "Ashley" greets you with a heavy Mumbai accent. Accounting firms use number crunchers oceans away to process tax returns. My telephone company that earns its profits from me and my fellow Canadians outsources its tele-marketing campaign to South Asians. .....
http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.ca/2011/03/thatcher-reagan-mulroney-and-their.html
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