Globalization.................Sucks

Globalization.......................sucks

NAFTA. CAFTA. HAFTA?

No. We don’t have to have globalization. What has it accomplished for the US? Maybe it has helped some of our companies, but does it help in ways that we want it to?

I was listening to NPR this morning and Governor Arnold from California was talking about his plan to reduce greenhouse gasses in California over the next 5-10 years. They then interviewed a businessman who countered that increasing the cost of doing business in California would just encourage more businesses to leave the United States and go to other countries who do not have the same concern for the environment.

Well.......isn’t that what’s been going on for the past 10 years? Our politicians talk about us “competing” in the world market and our need to have lower cost workers and lower costs of production. Let’s get something straight, “lower costs of production” means moving to countries where workers earn squat and the governments don’t care what kinds of pollutants you are dumping into the soil or pumping into the air or washing into the water.

We want our companies to be regulated and we want our citizens to be safe. But then we turn around and make it easy for US companies to send jobs and factories to countries where they can “lower production costs” at the expense of the citizens of that country. If you simply add 2 and 2 together, we are practically forcing our companies to move out of the US.

What globalization really means is that greed driven choices will dictate that companies produce products in the poorest countries and will produce products in a fashion that gives no real concern to the long or short term health consequences for that country. In that way, the companies will have low wages and low regulatory costs, enabling them to pump out products that can be bought cheaply at Wal-Mart. Our US company stocks then soar. Our US shoppers get low cost items. However, the number of people who can afford Wal-Mart stock and who can afford low cost items is shrinking due to the massive job losses brought about by “globalization.”

Companies will not continue to operate in the US when “globalization” means that they can get the benefit of being a US based company along with paying the wages of a third world company and without the costs of burdensome US environmental and social costs associated with hiring US workers. Why pay into the US social security system on thousands of workers when you can move your factory to China and pay far less?

Our decision to globalize means one thing. We will not get our jobs back until we are willing to work at wages paid to third world workers and until we are willing to allow companies to blast noxious chemicals into our air, land, and water.

Globally Yours,

Blawgerman.