Yet the real winner in the Cold War was clearly capitalism, and the capitalist knew it. While the majority of the US political establishment dithered about how to realign after the fall of the Soviet Union the money KNEW what to do. Move out and find value in the "global" marketplace that had been denied to them throughout the duration of the Cold War. With communism destroyed, the ideology of money was king. American dollars began to leave the shores of the US and flood into emerging markets.
Investments came into the emerging markets and began to improve infrastructure – roads and electrical grids – in locations around existing or upgradeable transportation centers. Its aim was to take advantage of the one commodity that the Western nations no longer had in supply – cheap labor. The greatest wealth redistribution in recorded history was underway.
Globalism, a policy of treating the planet as the proper sphere of US economic influence – economic imperialism – was born with the death of the competing Soviet ideology. The unwitting and uncared for victim of this march of the globalist was the American worker and the American middle-class. Good jobs, hard working, esteem building jobs were being sent packing to new exotic locales with low wage earners. Capital investments were being written off and salary and benefit savings were being pushed to the bottom line, and manufacturing began its long decline in the US. To be followed shortly by those service industry jobs that telecommunications and networks made easy to build overseas with a little capital investment and a large pool of skilled cheap laborers to utilize.
Both political parties have acquiesced in what is essentially the looting of America's middle-class heritage of jobs. While these may not be the "jobs that Americans do not want to do", they are the jobs that American businesses "do not want to pay Americans to do." American business, in seeking to be rewarded by Wall Street, has made labor a tradable commodity which places the American worker in an unwinnable position and disrupts a long standing partnership between that worker and the economy that generations of American workers helped to build.
A nation is more than a mere collection of people. A nation is a collection of peoples' economic efforts, their philosophy of government, the use of their nation's natural resources, their nation's intellectual property, and the shared vision of their nation's future. In the case of America it is, and always has been, the collective efforts of the whole that has created our nation's success. And it is that success upon which America's corporations were built.
And it is that collective effort of the whole nation upon which America's corporations have turned their back. And worst of all, the American worker is the one sacrificed. From the rural sections of our country, to the high rises and the inner cities, America's workers are being replaced, laid-off, or overlooked. The American workers, whose innovations are the bedrock of America's growth, find themselves watching the closing of their factories and plants, and a leadership immune and unconcerned by what that means to Main Street USA.
The CEO's tell the nation these events are essential in order for America to compete "globally", and the political elite buy this as unfettered truth and then parrot it back to the voters as a cover to their failure of leadership. This sacrifice of the American worker cannot continue.
As we watch the debate about rescue packages notice that the debate centers on saving the globalist and not on the American worker. Our financial problems stem from a globalized interconnected financial system that is making money from using the American worker, but which has no interest in preserving that which gave the American workers high standing in the financial system in the first place.
It is time to throw off the blinders and for the conservatives of the Republican Party to take the side of the middle-class fight against the global looting of the nation. If corporations wish to take advantage of cheap labor in other locales then a tax system to level the field is needed. The entrustment of generations of American workers cannot be ignored, the nation cannot support both the housing industry that the world seems so to need and the lowering of America's living standard to Chinese levels in order to compete. If you wish to sell within this nation to Americans then pay for the privilege. Build it here and pay Americans, or pay the Value Added Tax to acquire access to a large consumer market.
Instead of helping to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, conservatives should restructure the system to support the American middle-class.
