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The good-paying jobs have gone bye-bye, get used to it By
Bev Conover January 16, 2004—Remember the phrase "eating your own?" Well, that is what brainless Corporate America is doing to its US consumers by shipping out the decent paying jobs that allowed people to buy all those products—needed or not—constantly pushed in advertisements on TV, radio and plastered to any horizontal or vertical surface. Without people with the money to buy, Corporate America collapses, but the geniuses exporting Americans' jobs haven't yet made that connection. All they can see is the short-term swelling of their profits. In fattening their bottom lines—and the bigwigs' obscene salaries, bonuses, benefits and all manner of perks—they have plundered our natural resources, polluted our environment, stripped our industrial base and are now even sending white collar jobs offshore, where they are plundering other peoples' natural resources, polluting their environment, exploiting their labor and even threatening to have the corporate puppets in Washington make war on any nation that resists. Welcome to the New World Order in which those who made $50,000 and up a year are now competing for jobs at Wal-Mart and McDonald's that barely pay minimum wage. Oops, don't tell them you have one or more college degrees or were a skilled industrial worker or you will be declared "overqualified," which means no job as one of Wal-Mart's precious "associates" or as a McDonald hamburger flipper. If you are lucky, you will earn enough to buy food, clothing and keep a roof over your head. If not, there is dumpster-diving and discarded cartons big enough to curl up in—just no sleeping on park benches or anywhere you can be seen in public spaces, because that upsets the fat cats who will sic the police on you. What you won't be buying is all that "stuff," as George Carlin calls it, that keeps the captains of Corporate America in their mansions, luxury SUVs, yachts and private jets, but they aren't smart enough to figure that out. Instead, when they aren't busy patting themselves on the back for being good world citizens by exploiting . . . er, employing people in less developed countries, scouting for the next country to exploit when those in the ones they are currently exploiting start demanding more than slave wages, they are selling Americans a bill of goods along with overpriced products made abroad. Here are some of the code words they use—words that should make you cringe every time you hear or read them—and what they actually mean:
If the above aren't insulting enough, now we are being told the good-paying white collar jobs also are being exported and won't be coming back, so get used to it. We have been told to get used to a lot in the past three years: the loss of our freedoms, a bogus war on terrorism, endless wars on the "enemies" of the corporations (a.k.a. Bush's ever-expanding "axis of evil"), in addition to being told to "get over" stolen elections, a White House occupant installed by five Supreme Court justices, Bush's complicity in 9/11, and illegal "preemptive" wars on two sovereign nations. Of course, the collapse of Corporate America wouldn't be such a bad thing. At least we would have the opportunity to rebuild our economic system on a foundation of fairness and justice for American workers and halt the exploitation of foreign workers. We also could end corporate personhood, an oxymoron that has allowed inanimate entities to grab more rights than any flesh and blood person. The question is do we withhold as many of our dollars as we can to hasten the collapse, thereby lessening the pain, or wait for the inevitable implosion of Corporate America? The decision is ours, unless you believe getting used to becoming a slave in a banana republic is an option. Bev Conover Editor & Publisher Online Journal™ http://www.onlinejournal.com |
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