August 07, 2013, 2013
Wednesday PM

In the nineteenth and the early twentieth century we brought the “chink” and the “wetback” to the factory via massive in-migration. In the early twenty-first century we have reversed the process and now via outsourcing bring the factory to the “wetback” and to the “chink.” The intent in both instances is, nonetheless, the same, to degrade labor to the point of a peonage as close to slave labor as is humanly possible.

As first conceived in the mid-1980s the concept of “globalization” meant increased profits and opportunities to large business concerns by opening up overseas markets, in other words producing and selling more product; but it quickly morphed into “multi-nationalism,” a beast of far different and much more sinister character. In the hands of the corporatists “multi-nationalism” has come to mean simply “above and beyond” nations, and absolutely beyond any set of national laws. To the multi-nationalists the very concept of the “nation” is obsolete; and they are hell bent to destroy the concept as quickly as possible because it suits them; they want to be masters and monarchs of us all. A “super monarchy” is where this crap is headed, and damned fast at that. These are the most treasonous creatures in the history of the world; they have contempt for everything and everybody except their own larded asses.

They have set out very consciously to convince you that their greed is good for everybody else; and damned any parent among you if this crap is the legacy you intend to bestow upon your children.

For they degrade and demean the very act of work itself.

This is by conscious intent, not some accident or inadvertence occurring as consequence of some phenomena.

In 1981 Robert Welch first verbalized the mantra of this abomination, “The purpose of business management is to maximize the wealth of the shareholders.” It seems so simple it has to be logical, but what it really is saying is that “capital” is everything, and everything else is meaningless. The very purpose of the concept of the “corporation” is to accumulate capital, allocate the profits to the fewest individuals possible, and to hell with who or what you crap all over in the process. Nations can fall, democracy destroyed, millions killed by pollution and by industrial accidents, and none of that matters because “the purpose of business management is to maximize the wealth of the shareholders.”

In other words, if one is to truly adhere to this mantra, the whole purpose of human existence is to create corporate institutions that enrich beyond the wildest dreams of Midas or Croesus a few hundred individuals out of hundreds of millions, and to impoverish, if not kill, the rest. That cannot be the purpose of any business activity.

To corrupt the concept of “corporatism” to have that meaning is precisely what the multi-nationals have been doing for quite some time now.

On a radio visit last year the host asked me how any country could impose tax laws or minimum wage laws on any corporation that has as its choice relocation to some other country where such laws do not exist, as if this was the natural way of things. What is actually much more natural is that Hershey’s is located in Pennsylvania because that is where the family started the business, not because of its proximity to the raw materials of the business. Detroit in the meantime is conveniently located respective the raw materials needed to produce automobiles. In most instances with American corporations, though, they were originally located proximate to the location where their founders lived, nothing more complicated than that. Whatever else can be said historically it has not in any sense been “natural” to take U.S. corporations and transfer their operations overseas to exploit slave labor provided by dictators, just so they can avoid minimum wage laws. Nothing natural about that at all.

Corporations do not exist in a vacuum, and it cannot be the purpose of any corporation “to maximize the wealth of the shareholders” at the cost of the nation or of its citizens. In the first instance a corporation can exist at all only because of the rule of law operating in a secure society where safety of person and property is guaranteed. Without transportation networks and massive quantities of other types of infrastructure, all created by someone else, and much of that by government, i.e. the people as “collective;” without prospective employees and markets, a corporation cannot begin to function.

So to assert that everything gravitates to the top, and the rest be damned is a lie on its surface. If a corporation is not of great value to the society and to the individuals of that society, it has little justification for existence.

Not that long ago as the decades are counted the right wing in this country had a campaign motto that went like this, “America, love it or leave it,” generally alluding then to the same group of people right wingers allude to now, i.e. everyone who disagrees with their point of view. Now, of course, these same right wingers have discovered the advantage of crawling into bed with Communist dictators, Muslim dictators, and right wing dictators all over the world, all that cheap slave labor.

Red China used to be the name for this mess in China, and I don’t see any reason why that name should be changed. They have put up a lot of gloss and façade, but Red China remains in the clutches of the nastiest dictatorship on this planet, a dictatorship that killed at least 20 million of its own people as recently as the Cultural Revolution of 1966, and that employs the bulk of its people in unsafe working environments under slave labor conditions. Twenty-four cents an hour and a minimum work week of 86 hours is slave labor.

Last I looked we are at war with Islam. I realize we claim otherwise, and I actually believe we are just at war with ourselves at this point. Terrorists have and will always exist, and according them “nation” status is stupid; treat them like the criminals they are. But until further notice all of Islam has been placed in the “red zone” of danger and badness; Shariah law, not secular law, government by Mohammed. It’s not just a terrorist under every bush; are we not supposed to be perpetually terrorized by the prospect of being governed by the Koran?

And look at who all these “multi-national” U.S. corporatists are employing? Muslims in Malaysia and Indonesia, the slave labor of a Communist dictatorship, anyone but a U.S. citizen. Then they wrap themselves up in an American flag and call themselves patriots.

Nor can one legitimately argue that these products can only be produced at a retail cost that sells the product only with slave labor because every one of these products was being produced by U.S. employees at U.S. wage scales before the factories and the jobs were shipped overseas. The “false profits” created by the employment of overseas slave labor is treason in two directions. While simultaneously weakening this country in their efforts to trash the American middle class, they strengthen Communist, Muslim, and right wing dictatorships the world over.

All this just to pocket the difference, and to use this money politically to destroy democracy in this country. But one way or the other their overreaching greed will destroy them. These morons don’t know how to fix their own toilets. Destroy the middle class, and they destroy their own markets. Destroy their own markets, and they will not be able to replenish their filthy nest with further profits. If they expect to survive on their hoarded largesse, bad news again; the pissed off folks who built those gated communities will dismantle them bolt by bolt and board by board; and all the nickel-plated .44 mags in existence don’t mean squat when your opposition can drop you from 650 meters and out with one shot.

The denial of consciously intended class warfare by the rich and the super rich is the biggest lie of all. These traitorous bastards have as their specific and obvious intent the destruction of the American middle class and the very nation itself, while hoarding such massive accumulations of wealth as will assure their hereditary social, economic, and political power in perpetuity; in short, a return to monarchy.

But that is not enough. The value of work must be degraded to the level of slavery and peonage; in other words, as the rich get richer and richer and move away from us in terms of increased wealth, so, too, we move away from them at almost equivalent velocity as our wealth, the value of our work, in relative terms is decreased, is degraded into something less than nothing.

Life is not a lottery with odds of ten million to one determining who makes it while the rest suck. Life is too precious for that kind of conceptualization. Life is the battle against the void, against the nothingness of non-existence, and a world of limited resources cannot limit those resources to the few at the cost of the detriment of everyone else. I had hoped we had advanced a bit more than that in the last century or so, but this is a clear regression.

Dug out from whatever evil recesses they have been hidden, long discredited social theories have recently been re- popularized by the super rich to justify the greed and the treason of the super rich. Eugenics, social Darwinism, the insipid “objectivist” teachings of Ayn Rand, in many ways more Hitlerian than Hitler. She claimed, of course, to lack racial bias; but her thinking was very white; and in her world only the “prime movers” (read “job creators”) had the right to exist; all others should “perish as they should.” Her views fit nicely with the theories of the environmental right wing, that only 500 million humans will be alive in the year 2100.

When you consider that Great Britain recently announced it expects one-third of its babies born in 2012 to live to be at least one hundred years old, one does have to wonder who isn’t going to make the cut.

The purpose of business and business management is not to “maximize the wealth of the shareholders.” The purpose of business is to nurture our posterity. The latter formulation may at first byte seem as trite as the former, but as in science the simplest observations often result in the most complex theorems. Each corporation profits by providing a product or service that society thinks it wants or needs. A product or service must be produced or provided in some way, and that requires the merging of capital with materials and labor. Thus at the first level of intersection a corporation interfaces with its market, with its materials vendors, and with labor. Each group has its interests, its needs, and its desires. At the second and third levels of intersection there is the community in which a corporation is physically located and the local, regional, and national governments and the laws they enforce.

To say that any corporation operates in a vacuum is simply not true. The purpose of any corporation supersedes the corporation at a point where the product or service is perceived as a “need” by these other groups. It’s just like any invention; once turned loose in the hands of its users it quickly, virtually immediately, becomes something else. No matter that the “need” is only perceived; a fabrication; not real. The corporation has long since become more than the sum of its parts.

“Maximizing the wealth of the shareholders” has its place; it is not, however, a dominating value. It is a relative value that generally demands superiority of “place” in the pecking order. Capital perceives itself as being more important than labor; to an extent that is true. Capital is in greater demand, labor is in greater supply. Rare are the moments when the opposite is true.

A corporation’s relationships with its vendors are often far more complicated and consequentially far-reaching than its relationship with labor; and with government exist the most complicated relationships of all.

It remains a curious question whether historically the armies and navies of Western Europe followed the traders to the New World, or whether the traders followed the armies and the navies; and the answer to that question in the modern world remains as curious today; but in general terms it appears the case for the time being that a nation can decide whether a corporation exists, but a corporation cannot decide whether a nation exists. The fact that appears to be changing is, of course, what we are concerned about here.

Current corporate management would have us believe that none of these other groups’ interests or concerns has any merit whatsoever; that they are interchangeable nodules of inconsequential nonsense. That’s crap.

When a U.S. corporation relocates its operation to China to exploit slave labor, it is displacing American laborers with that slave labor, pocketing the difference in cash (No, the retail price will not go down.). The ripple effect of damaging consequences to labor, to vendors, to American communities, and to government institutions is profound. For the excessive greed of a handful, an incredible amount of real economic damage is inflicted.

These people claim in most instances to be U.S. citizens, but they support slave labor in overseas dictatorships. They finance dictatorships to the detriment of this country. They finance themselves to the detriment of this country. By their own historical standards they are the most hypocritical of traitors, aggrandizing a Communist dictatorship at the expense of their own country. Then they claim maximum rights of U.S. citizenship.

What I see is a group of people who don’t give a damned about anybody or anything, who think they live in a vacuum, and our job is to take whatever crap they dish out.

They want to own the world, give it to them. The world I am told is four-fifths water, so let them rule the waves. Revoke their citizenship, rent some cruise ships, and send them packing, on perpetual world cruises. Then they just have to stare each other in the face; they don’t have to worry about us, and we don’t have to worry about them. True multi-nationals; no country at all.

In the meantime boycott their products and them right out of business. Apple is one of the worst offenders with this garbage, but the perceived “need” for their product is also great. Boycotting Macs out of existence would be difficult, and probably not preferable. There are plenty of substitutes, however, for Etch A Sketches and Peppermint Patties. Boycott them to hell. Why would you even think of giving your child a toy that you know was produced by slave labor for twenty-four cents an hour with a minimum work week of 86 hours? How can you even consider such a thing?

The U.S. Tax Code is on occasion punitive. The tax system is invariably designed to encourage certain types of economic behavior, while discouraging others. At the extreme are such entities as personal holding companies, which the U.S. government considers so intolerable the tax rate is 108%. You pay the government more than you make.

To stop the treason that so much of this outsourcing in fact is I recommend to the U.S. Congress the imposition of the “American Workers Dignity, Respect, and Equalization Tax,” a 108% tax on the differential between slave labor wages paid overseas and the American wages and benefits displaced by this outsourcing, the specific intent being to stop U.S. right wingers from crawling into bed with overseas dictators of whatever ilk to exploit their slave labor because “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…………………..”, etc.

And these greedheads are not really us.

Read and forward; let others see.

David G. Hanger
Ketchikan, Alaska

Representations of fact and opinions in letters are solely those of the author.
The opinions of the author do not represent the opinions of Sitnews.