BukowskiOfTheValleyVille
We interrupt our regularly scheduled bloggodoccio to bring you this important message from Mr. Beer 'N Hockey:
"...I think the depth of our present poor economic circumstance is due to the fact the economy has nowhere good to bounce back to. I reckon my province's forest industry's history and present situation mirrors the world's economy in some important ways, the most important of which is the number of plants shut and workers told to f*ck off in the past few decades.
In the early '80s the economic depression was very deep as well. The forest industry was particularly hard hit, but when the economy bounced back most of the sawmills were still there to create capital and employ people.
Not like that any more is it? The old sawmills are gone forever. Same goes for too many of the rest of the work sites across the western world. They are gone to countries where workers are treated more like shite than workers here are.
And if I hear one more motherf*cking politician start blabbering about job creation strategies I am going to vomit. We do not need politicians to get us out of the f*cking mess we are in right now - we need a magician, or, failing that, we need us some truth."
In the early '80s the economic depression was very deep as well. The forest industry was particularly hard hit, but when the economy bounced back most of the sawmills were still there to create capital and employ people.
Not like that any more is it? The old sawmills are gone forever. Same goes for too many of the rest of the work sites across the western world. They are gone to countries where workers are treated more like shite than workers here are.
And if I hear one more motherf*cking politician start blabbering about job creation strategies I am going to vomit. We do not need politicians to get us out of the f*cking mess we are in right now - we need a magician, or, failing that, we need us some truth."
Now that is insight.
And an interesting, and potentially important, POV I've not come across before.
Hmmmmm....
Talking Head puffed-up punditry that actually means something.
It looks like it is not just for David Byrne and/or The Ledgie Boys anymore.
.
3 comments:
And of course, since they pay the workers in the other countries like 'shite', those workers don't get enough disposable income to purchase the products they help produce. So you don't get a new or expanded market to sell the product to. Instead nearly everything gets sent back to the western world, where it's bought on credit based on the fact that there used to be many good-paying jobs here.
Enlightened self-interest is foreign to many of the guys at the top of these companies. This is at least in part because globalization comes with pseudo-hidden (ie: pro-free trade shills denied all sorts of things that have proved true) goodies like a prisoner's dilemma inside. Say you want to grow a new market, and choose to pay your widget-makers enough to buy the widgets they produce. Say your competitor doesn't, but makes widgets really cheap for export to america, whose credit everyone accepts as cash. Are your workers going to buy your expensive widgets, or will they go for the cheap ones?
In a few years you may have grown part of a new market, but then your competitor buys you out. If you don't play the game as dirty and as cutthroat as your competition, you get eaten. Did Adam Smith visualize/predict the incredible mobility of capital and real-time communications that allow the central management of global corporate empire when formulating his ideas on capitalism? I doubt it.
Thanks Anon--
Wasn't it that old hard line commmie pinko socialist Henry Ford (not Fonda) who pretty much said the same thing?
(and acted on his statements)
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Our mills were shipped to China along with our raw logs. Campbell and his greed, wanted to exploit the Chinese people, who receive pennies a day for their labor. Child labor in China is even more cheap.
There is an apple factory, where Chinese are made to sign a declaration, they will not commit suicide. Those are the working conditions in China.
Large corporations are bottomless pits of greed. Decent people would never exploit the poor. However, we have bad people, such as Campbell and Harper who jump at the chance to thieve every dime they can, off the people, who can least afford the rip off.
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