Letter 2 America for March 4, 2014

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Dear America,
English: Steve Jobs shows off the white iPhone...

English: Steve Jobs shows off the white iPhone 4 at the 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference Español: Presentación del iPhone 4 por Steve Jobs en la Worldwide Developers Conference del año 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


I have been writing to you about the great divide in the distribution of America's prosperity between those with capital and those who do the work that produces capital.  Apropos of that subject, last Saturday an article appeared in the New York Times on a topic that is ostensibly unrelated, but that has a tangential relevance to the subject.  A lawsuit has been filed against several silicon valley companies alleging that they conspired to both avoid "poaching" one another's technical personnel--engineers, programmers and the like--and to refrain from making counteroffers to such personnel if they found preferable jobs with new employers.  This isn't a case of the oppressed being further oppressed; technical people in the information technology business make a great deal of money, and as the article points out, they are responsible for the profound spike in the cost of real estate in the area.  My heart isn't bleeding for either side, but the fact of the suit suggests unfair labor practices, conspiracy to fix the price of labor, and perhaps most importantly, personnel practices that border on racketeering.  And guess who was in the vanguard of the movement to institute and enforce the corporate hiring policies involved.  It was Steve Jobs, the patron saint of American free enterprise; the man who told President Obama not to waste his time trying to get the 30,000 jobs he had shipped to China back to this country because he wasn't going to bring them back no matter what.  His justification then was that cost was king among considerations in corporate policy making, and the Chinese would to the work needed to manufacture I-phones cheaper than Americans would...even though the author of a Times series on the subject calculated that the savings amounted to about $5 per unit out of a retail price eighty times that amount or even more, depending on the device in question.  For that savings, Jobs was intractable at a time when many of you were losing your homes because there weren't enough jobs in this country.

So what should we do now to protect wealth accrued out of that kind of sheer greed satisfied at the expense of millions of Americans who used to work in thousands of businesses...Americans  whose jobs are now being done by children in Bangladesh or India or the Philippines.  I mentioned protectionism the last time I wrote on this subject as the topic I would consider next, and now is the time.  The point I want to make on the subject is that there is more than one kind of protectionism, and while some of it, like tariff wars, may be self-destructive for the countries that wage them, protection of business practices at home that redound against the benefit of the nation as a whole do not merit protection despite the supply-side mantra that conservatives sing unremittingly to justify such rapacity.  We have reached the point at which punitive tax policy is necessary in order to prevent the corporate practices that are cannibalizing this nation.  It is time that the labor practices of foreign countries become the standard by which we tax products made in them for American companies, and that is my point in a nutshell.  If a product is assembled abroad, it should be taxed as an import when it comes home.  If parts for a product or raw materials--like "rare earth" substances, of which we have allowed the Chinese to virtually monopolize the production lately--are imported, they are taxed, and we should assess the same kind of protective tariffs against labor that is imported, and make no mistake about it.  Big business is importing labor just as surely as it did when sweat shops existed in New York City's garment district...or for that matter, when the colonists brought indentured servants to this country as virtual slaves for terms of years.  We are subsidizing the barbarous misuse of powerless people in foreign countries just as surely as if we were employing them at slave wages on our shores, and if we are the moral nation we claim to be, we should do something about it.

Tariffs on products made with foreign labor will never be a popular idea, but I ask you, why should the import of man hours--or child hours as the case may be--that result from violation of principles of basic fairness and undermine human dignity in ways that are against the law in this country go unnoticed and un-addressed.  Do our moral obligations cease at our borders?  Isn't the fiction that labor isn't imported just another expedient myth that we employ to excuse ourselves for operating a form of capitalism that is completely deracinated of equitable considerations, much less moral qualms, when it comes to foreign labor--practices that even diminish American workers in the process?  In this case in particular, isn't our lack of moral sincerity self-destructive?  We brook this exploitation of cheap labor abroad in the name of profit on the predicate that promotion of business is what makes our economy thrive.  Thus, conveniently ignoring American complicity in the abuse of labor that just happens to be located abroad is justified only by the expediency of facilitating business in our collective best interest, but the verity of that tacit claim comes more into doubt with each passing day.  The Republican/conservative notion that business can do no wrong merits scrutiny at the very least, and repudiation if it turns out that what we are seeing is what we are getting.  That is why a tariff on foreign labor makes sense.  Certainly we can all agree that fostering the tyranny of business not just here but abroad as well, perpetrated against not just the working poor here but the working impoverished in other countries, is immoral regardless of how many dollars it is worth.

It all comes down to a notion that I have mentioned before.  If we are truly the Judeo-Christian nation that we purport to be--and by characterization of our creed as Judeo-Christian I do not mean to exclude the other moral systems that also bind our people to virtuous principles that we want associated with the rubric "American"--we should act that way in all circumstances.  The fact that we ignore our principles so that we can enjoy cheap clothing and electronics does not redound to our credit, and the world resents us for it.  That, among other things, is what makes us a target...and rightfully so.

Your friend,

Mike

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This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on March 3, 2014 4:54 PM.

Letter 2 America for February 28, 2014 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for March 7, 2014 is the next entry in this blog.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on March 3, 2014 4:54 PM.

Letter 2 America for February 28, 2014 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for March 7, 2014 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

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