Monday, February 25, 2008

Do Corporations Conduct Secret, Social Warfare Against The People?

Remember "A Nation At Risk!"?

About 25 years ago, in the heat of the Raygun Revolution Against The People, national-scold-in-training (and already a high-roller in the casinos) Bill Bennett and a bunch of so-called scholars published "A Nation At Risk," to initiate the neo-con attack on the US system of public education. The book, one of many castigating the nations' teachers for a horrendous variety of misfeasances, worked on a single trope: A recitation of the numerous ills allegedly inflicted on the schools by permissiveness, self-esteem, and multi-culturalism, followed by the insistance that hed these ills been inflicted by the Russians, we (the concerned citizens of the USofA) would have declared war and bombed 'em back to the Stone Age.

So if the failures of the schools constituted a liberal "act of war" against propriety, common sense, and the way it has always been done in schools, how should we understand the following critique of USer/Globalist CorpoRat transgressions?

Former Raygunaut Asst. Treas. Sec. Paul Craig Roberts offers some opinions, in the context of an apparent endorsement of Obama's economic agenda. Citing what he calls the most important economics book of the last 200 years, Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests, by Baumol & Gomory, a money quote from which follows:
(C)orporations break the link between their interests and America's interest when they offshore their production for US markets. By producing abroad, they raise foreign GDP and lower US GDP. By producing abroad, they raise the productivity of foreign labor and lower the productivity of US labor. By producing abroad, they increase the productivity capabilities and trade position of other countries at America's expense.
If I were to take the tack of the neo-cons of 25 years ago, would I then be justified in asking if, given this sorry state, and declining USer prosperity, if the Russians had done to the US economy what our "native" corporations have done in the intervening period since the Raygunauts (Roberts among 'em, by the way, tho' he seems to have undergone some kind of progressive epiphany) first undertook to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society and fuck the middle class, would I not be justified in calling for the moral equivalent of war against CorpoRat Interests?

Roberts' point about Obama's apparent understanding of these issues notwithstanding, I'd feel a LOT better about Obama's prospects to reshape economic relations in his presidency of Baumol and Gomory were his advisors, instead of the (Milton/Thomas) Friedmanesque, University of Chicago (trained) trio of Cutler, Liebman, and Goolsbee, who are radical free traders who would be very comfortable inside the Bushevik regime.

1 comment:

Mr.Murder said...

The Obama infrstructure is sending up bliking red lights on where he's headed.

And the band played on....

btw, Bush gave a Medal of Honor, posthumously, to a guy named Woody today.

Medals for Empty Suits, heh. He is going to tell Condi she'll get one for certain!