Thursday, March 3, 2011

Nope. Capitalists Won't Pony Up For Job-Providing Infrastructure. Nagahapun!

There is much hand-wringing and wailing in DC and in the circles of the Wise elsewhere about the catastrophic, sustained problem of unemployment in the USer work-place. The common reply to the matter among the ones most distraught about it (the left-punditry, unions, workers' representatives, Bernie Sanders, etc.) is to "call for" the resurrection of the USer industrial/manufacturing State of yore.

It was this capacity, in a war-desolated world, which permitted the erection of (relatively) the WEALTHIEST "middle-class" in history; the dissolution of which is the most important, most instructive story in the whole unfolding narrative of "decline and fall" that is unfolding (or is "crumbling" a better word) around us even as we speak.

So this makes me wonder if I'm missing something in the popular, mediated rhetoric and hurrah about creating jobs, and restoring Murkin manufacturing, and international competitiveness, an' all shit like that.

Here's the elephant turd in the soup tureen:

Where is the money gonna come from to RESTORE the infrasructure that the CorpoRats have spent the past 30 years up-rooting, off-shoring, destroying, dismantling, and selling off?

What makes anyone think the CorpoRats are gonna spend money to undo what they already MADE money destroying? They've sold off all the parts they could, long since. The bloody CorpoRats aren't gonna pony up. The USofA is a declining empire. It's expansive days are over. This market is topped out. The people are less important as consumers than hitherto. When you've sold out your citizenship for the convenience of being a consumer, and they close the fucking stores, what have you got left?

The Global corpoRats owe and claim no allegiance to the American nation, except as the military arm and instrument of their policies. They have NO incentive to invest in the failing CIVIC enterprise that is this country's heritage and legacy.

In fact, the CorpoRats have EVERY incentive to undermine, rebuke, and/or ignore it.

No CorpoRat encourages democracy. Democracy, especially in the work-place, is almost literally anathema to the CorpoRat mind, which is autocratic and authoritarian. They exhibit these proclivities every and in every way that they work to diminish or prevent the unions from exercising their power as the democratic representatives of the workers. CorpoRations are FEUDAL freeholds, and the Owners wish ONLY to preserve their OWN power over their vassals. Unions in the work-place, and democracy in the civic culture, are active opponents of those Medieval pretensions, and as such are subject to attack, destruction if possible.

The minions and lackeys of the CorpoRat State are even now busily engaged, where they have "won" the power to do so, in reversing 150 years of workers' gains. Some are resisting. I wish them success. But I don't trust USer cops NOT to shoot demonstrators, and I do not trust 'the people' NOT to turn against 'labor (or whatever makes them uneasy); but I am skeptical by nature, especially since I was witness to and involved in an incident at which the National Guard advanced on an unruly but NON-VIOLENT student demonstration with bared, fixed bayonets (UNM, May, 1970), while the good burghers of Albuquerque stood on the sidelines and spat on the students, and cheered when the Guard inflicted injuries; so I think my skepticism is earned.

2 comments:

P M Prescott said...

Unless there is as much money in rebuilding it.

Woody (Tokin Librul/Rogue Scholar/ Helluvafella!) said...

If there were an actual FUTURE in doing so, yes, that might happen. But the world's owners have basically decided out time is up, and the Iron Fist/Velvet Glove is passing along. The reason they WON'T is that there's NO FUTURE in it. We Murkins are disposable, now.