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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector- A "free market" success story, and a role model for 21st Century business-as-usual:
Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retail corporation, largely owes its profits to the use of slave (prison) labor in China, child slavery in Bangladesh, and in its stores in the US, where minimum wage is the rule, smuggling in illegal-alien workers paid below minimum wage.
HALF of the 10 richest billionaires in the US inherited their wealth from Sam Walton, Wal-Mart's founder. Thanks to "slave labor," the Waltons' fortune is now TWICE the size of the riches of Bill Gates, #1 on the list.
But even cheap MEXICAN labor isn't cheap enough anymore ...
U.S. isn't only country losing jobs
By Daniel Sneider
San Jose Mercury News, Aiugust 16, 2003
Remember the "giant sucking sound"? That was what millionaire businessman and political gadfly Ross Perot predicted we would hear when American jobs escaped to Mexico after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA is nearly a decade old and though experts dispute the numbers, the pugnacious Texan was at least partly right. Foreign firms set up factories along the border -- so-called maquiladoras -- where they took advantage of cheap labor to produce goods for the U.S. market. They created 1.3 million jobs and helped fuel an export boom that allowed Mexico to supplant Japan as the No. 2 exporter to the United States after Canada.
Now Mexico is hearing the "sucking sound," and it is coming from China. In the last 2 1/2 years, nearly 300,000 maquiladora jobs have fled Mexico, most of them headed for China. And sometime later this year, China will likely overtake Mexico as the second largest source of American imports.
Mexican officials are furious at the Chinese. And they aren't alone. Throughout Asia, China's economic rise is viewed with anger and growing fear. Those countries see China drawing away foreign investors at their expense. Assembly lines are going up at a record pace in China, fed by a seemingly unending stream of low-paid labor <or FREE labor, in the case of prisoners> from the Chinese countryside.
Government officials in South Korea and Japan, who compete for markets with China, accuse it of unfairly maintaining an undervalued currency to artificially prop up its exports.
These are the cross-currents of economic globalization that Americans rarely see. We think globalization is about American jobs going overseas, or the impact of American popular culture in other countries. But globalization is also about how China's growth can mean trouble for Mexico. And how the investment decision of a Dutch electronics maker to shut down a factory in Tijuana can in turn affect the United States, making it more difficult for our neighbor to the south to provide work for its growing population -- perhaps spurring more illegal immigration.
Mexico benefited from the way multinational companies effortlessly move their capital from country to country in this global economy. Now that same borderless economy has come back to haunt them.
The list of factories that have shut their doors and moved to China is long -- more than 520 since December 2000 -- and growing. Here is a just a sample:
* Japanese TV maker Sanyo closed six Tijuana plants, laying off almost 1,900 workers.
* Toy maker Hasbro moved its Tijuana plant to China.
* Dutch electronics giant Philips shut its PC monitor plant in Ciudad Juarez, putting 900 people out of work, and moved the work to its plant in Suzhou, China.
* In June, Mitsubishi shut down production at a PC monitor plant in Mexicali, putting 1,200 people out of work.
The driving factor is labor costs. According to Merrill Lynch analysts, Mexican hourly wages [before taxes] now average $2.96. Move to China and you only have to pay 72 cents an hour, wiping out the advantage Mexico has of proximity to the American market.
There will no doubt be not a few Americans who, hearing this, say that this is a case of "what goes around, comes around." And there is a basis for thinking that.
"Ironically, in their denunciations of China, Mexican officials echo American union officials," points out a study prepared by the Oriental Economist Report, "who for years have denounced American assembly plants that have moved south of the border ... to take advantage of Mexico's lower labor costs."
But critics also point to Mexico's failure to improve its competitiveness during this past decade. Mexico has not matched the investment by China in infrastructure such as education, ports, roads and industrial parks, as well as cheaper electricity rates. Plus manufacturers can draw on much larger pools of component suppliers in China.
Mexican officials have a darker view of this competition. Last year the Mexican secretary of the economy, now the foreign secretary, threatened to file a complaint before the World Trade Organization against China for giving "disguised subsidies" to lure manufacturers. Mexico has yet to carry through on its threat. But the scent of a new arena of global economic warfare is already in the air.
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<http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=192>
The typical MO (method of operation) of the IMF and World Bank consists of systematically weakening and ultimately destroying existing economies of debtor nations in order to pave the way for transnational corporations to come in and reap the stolen harvest of underpaid labor of a people made destitute and desperate for work.
First, under the dictates of the SAPs, any and all forms of social safety nets governments may have in place for their people must be eliminated. Countries are forced to radically downsize government operations, to freeze or cut wages, to cut public pensions and unemployment benefits, to impose user fees for formerly free government-provided services such as health care, education, and clean drinking water, and to privatize all publicly owned, generally profitable enterprises, among which may be gas, oil, telephone, rail and electricity.
This restructuring, in effect, renders thousands of employees jobless and creates whole new displaced underclasses that suddenly can no longer afford to pay for even the basics.
Next, the IMF tells these same countries that, in order to procure money to pay off their debt, they need to open up their borders to the global free trade market. Of course, "the only way" to accomplish this is to outlaw all forms of protectionism, like trade tariffs on imports and government subsidies of local industries, so as to successfully entice other nations to trade with them.
This is referred to as a "leveling of the playing field," clever Orwellian doublespeak for giving rich nations unrestricted access to a country's markets and cheap labor.
Again, true to form, the IMF conveniently fails to mention to these fledgling countries that they will be competing against economic mammoths, such as the United States, whose crops and exports, contrary to the rules debtor nations are compelled to follow, are heavily subsidized by their governments.
Once trade barriers have been eliminated, foreign goods pour into the markets of these nations at cutthroat prices, putting formerly prosperous industries out of business. Small business owners and farmers using traditional, labor-intensive methods despairingly find themselves unable to compete against the megalomaniacal, highly mechanized, government-supported enterprises of the United States and other industrialized nations.
Adding insult to injury, once an economy has been severely compromised, transnational corporations come in under the guise of alleviating poverty and unemployment, and are granted the right to build and establish "free zone" manufacturing areas which are exempt from paying any local fees or taxes. They then hire domestic workers, desperate for income, at sub-standard wages and pressure them, under sweatshop conditions, to assemble products that, when completed, are immediately exported back out to wealthy nations.
Like the true leeches they are, these corporations even go so far as to ship in any and all materials needed to make their products, essentially guaranteeing that no local businesses benefit in any way.
Workers for these transnational corporations earn barely enough to cover 60% of their costs of living, relegating them to a life of abject poverty, while the top CEOs of the very companies they work for rake in salaries to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
The Hanes/Sara Lee Corporation, Disney, Nike, Addidas, Reebok, JCPenney, Sears, and WalMart are just a few examples of U.S. companies that actually seek out Third World countries with high unemployment rates and weak environmental and labor laws in order to set up shop and maximize profits.
Take into account that the IMF, the World Bank and countless, exploitive, transnational U.S. corporations are de facto representatives of the United States. Now multiply the aforementioned scenarios to the nth degree in countries around the globe. Considering what is being perpetrated in our names, is it any wonder that the U.S. is so utterly resented and despised throughout the world?
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