The Six Dollar an Hour Man.

There will definitely be a day when Americans can no longer afford the products we outsourced to China.

Remember, we went to China to make products at lower costs. We sent them our plastic sandals and t-shirts. But now they have our computers and televisions. And one day, the American worker won't make enough money to buy that computer.

When corporations look at the Chinese factory model with envy, you know the goal is to turn Americans into slaves. Cheap Chinese labor is driving down the value of the global workforce to near zero. "We've found someone who will work cheaper than you. Goodbye."

But, yes, to say the goal is SLAVERY is to oversimplify. The goal is to keep China happy.

I've heard stories about what it takes to do business in China. One story says that a company needs to turn over all the schematics and manufacturing plans to China to have them approved. And then China keeps them. But I don't know if this true. Because if true, it would mean that any American that outsources to China is staying in China. Because if they leave, China will simply build the products anyway. And sell them and put the American companies out of business.

Listen to this story where the corporate executive is giddy, absolutely giddy with the notion of a workforce that produces 24 hours a day:

One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

source, NYT,"How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work."

Look at what is expected from workers. That is an inhumane work environment. That factory could not legally exist in the United States. But that's what corporations want: no labor regulations, no rules at all.

And who the hell brewed those 8,000 cups of tea?

I think the next step is to treat laborers as a commodity, trading at a fluctuating rate on world markets. Today, you make $10 an hour, but tomorrow we pay $9.27. The result might not be slavery because there is some income, but it will be slavery because there will be no place else to go.

The Working Dead.

I guess you've heard about the Occupy Wall Street assholes, um, protestors. They're the group leveraging social media to protest the corporate screwing of America. No, wait. They're not using social media; they're actually marching on Wall Street. With picket signs. And getting busted for it.

They aren't just virtually there with a Google map representing the greed on "the street," or creating an augmented reality app with facial recognition cloud resources to identify the richest trader cocksuckers in the crowd, but are physically there in NYC. And not one protester has signed into Foursquare to claim the mayorship of the intersection at Wall and Broad streets.

Wikipedia tells me, "The participants of the event are mainly protesting against social and economic inequality, corporate greed, and the influence of corporate money and lobbyists on government,..."

Ah, a political manifesto. Why not just be about jobs?

Here is their dickhead philosophy, "The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%."

You know what? I don't care about the greed and corruption. I'm glad Wall Street is making money. What I care about is their refusal to share.

I would protest the seeming collusion by big business to create a two-tiered America where the few blessed earn $10 billion a year and the rest of us earn $10 an hour. I would protest the union busting. The professional downgrading. The extreme costs of education that leave us in debt just for the empty promise of a decent living wage. I've complained for the last three years that corporate America has some plan to turn us into the working dead with lower and lower paying jobs.

Where is my American Dream? That should be your fucking mantra. Don't criticize the greedy. Greed shows that there is money out there to be made. But find a way to make those greedy bastards play fair and create jobs, good jobs.

Nobody cares if Mr. Big has a billion dollars if we also have good jobs, health benefits, safe places to live and play.

All you idiots with any other political agenda need to shut the fuck up until we all have jobs with a good future, with benefits to keep us healthy and productive and with pensions for loyal hard work.

Create Good Jobs. Any other message and you're wasting your fucking time. And mine.

The United States of America: Detroit of the World.

I'm actually worried about the state of this country. I'm worried that the people who spend the money, the legislators, have busted this country for the people who make the money, the corporations.

Don't confuse Corporations with the People Who Pay the Bills because that's the Middle Class. But corporations make the money and the USA hasn't been very good at allowing them to do that for the past few years. The fact that corporations aren't providing good jobs for Americans to earn the salaries to allow them to purchase the goods and services that the corporations produce doesn't seem to make any difference to the Corporations.

So in an every deteriorating spiral, Corporations don't pay the bills that fund America's infrastructure and they don't provide the salaries, yet they complain that America isn't doing enough to keep the corporations fat and wealthy. So they've been taking their business elsewhere.

We used to think that America ("The United States of America") and the Corporations were inseparable. But these past 2 years have taught me that they aren't. The Middle Class is disintegrating before our eyes. The Super Rich have gotten super richer and the poor keep finding ways to avoid success. If I had to do the math, I'm sure I could find an algorithm that explains the tipping point where someone decides they are better off not working for low pay than they are not working at all. My guess, with my poor math skills, is that if you are single and make less than $22,000 a year (about $12/hr.), it's probably not worth your time to have any regular job. You might as well let the government feed and house you. And from what I see happening in America, there must be an app for that calculation because so many people don't seem to want a job if it pays so little.

Don't think this is about the poor. It isn't. It's about why there are no good jobs in America any more.

Wall Street is richer than ever. But America is poor. We have no jobs and the good jobs that were left are being stripped away. Okay, I guess I should admit that there are some jobs: food service jobs are plentiful. Low-paying jobs with little room for advancement abound. But the abundance of moderately-high-paying jobs that seemed to come from education and work experience seem to have evaporated. Whatever promise the future made to our parents hasn't been shared with us.

Look how America treats Corporations: we have regulations. We tell Corporations how they can function, how they need to report earnings, how they need to keep products safe, how they should be greener, how they should treat workers fairly, how they should offer medical benefits, how they should provide fair pay, hours, benefits. We've banned smoking from the workplace, for chrissakes. And Corporations love to smoke!

The rest of the world doesn't care about this.

Corporations took too easily to doing business with China. Yes, I'm bashing China. Look at it! Do you even understand what's been happening there? Corporations went there for cheap labor and low or no regulations. Other than graft and political corruption. So Corporations opened up shop there and Chinese regulations require that the Corporations turn over manufacturing specifications and trade secrets before China will agree to let them stay. So China can now counterfeit all your goods if they want, but they promise not to if you stay and don't complain about their labor laws or how their government is run. And so the salaries for Chinese laborers went up, a little. And you can see how we've been rewarded for that, oil prices and food prices and the cost of most commodities have gone up. Because a few hundred million workers can now afford to buy cars and food. But as costs increased for the Corporations, what did they do? Many of them moved from the areas where labor was to cheap and quickly became more expensive to areas where labor was still cheap. The Corporations just moved from one part of China to another. Just like in America when they move from one expensive state to a cheaper one. The Corporations learned that providing jobs to workers, even low paying, unsafe, exploitative jobs is more important to keeping a government stable than providing well-paid jobs with good benefits. And so they have been applying that new philosophy here in America.

But I'm not blaming China. I'm blaming us. If I thought about it, I'd probably find blame with NAFTA because that's where I think Corporations got the idea that they didn't need to support the American workforce in the first place.

More proof. Corporations want to do business in Libya. True. Even a corrupt, evil dictatorship looks sexy to Corporations. Libya and other countries where life is hard and cheap because the government is cruel, are like whores who would let Corporations have their way with them. Not like America, where we complain all the time, but slutty, spread-open skanks who welcome manufacturing facilities with toxic chemical processes or obsolete unsafe production methods and don't have court systems that have ever heard the words "Class Action."

America is less attractive to Corporations than Libya. And Libya is the Libya of the World. We used to compare city to city in America, deciding where we would move to find a better job, but I don't think that's possible anymore. The Dollar is weak. And America has become expensive.

You can call me an alarmist if you want, but I'm not trying to alarm anyone. I don't have a solution. I'm just pointing out where we are as a country, and our place in the Global Village. America used to be the New York of the World. We used to be Hollywood. But not today. We are Detroit.

If you ever want to find work in the future (I'm guessing 15 years from now), you won't just pack up your stuff and move to California or Washington; you will have to go to a whole other country. And not Canada. For the next location the Corporations might find desirable, I'm thinking Ireland or Greece. So learn a new language or buy a warm coat. You still have time.