With one of the richest cultural legacies on the planet, China, we stand in awe of your contributions and longevity. Your collective will and determination to continue in the face of dificulty, retrograde government control, inhumanity to fellow man and human rights issues, remains unparalled.
However....We can no longer abide, your manufacture and distribution of useless plastic crap, in all her many forms, sizes, shapes and sizes. Your ability to get this shit into the hands of the world, in particular, western countries Like the USA, Mexico, and Canada, has been greatly increased by our leaders' systematic undoing of our oun infrastructure, outsourcing jobs, and most of all, entities like Walmart, with a business model that best resembles, the insatiable appetite of a Black Hole, sucking everything into the vortice, as it nears.
Fuck the cheap, plastic, poorly-constructed and useless shit that your people slave away to produce and distribute.(but not the illegal aliens that pour into the United States, they love your cheap shit) We don't need it, are told we want it, by another entity, deserving of death and torture, the marketing tendrils of broadcast media, who have a special place reserved for them in the torturous nether-regions of some lightless abyss.
Awww fuck it. Nevermind.....guess we'll just have to see how it plays out....too late for whining about it, we're too far down the esophagus and swimming in digestive juices...(think I'll go play on the Wal-Mart intercom some more......)
Stumble This
The American economy depends on consumer spending, which doesn't want to pay the high price that goes with manufacturing high end products and paying the high wages that entail them. It's American Capitalism baby.
Love it or leave it.
http://www.videosift.com/video/Bill-Hicks-on-Marketing-and-Advertising
Passing through the sweatshop stage has been important to the development of a number of countries in east Asia. It's only a minute sliver of the global trade in labor, so I'm not sure why people single it out. If your country is losing jobs in manual labor, that's generally a good sign.
http://www.videosift.com/video/China-Blue-PBS-doc-on-life-in-Chinas-clothing-factories
http://www.videosift.com/video/Slave-Labour-from-the-East-for-the-West
China may seem decades behind in human rights now, but it's a near guarantee that they will catch up as their economy grows.
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Century-of-The-Self-Part-1-of-4
Of course I'm one to talk: I loves me some Target and I ain't givin it up. Except the baby toys.... going to start buying wooden and Made In America baby toys soon.
If anyone is to blame, it's the wide-asleep masses who have all the power and give it away, having been groomed to do so.
Blame for what? Also, calling global economic development 'giving up power' is a tad bit xenophobic, don't you think?
I hate seeing "MADE IN CHINA" on anyting....the stuff of any value made by Chinese, has no such stamp or injection-molded raised letters.....
The power to exercise one's freedom of choice with regards to where they place their investments, be they small or large, is a manipulated confabulation. The availability of goods and services to Americans, the result of feeding the corporate beast is the reason why availability of quality merchandise and service is the exception, rather than the rule.
Your phrase, "Global economic development" with regards to what I am talking about, borders on oxi-moronic. Development for whom, and to what end??
We have the power, as the people who slave for shit-tickets, to demand more from ourselves, and our herders. They suck, and we don't. Always remember that, the measure of a man is not how much monopoly money is represented in a ledger.....money has NO value. Especially if the Fed printed it......
If I had my way, we'd start reshaping government, by actively disrupting the economy.
I re-read your post, and I can't eek out anything besides a rehashing of tired arguments against globalization. Yes, I'm projecting a little bit, but you've alluded to an increasingly common reactionary position. If you can be more specific about who your post is aimed at I can make a more constructive comment.
When I write "global economic development", I mean development for anyone and everyone in the world. Granting greater access to worldwide markets is one way to achieve this, but it's a nuanced process which I can't go into further without writing an essay (I'd be glad to offer links though).
You wrote that you hate seeing "MADE IN CHINA", and that "We can no longer abide, your manufacture and distribution of useless plastic crap". Those parts in particular are why your claim that China is outside the blast radius of your rant is a stretch. It was in poor taste for me to use the x-word, but I honestly don't know of a word that means "undirected fear of other countries' economic growth".
Lamenting that people buy large volumes of low quality goods is a fine thing to rant about, so why not stop there?
If I had my way, we'd start reshaping government, by actively disrupting the economy.
Is your main argument against neo-liberal economics then? It's really hard to tell. We all have beefs about the system to be sure, but it's the best progress engine we've come up with yet. If you think that the developed world has stopped progressing and that we're just building idles to the almighty dollar now, that's another fine rant, but there are 5.5 billion or so who haven't come close to hitting that sweet spot yet. I don't think you'll be able to enlist them in taking down the machinery that holds the greatest promise of helping them.
The businesses gained, the goods stayed expensive, with all the sweatshop labour the cost reductions are not passed on to the consumer, rather there is a larger profit margin to be made. For exmaple a t-shirt made in Bangladesh would cost 20 cents, but it is infalted to 10 to 15 US Dollars in the North American market.
Notice how all criticism towards losing manufacturing jobs always runs from illegal aliens to blaming China in general, but never falls on the businesses themselves.
China did a wonderful job of moving from a state centralized economy, to creating free commericial zones that allowed it to experiment with capitalism. Their entire motto of development has been import the first product, manufacture the second in China, export the third to the rest of the world. But even now its learning that mass production needs to be high quality and inspected thoroughly, given the Toy recall fiascos.
But one must realize that it is really a global economy now, the Chinese development is still reliant on a multitude of trade partners to make products develop, one part from Japan, another from Singapore and so on. The interconnection of global trade only benefits us all because having a war is dangerous as all economies become dependent on one another.
With regards to America. The country has been too obsessed with profit, as was the government in its legislation, it hasn't tried to create new jobs so much so as increase the profits of companies themselves, thinking that it would trickle down in employment. The US needs to overcome its recession, end the war and fix its debt before implementing FDR stlye reforms to create jobs for the people again.
The example I give is this video:
http://www.videosift.com/video/TED-What-does-technology-want
At 12:00, Kevin Kelly points out that technologies virtually never go away. He did a little experiment, leafing through a century-old catalog, and found that every product was still available.
My hope for a future, would be cessation of the global economic gristmill, about 2/3rds of the earth's population disappearing in a matter of a few years (preferably some natural catastrophic scenario, and a collective upward thrust of mankind's remnants, finally getting their heads out of their ass, and working together for some worthwhile global scenario......until then, I'm all for getting rid of currency altogether.....
Systems are not as stuck as you think they are, there is much room for improvement without throwing out the bathwater.
These are the best of times because we're on a gas guzzling induced high. The one-two punch of peak oil and climate change are about to knock our socks off, but I'm not one of those Luddite-anarchists who thinks we should give up the ghost and go back to horse-and-buggy times.
The explanations of the process and results are shady- most are ill-equipped to describe it using familiar models.
Can you do me a favour though, and stop posting about solar cycles? It's old hat. From the link: The sun-climate effect is “about 10 to 15% the magnitude of the greenhouse gas forcing over the 20th Century.