Flat Broke in the Free Market by Jon Jeter

Author:Jon Jeter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2009-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

THIS IS THE new global class war, a conflict that increasingly recognizes neither race, nor geography nor traditional alliances. Worldwide, widening inequality has increasingly estranged ordinary working people from the proxies they choose to represent them in democratic discussion.

What fuels this shift is the evolution of a modern postindustrial elite, an international cadre of politicians, corporate executives, diplomats, journalists, and bankers who have more in common with one another than they do with their countrymen or constituents. Across the globe, from the favelas to the townships to the villas miserias to any neighborhood located just off Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in inner-city America, the traditional champions of the poor, workers, consumers, and people of color are siding with big business. The story of globalization is in part a Shakespearean drama of betrayal: of working-class Zambians by a former trade union leader; of Argentines by the party founded by the populist labor minister; of Brazilian workers by a former lathe operator who lost a finger in an industrial accident; of black South Africans by the countrymen who liberated them; and of neighborhoods like Englewood by one of their own.

In each of these narratives, public space for ordinary people is shrinking. Wages and salaries in the United States now make up the lowest share of the nation’s GDP since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits as a share of national income have climbed to their highest ratio since the 1960s.

The disparate trajectories are both the consequence of and the catalyst for profound changes in longstanding political alliances. Consider, as one example, that the Democratic Party—once the party of the American working class—raised $340.3 million in campaign contributions from big business in 2000, compared to $52.4 million from organized labor. It is not surprising, then, that the chief architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who, along with Mexico’s Harvard-educated former president, Carlos Salinas, lobbied for the 1994 law, although Clinton’s Democratic base—especially labor unions—was staunchly opposed.

On newspaper editorial pages and television newscasts, globalization is often described as an inevitable process, a Darwinian winnowing that yields a modern state. But as the economist and writer Dean Baker has noted, the authors of the international trade rules could just as easily have rewritten labor laws and licensing requirements that shield such professions as medicine, journalism, and accounting from foreign competition, which would produce far greater savings to consumers than lowering restrictions on the sale and purchase of manufactured goods does. As one example cited by Baker, the only reason a publisher cannot hire English-speaking journalists from, say, India or South Africa and pay them half of what newspaper reporters earn at the New York Times (and consequently charge less for advertising space) is that prevailing wage laws make it illegal. Workers at Wal-Mart have no such protections.

Similarly, consider that the World Trade Organization and NAFTA-style pacts require participating countries to strengthen laws protecting international patent rights, thereby increasing the price of anti-AIDS medicines and other drugs and the profits reaped by multinational pharmaceutical firms.

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