The War On the Middle Class

I don't think you understand what globalization means.

And if you think it's that evil you'd not use the internet. You are part of globalization, pistoff.

What?
Since you think that I don't know what it means, why don't you tell me what it means?

I will let you know if I agree with your view of it.

Ok. But since you get to put the onus on me I get to talk a lot.

Globalization refers to the increasingly rapid rate of growth of international relationships of all varieties.

It's driven by man's progress in science and specifically in technology.

Man's ability to easily communicate, travel and trade across the globe is improving at an accelerating rate.

The results of this have deep repercussions in many areas, though your post seems to only have economy in mind.

Through the change in ability to communicate and travel intercultural exchange is increasing.

Through the ability to trade and the move toward larger trading spheres there are many economic changes.

Whether the changes are good or bad are individually debateable. Nevertheless most can agree that there are both good and bad results.

Many people equate the spread of capitalism with globalism and do so equivocally.

Globalism accelerates change and allows for more rapid change and a greater projection of power.

Were capitalism and "free" market ideology not the already entrenched and dominant ideologies the changes would be as sweeping, rapid and wide ranging but with a different ideology riding the wave.

Most of the resentment of globalisation is from the political extremes. On the right there are the "there goes the neighbourhood" types who resent the cultural changes.

As the world grows smaller and intercultural exchange permeates societies they complain about things like language and immigration.

These people exist in each nation and oddly enough they all are worried that their culture is being dilluted and is losing. They are all ironically unaware of their peer in the opposite culture who is saying the same. For example, while one culture might resent the increasingly American global pop culture Americans themselves might complain about other culture "taking over" their nation. History's most dominant culture is worried that things like Spanish and immigration are "taking over".

On the economic end you also have people from both political sides with reservations. On the left you have people who resent the mediums that constitute globalization because changes in remote corners of the globe are commonplace. And because corporations and already rich nations and entities are alble to dictate a lot of the change, with many of the smaller players playing catch up in a game in which they are already behind and disadvantaged in technology, the driving force of the mediums of globalization.

In short, many on the left fault globalization for what they perceive as a "new" way for the rich to exploit the poor. But they do so in error. "Globalization" is as old as man.

On the right you have less strident opposition but opposition nonetheless. On the right the complaints are usually about the fact that through increased trade there are odd bedfellows (China and the US for e.g.) and as economic contagion and interdependency increases and trade barriers removed there is, once again, change.

The change comes in many forms. But a big complaint is the sudden competition from foreign economies and specifically their jobs.

So economically both sides claim a loss. And a victory. And that's the way economy is. Having a weak currency had it's drawbacks but it makes exporting easier. Having a strong currency has perks but makes your manufactured goods less competitive.

Everyone has one thing in common. They all have reservation about changes they percieve. And individually they might all have legitimate gripes.

But I think they err in focusing on globalization because globalization is human nature and what we have done with it.

Colombus was "globalization", pidgeon carriers were "globalization". moveable type, free press, the internet, the telephone, the automobile, the aircraft, the cellular phone, the smoke signal, the boat, the wheel.....

You can go on forever, man's progress in every area contibutes to the increasingly deep relationships across the globe.

And the rate at which this is progressing is incrasing and people are just now starting to note this trend that has been around throughout man's history because it's just now becoming a flash flood instead of a trail of frozen molasses.

But globalization is essentially a reference to the progression of science and how it makes a small world smaller.

The changes are not inherent to the trend. If communism were the deominant ideology it would be spreading through the same mediums that people call globalization.

Ultimately globalization is just the inevitable progression of mankind through science. What we do with it and how the changes end up are not a valid indictment of the technological progression itself.

An analogy is the airplane. It can bring distant people together and increase awareness between culture. Or it can blow things up and kill people because said cultures are mad at each other.

A cell phone can be a way to say hi to grandma from across the globe. Or it can be the way to hire a hitman and coordinate a murder.

There are legitimate gripes about many specific changes. And through the increased "globalization" mediums these changes are happening at a fast and furious pace.

But those are complaints about the changes, not globalization. Globalization is just a name for a trend that will never go away.

As we progress in science our lives will change at a more rapid rate. Such is the nature of life in many many ways. The world's getting faster and many people are saying "stop the world. I want to get off". And while the complaints may all have validity to fault globalism is about as effective as faulting the earth's spin.

Globalism is inevitable, complaints about capitalism, immigration etc are complaints that have to do with specific changes. Globalism is a trend, not a force. The force behind globalism is man's scientific progress.

OK
I agree with the broad defintion and that it is inevitable.

I see that we, as a global people, need to expand culturaly and can maintain our individual cultures. I welcome diversity.

Science and technology are tools that can be used for postitive or negative, just a fire is such a tool. I am open to progress.

Yes, I understand your concepts. My concern is with the economic disparity. The American Middle Class cannot compete with the Free Trade situation as it is set up. I don't have the solutions to this but I feel that Rep.Kucinich and others do have solutions. I do feel that if other countries wish to trade with us there must be fair rules and they must be abided by and strictly enforced. Tarrifs are not the answer. I feel that labor rights and environmental rules are paramount.

There is no way that outsourcing and mfg. re-location will enhance the Middle Class. We must live within our means, yes, but the Middle Class must not be demoted to be the Working Poor. Corporations need to be sanctioned and rewarded or keeping jobs in the USA, not taken jobs away.

It seems that our Govt and Congress does no longer value the American Worker. That is what I am concerned about.

Phil

In 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote a book called, "Future Shock". In it, he correctly described the changes that rapid technology was having on families, nations, and the world. He also described the difficulties that people have adjusting to these rapid changes. The book is a classic, and very well worth reading, especially in the light of the points made in this discussion:

Link to "Future Shock"

A few random thoughts here:

There are a lot of factors that are hurting the middle class. Inflation, high overall (federal, state, city, etc) tax rate, and loss of jobs to overseas to name just three. However, these occur under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

As for globalization - I believe it's inevitable. With improvements in communications and more open economies, the world will be drawn closer together. In the long run this will be a good thing, but the short term will cause discomfort to some - as jobs migrate and foreign ideas creep in (to name just two side effects).

On one hand I do not want to see "McWorld", where everything becomes uniform over the entire world, just as every U.S. shopping mall is nearly the same. On the other hand, it is a good thing that economies are becomming more connected, thus reducing the risk of war. It is good that over time the gaps in standards of living between countries will begin to be reduced, and it is a good thing when people become more knowledgable and tolerant of other's cultures.

Hello-again
The Collapse Of The
American Middle Class
By Rep. Bernie
Sanders Buzzflash.com


The corporate media doesn't talk about it much, but the United States is rapidly on its way to becoming three separate nations.

First, there are a small number of incredibly wealthy people who own and control more and more of our country.

Second, there is a shrinking middle class in which ordinary people are, in most instances, working longer hours for lower wages and benefits.

Third, an increasing number of Americans are living in abject poverty -- going hungry and sleeping out on the streets.

There has always been a wealthy elite in this country, and there has always been a gap between the rich and the poor. But the disparities in wealth and income that currently exist in this country have not been seen in over a hundred years.

Today, the richest 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent, and the CEOs of large corporations earn more than 500 times what their average employees make.

The nation's 13,000 wealthiest families, 1/100th of one percent of the population, receive almost as much income as the poorest 20 million families in America. While the rich get richer and receive huge tax breaks from the White House, the middle class is struggling to keep its head above water.

The unemployment rate rose to a nine-year high of 6.4 percent in June, 2003. There are now 9.4 million unemployed, up more than 3 million since just before Bush became President. Since March, 2001, we have lost over 2.7 million jobs in the private sector, including two million decent-paying manufacturing jobs -- ten percent of our manufacturing sector.

Frighteningly, the hemorrhaging of decent paying jobs is now moving into the white-collar sector. Forrester Research Inc. predicts that at least 3.3 million information technology jobs will be lost to low-wage countries by 2015 with the expansion of digitization, the internet and high-speed data networks. But understanding the pain and anxiety of the middle class requires going beyond the unemployment numbers.

There are tens of millions of fully employed Americans who today earn, in inflation adjusted-dollars, less money than they received 30 years ago. In 1973, private-sector workers in the United States were paid on average $9.08 an hour. Today, in real wages, they are paid $8.33 per hour -- more than 8 percent lower.

Manufacturing jobs that once paid a living wage are now being done in China, Mexico and other low-wage countries as corporate America ships its plants abroad. With Wal-Mart replacing General Motors as our largest employer, many workers in the service economy not only earn low wages but also receive minimal benefits. Further, as the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs soar, more and more employers are forcing workers to assume a greater percentage of their health care costs.

It is not uncommon now that increases in health care costs surpass the wage increases that workers receive -- leaving them even further behind. With the support of the Bush Administration many companies are also reducing the pensions they promised to their older workers -- threatening the retirement security of millions of Americans. One of the manifestations of the collapse of the middle class is the increased number of hours that Americans are now forced to work in order to pay the bills.

Today, the average American employee works, by far, the longest hours of any worker in the industrialized world. And the situation is getting worse. According to statistics from the International Labor Organization the average American last year worked 1,978 hours, up from 1,942 hours in 1990 -- an increase of almost a week of work. We are now putting more hours into our work than at any time since the 1920s. Sixty-five years after the formal establishment of the 40-hour work week under the Fair Labor Standards Act, almost 40 percent of Americans now work more than 50 hours a week.

And if the middle class is having it tough, what about the 33 million people in our society who are living in poverty, up 1.3 million in the past two years? What about the 11 million trying to make it on a pathetic minimum wage of $5.15 an hour? What about the 42 million who lack any health insurance? What about the 3.5 million people who will experience homelessness in this year, 1.3 million of them children? What about the elderly who can't afford the outrageously high cost of the prescription drugs they need? What about the veterans who are on VA waiting lists for their health care?

This country needs to radically rethink our national priorities. The middle class is the backbone of America and it cannot be allowed to disintegrate. We need to revitalize American democracy, and create a political climate where government makes decisions which reflect the needs of all the people, and not just wealthy campaign contributors.

We need to see the middle class expand, not collapse. - Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the only Independent in the U.S. House. http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/09/04_sanders.html

Demise
White-Collar Anger

By Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark, AlterNet
December 18, 2003

Pete Bennett is fed up, and he's not going to take it anymore.


"People are tired and angry and upset," says the 47-year-old unemployed worker from Danville, California, frustration noticeable in his voice. "People are hurting, losing their homes. If we keep pulling jobs out of the country, how is the economy going to stay up?"


Coming from an autoworker or a steelworker, these would be familiar words. But Bennett isn't a laid off Ford or GM employee. He used to work for companies such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo, where, as a contract database programmer, he earned between $80,000 and $90,000 a year. But in the last year, he says, he hasn't been able to find any programming work - such jobs, he is told, are moving overseas.


Bennett is not alone. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of highly skilled, well-paid positions have been sent abroad.


These days architects in the Philippines are producing blueprints for Fluor; electronic engineers in India are designing cell phone chips for Texas Instruments; and computer programmers in the Czech Republic are building software for Kodak. The stream of job loss is set to become a torrent; a November 2002 study by the consulting firm Forrester Research estimated that over the next 15 years some 3.3 million US service sector jobs would be sent abroad. A more recent report by economists at UC Berkeley says as many as 14 million programming, accounting, paralegal and other service jobs are at risk of being "off-shored."


The off-shoring of service jobs is déjà vu all over again. In the 1970s, U.S. corporations started shipping manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries such as Mexico, China and Indonesia in an effort to cut labor costs. Now, that same drive to reduce labor costs is hitting more highly skilled workers as service jobs go to well-educated workers in New Delhi and Prague and Singapore. As skilled workers are painfully starting to learn, the logic of cost cutting doesn't distinguish between blue collar and white collar.


While the economics of sending manufacturing jobs and service positions abroad may be the same, the political consequences promise to be different. In American politics it's one thing to attack the working class, but quite another to undermine the middle class, which votes in higher percentages. As any political consultant will tell you, as the middle class goes, so goes the nation. By cutting white collar positions, American businesses are sowing the seeds of a populist backlash that could redraw the political map.


One political topic that is bound to be influenced by the off-shoring of service jobs is the hot-button issue of trade policy. Surveys by the Pew Center show that support for free trade policies splits sharply along income lines. Among families earning more than $75,000 a year, 63 percent of people see globalization as positive; among families earning less than $50,000 a year, support drops to 37 percent.


In effect, better paid workers have supported free trade policies so long as they aren't impacted by them. But now many of those people are suffering the same cold fate that manufacturing workers have grappled with for decades. As more and more skilled jobs go abroad, supporters of free trade are almost certain to reassess whether corporate globalization is in their best interests.


The loss of high skilled jobs could also have a significant impact on next year's presidential election. Voters' job anxiety is shaping up as the number one election issue, with President Bush struggling against the loss of more than 2 million jobs on his watch and a so far "jobless economic recovery."


Off-shoring skilled positions is only going to make the anemic job market worse: According to the industry consulting firm Gartner Inc., one in 10 U.S. technology jobs will move overseas by the end of 2004. The disappearance of those good-paying jobs gives Democrats a chance to reach out to more affluent voters whose natural sympathies may lie with Republicans - but whose anger could translate into Democratic gains.


Winning elections is in large measure about managing expectations - and it's the newly unemployed skilled workers whose expectations are being downsized furthest. As Pete Bennett puts it: "These people have never experienced this before. ... What are we going to replace these jobs with? Flipping burgers?"


The long-term political effects of the off-shoring of skilled jobs promise to be larger than one single issue or one election. The export of skilled jobs could very likely cause an anti-corporate backlash that will reverse the decades-long drive toward deregulation and the weakening of organized labor.


During the heady days of the late 1990s, America's high tech class by and large supported the push for deregulation and laissez-faire economics. Now, the software designers and tech engineers who didn't think the government needed to play a role in overseeing the economy are the victims of uncontrolled economic forces. The once comfortable are becoming the insecure. The shift from being a winner to a loser is bound to prompt some serious rethinking about whether corporations should be given free rein to do whatever they like.


The first signs of this are already evident. Newly vulnerable high tech workers - traditionally not big union supporters - are starting to listen to the entreaties of organized labor. The Communication Workers of America says it is seeing increasing enthusiasm for unionization among off-shored high tech workers. Calls are also increasing for government regulation to staunch the hemorrhage of jobs. In response, state and federal legislators are considering laws to keep service jobs in the United States. The laissez-faire mentality of the 1990s is being replaced by demands that government act to restrain corporations' basic instincts. The political pendulum between dislike of big government and dislike of big business is swinging in a new direction.


Those businesses shipping high skilled jobs overseas should beware: Short-term profits may come at the cost of future political peril.


Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark are authors of the new book, "Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power" (Routledge Press). They work for the human rights group Global Exchange.

pistoff, I see what you see and more. What I mean to say is that I agree with Craven's thesis, that globalization is here to stay. If that is the fundamental truth, then our workers must 'create' jobs that will compete in the world markets. Shifting of jobs have gone all for several decades - it's not a new phenomenon. It always fascinated me that the garment industry lasted so long in this country. Levi Strauss finally closed their last plants in the US last month. We've been losing garment factories in the US for many decades. What has our population been doing in the mean time to prepare for it? Isn't it interesting that we can still buy a shirt for $10 - the same we paid 30 years ago. Do you know why? It's because of comparative advantage. Japan went through the same change in their industries. At one time, Japan's garment industry was very big. We all know what happened to Japan's industries - they changed to automobiles and entertainment products from clothing and cheap household appliances. The economic giants such as the US must continue to produce better and innovative products to survive economically. Not by crying about "lost jobs." That's the reason why our educational system is so important. Our country still has the capital and innovators, but developing countries are on our tail. Progress is our only hope.

?
Of course the US must innovate. I don't understand how that alone would solve the problem.

Please, expand your concept.

Remember the high tech industry? At one time, the US was the leader in producing all high tech equipment. Intel is still the biggest producer of computer chips, but our biggest competitors are now in Asia. Intel continues to spend billions in new development; their R&D budget is huge, but they continue to improve their products almost every year. We are now into nano technology; chips that can hold millions of data on a pinhead. When computers first came out, the cost of computers were prohibitive to most companies and individuals, and they took up much floor space. Today, almost everybody in developed countries have been exposed to computers. We must continue to innovate new products that will have universal appeal. This is but one example of how we can continue to compete in this world's economics. There are still many things that need to be invented. Just think; it wasn't that long ago that the Wright brothers made the first motorized flight. We can now travel half way around the world in one day. That's progress.

Technology
I understand that technology is important and that Govt. should fund scientific research with no strings attached. I still don't see how that keeps the Middle Class and the Working Poor from slipping further down.

As the above articles state. How will the US be able to maintain jobs for the people when Corps. keep doing what they are doing? How will the standard of living be raised instead of lowered? Everyone is not capable of re-learning new job skills &/or millions do not have the mental ability to be high tech.What is to become of those millions? How will Economic Globalization solve these problems when other countries do not have the same labor and environmental standards?