The death of the American Middle Class is actually not more complicated than you imagine.
The death of the American Middle Class can be explained pretty easily: Americans didn’t want to be slaves, so exploitation moved overseas.
Go ahead and picture something: Steve Jobs held a meeting a few thousand miles away from you where he stepped out of his Mercedes, strode angrily into a conference room, and held up a scratched phone. He precedes to berate his executive team and insist upon a complete retooling of a product set to ship in 6 weeks. So your foreman runs through your factory thousands of miles away, gets your ass up in the middle of the night, hands you “tea and a biscuit”, and makes you work a 12-hour shift to satisfy the whims of a distant plutocrat.
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.
Now, a couple of things happen when somebody wakes me up in the middle of the night. If it’s my wife, I ask what’s wrong. If it’s my child, I go to comfort him. If it’s a relative, I ask who died. If I am awakened by anyone else for any other reason I throw punches. If my boss called me at midnight because Steve Jobs wants a glass screen, I’d let my boss know he can jam a glass screen up his ass unless the money is awesome. It’s called “freedom”.
Lets see if your “horseshit” detector goes off at any point during this paragraph:
To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged.
Horseshit. “Nimble” competitors are “nimble” because they can wake up 8000 people in the middle of the night with tea and a biscuit. By that standard, I’d imagine a Georgia plantation in 1847 was nimble as fuck. Look at the “employees” dancing nimbly for the whip!
China is a slave state that permits hundreds of thousands of people to live like cattle. American companies that utilize this labor are “competing” on the basis of their total indifference to the human consequences of their output. People shaken awake at midnight in factory/farm dormitories paid a pittance to satisfy the whims of plutocrats might give shareholders the stomach flutters and Andrew Carnegie’s corpse an erection, but let’s be real, New York Times.
Let’s be really real about what “nimble” means and how inescapable international wage slavery really is.
Sent from my MacBook.
