It's A Small World

I sometimes think that Robert Reich is a bit of a nut, but in this article he explains perfectly what globalization is all about. The corporations we call “American” are not anything of the sort, they just happen to have their headquarters here. They are, like companies headquartered in Europe and Asia, global corporations and they operate globally for reasons which often have nothing whatever to do with labor cost.

We think that we can stand above that globalization thing, using it only to our advantage by sort of pushing the rest of the world around and making demands as to what we expect other nations to do or not do. We have been such an economic power for so long that we don’t believe we have to be part of the global economy but can somehow “stand above the fray” and thrive even when Europe heads into recession and Asia declines.

We still have not caught on to the simple fact that the rest of the world has caught up with us. As Robert Reich points out, we need to offer corporations, our own and others, a reason to want to use our resources, human and other, and we don't have those reasons. If a company builds a product here, for instance, there is no adequate infrastructure to economically facilitate the transport of that product to overseas shipping.

Rather than demonizing corporations and “the rich” we would do better, as Robert Reich points out, to work on creating resources in this country, human resources and infrastructure, that would invite not only American corporations but foreign ones as well to become more active in our portion of the global economy.

Reich then, of course, misses the point completely in saying that “Romney’s so-called ‘business experience’ is irrelevant to the real problems facing most Americans.” There are certainly other problems with Romney’s “sales pitch,” but trying to debunk the relevance of his business experience is just a little bit silly.

What is truly “irrelevant to the real problems facing most Americans” is expanding military bases in the Pacific, killing people throughout the world with drone strikes, imprisoning people in Bagram without habeas corpus, threatening to go to war with Iran over a weapons program they don’t have…

I am no Romney supporter, but I’d say his “business experience” is closer to being relevant than is Obama’s obsession with reducing the deficit, killing people who may or may not be terrorists, and preserving state secrets.