Global Culture

Although I have to admit that I resent some of the comments that CNN’s anchor Lou Dobbs has made in the past regarding illegal immigration, his recent appearance in The Daily Show to promote his book, “War on the Middle Class“, provided great insight to what is likely the terrible sentiment brewing among middle class families in the U.S. and possibly other rich countries. After decades of abuses by corporations pursuing their global quest, these families are starting to realize how hard they are being hit:

• 10 million jobs outsourced
• 4 million manufacturing jobs lost
• wages stagnant for the past 35 years
• an education system that fails to create the opportunities it should

While corporations have only increased their position of power:

• 2 billion dollars used by corporations to influence elections & legislations
• lowest tax rates since WWII
• corporate profits at a record high, while earnings participation are at record low
• and some other facts mentioned in the previous post earth inc.

While the middle class continues to be played by corporate america, jobs continue to shift to cheaper regions of the world, corporate lawyers continue to manipulate legislation to create all kinds of tax breaks, boards of directors continue pushing the limits of productivity just to accumulate more wealth. Without being able to understand the complexity of the situation, hard working families assign blame to the masses of immigrants for taking their jobs, to foreign countries for producing cheaper products, without realizing that some corporation is behind all these problems.

Corporations dream of a very large idle class. A massive conglomerate of families with a certain acquisition power, sufficient to make them great consumers, but nothing else. Idle, because once they reach their peak as consumers they are expected to do nothing else but stay there. Unfortunatelly, as Lou’s comments make it obvious, the situation has gone so far that civil unrest is not too far away and may get all the wrong people fighting each other, Corporations looking from above wondering how to restore the idle class.