China has no modern industrial base or manufacturing expertise to speak of 30 years ago when it started changing its economic system. It was not capable of making cheaper products that can compete here (and put people here out of business) in the same way Japan, Korea can do. So who's really putting people out of business in this case? People like Sam Walton: http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article ... arts_image
An except:
The story isn't part of the official Wal-Mart creation epic, but it tells us almost all we need to know about the company's approach to the interests of its employees and the laws of the nation. Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million -- a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.
Walton was furious. The mechanization of agriculture had finally reached the backwaters of the Ozark Plateau, where he was opening one store after another. The men and women who had formerly worked on small farms suddenly found themselves redundant, and he could scoop them up for a song, as little as 50 cents an hour. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues didn't exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure.
Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.
I'm not singling out Walton, because he's just doing what any really smart capitalist would do. I'm not one of those alarmists, conspiracy theorists, but we are at a stage now where corporations are so large, so borderless, that we can't automatically assume what's good for GM is what's good for America, or more broadly, what is good for capitalism is automatically good for any one country, even America. Because these for-profit organizations will run roughshod over interest of any country or its people when huge profits are involved.
