Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The Narrow View from Globalists

Here is a Washington Post article on globalism. A relative asked my my opinion on this piece, so I include it next.

As usual, this author, William H Overshot, picks and chooses the things he wants to talk about. He also gets it wrong in many places.

If you look at high tech wages, they are either flat in all areas or have fallen in the past 5 years (Business Week survey). His claims about the workers getting a cut of the profit that the high level managers get is absolutely false for the high-tech industry. What other industries has he been sloppy with?

Its great that prices are better at Wal-Mart. For those who are poor and barely making it, this is a godsend. He claims that this is a 5-10% "effective boost" to everyone's income. What he should say is that its a boost to those who still retain their jobs. In the tech industry, people have lost their jobs due to globalization and have taken subpart jobs with incomes at half (or less) of their old job. If we are going to be thorough, as the author claims, lets be sure to count that %50 loss for these people.

He claims that the assertion that upper managers are getting fat on globalization is "mostly false." Lets put some numbers to that. I believe that the latest figure of the ratio of top CEO pay to worker pay in the US is now at an astronomical 425 or 1. This is unprecedented in history and the closest rival figure is in Great Britain, where its 13:1.

He also makes the favorite globalist claim that globalization is really helping to improve the living standards and conditions in other countries. Well if this is a laudable goal and a primary reason to support globalization, lets go back to that 425:1 figure. Lets scoop off say the top 80% of the CEO salaries and start pumping that into charities that focus on improving the lives of those in third world countries.

The sucking sound you hear isn't jobs be lost this time. Its the sharp intake of breath of The Comfortable who are aghast at anyone threatening the piles of money that they have so rightly earned. It'll be a cold, cold day in hell, when anyone other than the working class fund the improvement of third world living standards.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just to show you what a total idiot this Overshot guy is, he accuses Lou Dobbs of being one of those that have "built careers around denouncing the evils of globalization". No, Lou Dobbs built his career around something else but Overshot didn't bother to check that out. Lou Dobbs reports on many things and the evils of globalization is just one of them.

But it is funny that Overshot has built his career on the encouraging of shipping jobs out of this country, open borders, and dragging this country down to third world level!