At the same time, U.S. corporations continue their race to the bottom for cheap labor. Cable News Network's " Exporting America" broadcast listed hundreds of "U.S. companies either sending American jobs overseas or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor instead of American workers." A very small fraction of the firms on CNN's list are reprinted in the following three paragraphs to convey some idea of the enormity of the indifference of employers for their workers:
Aetna, AIG, Alamo Rent a Car, Alcoa, Allstate, Anheuser-Bush, AT&T, Bank of America, Bechtel, BellSouth, Best Buy, Borden Chemical, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Caterpillar, ChevronTexaco, Citigrouup, Continental airlines, Delta Air Lines, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fedders Corp., Fluor, Ford Motor, General Electric, General Motors, and Goldman Sachs.
Also, Halliburton, Hershey, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, IBM, Illinois Tool Works, ITT Industries, John Deere, Johns Manville, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg, Kerr-McGhee Chemicals, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, Lear Corp., Levi Strauss, Lockheed Martin, Mattel, Maytag, Merrill Lynch, MetLife, Microsoft, Monsanto, Motorola, Nabisco, Northrop Grumman, Northwest Airlines, Office Depot, Orbitz, Oracle, Otis Elevator, Owens Corning, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Polaroid, Pratt & Whitney, Procter & Gamble, and Prudential Insurance.
Also, Quaker Oats, Radio Shack, Rayovac, Rohm & Haas, Safeway, Sara Lee, Seco Manufacturing, Square D, State Farm Insurance, Target, Tenneco Automotive, Texas Instruments, Time Warner, Tropical Sportswear, TRW Automotive, Tupperware, Tyco Electronics, Union Pacific, UNISYS, United Plastics Group, United Technologies, Verizon, Wachovia Bank, Weyerhaeuser, Xerox, and Zenith.
Why hasn't the Obama administration taken swift and forceful action to relieve the situation, perhaps even to launch the Domestic Marshall Plan for the cities the Urban League's Whitney Young called for as far back as 1962? Perhaps it's because like President Bush before him Mr. Obama is more focused on waging war. Here, again, Sir Thomas More speaks to us: "To start with, most kings are more interested in the science of war...than in useful peacetime techniques. They're far more anxious, by hook or by crook, to acquire new kingdoms than to govern their existing ones properly."
This, of course, applies perfectly to America's kings, for not only have our presidents assumed the powers and prerogatives of kings but they have, in fact, acted no better than medieval kings, waging wars with armies raised from the poorest strata of society and spending lavishly to conquer while ignoring their own citizenry's cries for bread and opportunity. Put another way, the Pentagon is spending more money for war (52 cents of every tax dollar) than all 50 states combined spend for all purposes to improve the lot of 300 million Americans. In their book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War"( W.W. Norton), Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes write, "A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq." (Stiglitz is former chief economist at the World Bank and a Nobel Prize laureate and Bilmes is a public policy authority at Harvard.) Given the wars' colossal and criminal waste of human life and treasure, it is little wonder states and cities the nation over are starved for income, record numbers of homes are being foreclosed, and soup kitchens are reporting a rising influx of patrons, many of them bewildered former members of the shrinking middle class.
This situation has pertained in America now for several generations. Before Iraq and Afghanistan there was the Viet Nam aggression. Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern attempted to make the connection between war abroad and hard times at home when he said, "For every bomb that falls in Viet Nam a house somewhere in America collapses from neglect." McGovern was defeated by incumbent Richard Nixon in a landslide. It is apparent from the recent elections that Americans today, just as in the national election of 1972, do not grasp the reality of the terminal disease that is war. They do not recognize how it is driving them relentlessly into poverty while sacrificing their children like some primitive culture on the altar of the military-industrial complex to ensure a profitable harvest from their blood. #
(Sherwood Ross is director of the Anti-War News Service of Coral Gables, Fla. His prior experience includes work as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, as a "workplace" columnist for a wire service, and as News Director for a major civil rights organization.)
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