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"Globalization" for Americans is Really About Income Distribution
By Mark Weisbrot
“Globalization” is
one of the major challenges facing American workers –
which includes not only factory and office workers but
more than 80 percent of our 144 million-person labor
force. But it is widely misunderstood. Most of the
people writing and talking about globalization for the
major media know little about economics, and of the few
who know something, most are dodging the most important
issues.
The central issue
for Americans facing the global economy is income
distribution. Whether it’s international trade or
investment, or immigration, the main impact on most
Americans’ lives has been on the distribution of income.
And that distribution has gotten dramatically worse over
the last 30 years: the rich have gotten a lot richer,
the poor have languished, and the middle class has
shrunk.
From 1972 to 2001,
the bottom 20 percent of wage and salary earners got
only 1.6 percent of the increase in this income over the
three decades. The majority got less than 11 percent.
But the richest one percent received 18.4 percent of the
increased income – vastly more than went to the majority
of Americans.
The “managed
globalization” designed by our political leaders has
contributed very much to this upward redistribution of
income. The key word here is “managed.” It is not, as
the pundits argue, simply the result of market forces
combined with technological changes in communication and
transportation.
The architects of the global economy have not thrown
their friends and neighbors – the doctors, lawyers,
executives and other professionals – into brutal
international competition with the tens of millions of
highly-educated, English-speaking people who would be
willing to do their jobs at half the salary. That is
why, for example, our doctors earn twice as much as
their counterparts do in the rich countries of Europe.
Instead, our
political leaders have devoted decades of careful and
often protracted negotiations to rewriting the rules of
international commerce so that the nearly three-quarters
of Americans that do not have a college degree would
face lots of global competition. Partly as a result of
these changes, the real wage for most workers in the US
has barely grown over the last 30 years – about 9
percent – while productivity, or the amount that is
produced by an hour of labor, has grown more than 80
percent.
Immigration policy
follows the same rationale – foreign citizens who want
to work in restaurants or as construction laborers can
do so by the millions, but the same is not true for
foreign dentists or engineers.
The result of this
“protectionism for the few, international trade and
competition for the many” has been exactly what
economists would expect: the gains from a growing
economy have gone increasingly to the protected and
privileged few.
Of course, managed
globalization is only part of the story. Political and
legal changes have undermined the bargaining power of
organized labor and its membership has steadily fallen.
Health care costs have been allowed to spiral – the
United States now spends about twice as much per person
as other developed countries and has worse health
outcomes – and these burdens are increasingly shifted to
employees. And the tax code has been rewritten to favor
the upper classes.
The Federal minimum wage, in terms of purchasing power,
is now at its lowest point in half a century. The
majority of Americans have so little influence in our
political system that despite the overwhelming support
for an increase, the party that controls Congress
believes it can get re-elected in November while
refusing to even allow a vote on the issue. We shall
see.
Reform in all of
these areas will be necessary if this country is ever to
return to an economy in which most Americans share in
the gains from economic growth.
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director
of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in
Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from
the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean
Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University
of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous
research papers on economic policy.
He writes a column on economic and policy issues that is
distributed to over 550 newspapers by
Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services. His opinion
pieces have appeared in the Washington Post, the Los
Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and most major U.S.
newspapers. He appears regularly on national and local
television and radio programs. Mark Weisbrot can be reached via
email at weisbrot at cepr dot net.
www.cepr.net/pages/mwbio.htm
Source:
CEPR
posted 6 September 2006
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
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1965
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 14
December 2011
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