The death of the American Middle Class can be explained pretty easily: Americans didn’t want to be slaves, so exploitation moved overseas.
Go ahead and picture something: Steve Jobs held a meeting a few thousand miles away from you where he stepped out of his Mercedes, strode angrily into a conference room, and held up a scratched phone. He precedes to berate his executive team and insist upon a complete retooling of a product set to ship in 6 weeks. So your foreman runs through your factory thousands of miles away, gets your ass up in the middle of the night, hands you “tea and a biscuit”, and makes you work a 12-hour shift to satisfy the whims of a distant plutocrat.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
Now, a couple of things happen when somebody wakes me up in the middle of the night. If it’s my wife, I ask what’s wrong. If it’s my child, I go to comfort him. If it’s a relative, I ask who died. If I am awakened by anyone else for any other reason I throw punches. If my boss called me at midnight because Steve Jobs wants a glass screen, I’d let my boss know he can jam a glass screen up his ass unless the money is awesome. It’s called “freedom”.
Bold-ed text my doing.
But I have been repeating this mantra for at least two decades now — that slavery and/or exploitation has simply been exported, not expiated.
