Why big corporations don't care about the United States anymore
They have little interest in the health of the United States economically, because they see the economic center of the world shifting overseas, to Asia. Most of the future economic growth as they see it will be in Asia and between Asia and Africa.
-http://www.businessinsider.com/central-asia-economy-is-heating-up-2015-5
- http://www.inboundlogistics.com/cms/article/asia-manufacturing-dynamo-or-consumer-powerhouse/
- http://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/T019-C021-S001-middle-class-spenders-will-lead-global-growth.html
Former World Bank President talks about here, back in 2010:
You can see the full speech here:
If your a capitalist that saw these projections years ago, why would you have any interest in the American market, especially after seeing this?
- http://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/T019-C021-S001-middle-class-spenders-will-lead-global-growth.html
According to the projections, America's middle class spending will be pretty much stagnant while the rest of the world's middle class will be growing rapidly thus its spending will grow rapidly, leaving America in the dust.
So they see America as a dead market, and they are just feasting over it like vultures with a carcass, as if it has no future.
= new reply since forum marked as read
They are just being "good global citizens"?
I'm glad they're being 'good citizens' SOME-fucking-where.
Black and Latino (and Amerasian, for that matter) labor was kept artificially cheap, and their property rights were ignored to keep white property values artificially high. This started to be un-done in the 1960s, though its pernicious effects still linger (see Coates's "The Case for Reparations"
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As black and Latino labor in the US stopped being so completely exploitable in the 1970s, the first wheel of the train came off the track and white middle class wages began to stagnate. The white middle class response was for families to switch from one earner as the standard to two earners (hence the 1980s hand-wringing about latchkey kids). But the black middle class was (re)born (there had been one in the 1920s before the white paramilitary backlash against it provoked the Great Migration), provoking a lot of white resentment.
A combination of technology and post-Cold War trade liberalization started integrating Asia into the global economy (and I mean mainland Asia; Japan and South Korea were ahead of this game by a generation) at just about the time that the white middle class's transition to full two-partner employment was complete. There were very few stay-at-home moms left to enter the labor force. So, many countries (including the US) started to form regional trade blocs to increase their market access on better terms than China would get. So, you get NAFTA, the Eurozone, etc. And, more or less, the white middle class treaded water for twenty more years based on that increased regional trade.
In both the US and Europe, minorities and immigrants saw much larger economic gains during the past 40 years than the "existing" white middle class did, which bred resentment that the right in both countries preyed upon, despite the fact that minorities still wound up worse off than whites economically; it's just they had been so very much worse off before. Similarly, as businesses began to see profitable ways to operate in Asia, and in doing so created the Asian middle class (the greatest reduction in global inequality in history, remember), similar resentment struck the western white middle class.
If you're an "average" white American, you're doing roughly as well now as you were in 1970. (I mean, obviously you yourself are not, but you're doing roughly as well as someone with your education, experience, and age would have been doing.) The white middle class in the west has been, essentially, treading water while immigrants, minorities, and foreigners are seeing their incomes go up by leaps and bounds. You probably feel less secure in your job (though I'd argue that that job security people felt in the 1970s was false). It's always disorienting to lose privilege. Your family is probably the same size (fertility is roughly flat across this period, though there was a bump in the 1980s).
If you're an "average" black or Latino American (with the same caveats as above), you're doing rather better now than you were in 1970, though still not as well as a white person was doing in 1970 (or possibly just slightly better; if they haven't crossed yet they're about to).
If you're an "average" east or south Asian, the worlds of today and of 1970 are completely unrecognizable. You probably lived in a village then; you probably live in a megacity now (500 people come to Mumbai from a rural village every. single. day.) You probably worked in agriculture then; you probably work in manufacturing or services now. You probably made (adjusting for inflation) about fifty cents a day, and you probably make about $5 a day now -- 10 times more. Your family is probably much smaller (it's an old adage that the most effective contraceptive in the world is economic development). Basically, Asian cities right now are what New York or Chicago were in the early 1900s.
So, basically, everybody is doing better except for the western white middle class, who are stuck pretty much where we were 40 years ago (there have been gains, but they're small enough to be at the level of noise). And that pisses off the western white middle class. But there's nothing deceptive about saying that looking at the global situation, it's much, much better than it was 40 years ago.
which is rapidly learning how to play the biggest-ape-rules multinational corporate game. Perhaps the TPP is a desperate attempt to make pals in Asia before China becomes the biggest ape and swallows up all the future growth in those markets.
