“We’re fighting for a society where everybody is important.”
– October 7, 2011 by Grounded TV, covering voices from the Occupy Wall Street march in New York City on October 5
Why is it that a coworker promoted to be your manager suddenly has the power of life and death over you? A few months ago, in many cases, he or she was joking with you as you sat in back-to-back (literally) cubicles.
Now, after the promotion, when the old-style top-to-bottom hierarchy of a corporation blunders and has to lay off people, your coworker of a few months ago signs off on your layoff.
If he now has the power to send you into an intractable Recession without adequate severance pay or health insurance-and then “bad-mouth” you to his peers and superiors at corporate parties and clubs, shouldn’t you have the right to bad-mouth-or tell the truth-about his weaknesses?
But, in the quintessential multinational firm with a head office drawing up plans and issuing commands to international satellite facilities that build a local version of “Product 1,” you have no rights, either before or after your layoff. If you bad-mouth your ex-boss/ex-coworker, you are labeled as “erratic” or a “misfit” or “don’t hire him, his memory isn’t 100%” or “he hates company parties” or “I saw him steal a package of Xerox paper one day.”
And your hole grows deeper. The damage inflicted without thought, casually, by your ex-friend gains momentum until people believe everything is your fault: “He hasn’t been hired in two years! There must be something wrong with him!”
Your network of loyalists dwindles, until, one day, using a free movie ticket received for donating blood at your church, you see this ex-coworker in the theater’s lobby: A sideways glance. “Hello, Mr. Smith,” he says to you. You stare into his eyes and say nothing. You call your child near to you and slip into your movie-one you hope he is not also going to see.
I’ve been thinking lately that capitalism is nothing more than proof of evolution, in which the fittest or most adaptable survive. Since we are creatures of evolution, we accept this kill-or-be-killed mentality without question–except the preposterous one: “Can’t we all just get along?” I’m not sure how socialism would work, but, from what I’ve read, I’d like to give life in Scandinavia a try versus being jobless for nearly three years and having no health insurance (this will cut my life expectancy 20 years). With the Crash of 2008, I suddenly realized that I might have only five years left instead of the 25 I had planned on.
(As Marx said-and is being proven right every day, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state. It is part of the same nightmare experienced in postindustrial mill towns of New England and the abandoned steel mills of Ohio. It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans, living in terror and mourning their dead, endure daily.)
What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?
Perversely, the free-trade agreements pioneered by Bill Clinton and largely responsible for there being 40 applicants for each open position in my life’s work-editing, writing and proofing-likely heed the beginning of the end of the “quintessential multinational firm,” according to a valuable little book called, “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio/Penguin, New York, 2010).
According to Tapscott and Williams, that old-fashioned multinational “was modeled on a hub-and-spoke architecture. A head of office drew up plans and issued commands to an international network of satellite production facilities that built products for local markets.”
“This market-by-market approach to organizing production no longer makes sense in a global age,” the authors write. “National silos gave rise to bloated and expensive bureaucracies that deployed inefficient, incompatible, and often redundant processes for making and marketing products locally. Insufficient knowledge transfer across organizational boundaries and departmental silos meant that most multinationals failed to seize opportunities for innovation and cost reduction. Now that global business standards and info technologies envelop the planet, the cost of coordinating a distributed global business is infinitely cheaper than just a few decades ago.”
This is what caused the Crash of 2008 and the rise of the elite 1%, leaving the 99 percenters (the commoners, or serfs) to struggle for survival just as the inhabitants of the great Mayan civilizations struggled to survive when the Spaniards attacked with guns, steel and germs 500 to 600 years ago; just as the makers of horse carriages struggled when the car was invented about 100 years ago; just as trains and ocean liners petered out after the airline industry skyrocketed in the 1940s and 1950s; just as farmers struggled and had to migrate to cities to squander out a “living” wage during the first Industrial Revolution from 1700 to 1900.
This is what Occupy Wall Street-and all of the Occupy protests–are fighting. Do you think they will win? Doubtful. A friend of mine told me that he went to his union’s meeting about a week ago and there was no “fire in the belly” of his fellow union members. It seems that after the police brutally, in the dead of night, scrambled Occupy Wall Streeters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan and trashed laptops, tents, sleeping bags, and backpacks within the New York City Sanitation Department’s warehouse, there may be too few people, whether young and with nothing to lose or not, willing to face life-ruining jail time or injury. My friend said there, so far, appear to be very, very few Tim DeChristophers willing to brave two-years hard time in a federal prison to try to change the 1% elite, which has this universe’s two prime weapons-money and power.
(In March, DeChristopher was convicted of two felony counts for a nonviolent act of civil disobedience. Acting out of his convictions and his concern for the survival of humankind, Tim bid on oil and gas leases on federal land that he didn’t have the means to pay for.)
It seems that more and more multinationals are moving to a new model, a truly global firm that breaks down national “silos.” “This is not a multinational with a new twist. Smart firms are abandoning the multinational model completely,” the authors write. Today “supply chains” are becoming “value networks.”
“In the past, companies like Boeing wrote detailed specifications for each part and asked suppliers to build to plan. Boeing gathered the parts on the plant floor and spent weeks assembling a single plane. Today, suppliers co-design airplanes from scratch and deliver complete subassemblies to Boeing’s factory, where a single plane can be snapped together like Lego blocks in as little as three days.”
“Handing significant responsibility for innovation over to suppliers signals an important change in how companies compete.” Bringing new products to market now means working with a vast “ecosystem” (a word the authors use, rather oddly, considering the global warming consequences and economic consequences being ignored in the never-ending quest for greater profits for shareholders) of partners that possess complementary skills. Innovation is less about inventing and more about orchestrating or coordinating good ideas,” the authors claim.
But they never touch upon any negative consequences of this new business model or the “collateral damage” it already is bringing by destroying the middle and lower classes while depleting their retirement funds or health insurance or educations.
The authors instead say, “Boeing and BMW are not giving up on innovation. Both companies are taking advantage of the resources they have ‘freed up’ to focus on improving a few dimensions of value that ‘matter most’ to their customers.”
Tapscott and Williams, unfortunately, reveal their bias (or is it realism?) when they focus on China’s burgeoning motorcycle-making industry since 1990. China collaboratively “reverse-engineered” motorcycles it allowed the Japanese to make within its boundaries and now, modifying and improving on some of those designs, is making Chinese-brand motorcycles some of the most popular in the world. One reason it can do this, of course, is that Chinese workers, desperate to feed and shelter their families, work for peanuts versus the fat, lazy Americans or the westernized Japanese-although they, too, soon will work for peanuts and “owe their souls to the company store.”
However, this rush to modernize, increase profits for shareholders, and decrease product costs so sales rise, has fatal collateral damage. As I said, Tapscott and Williams don’t mention it. However, I also wrote that this is the start of a “brave new world,” similar to when the Europeans met the Native Americans or the first Industrial Revolution met the predominately farming industry of the U.S. in the late 1800s.
A recent 83 page report detailed suicides and labor conditions at Foxconn in China. It was produced by 20 universities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. Interviews of 1,800 Foxconn workers at 12 factories found evidence of illegal overtime and failure to report accidents, says Wikipedia (one collaborative venture that has achieved tremendous success and added value to everyone’s life and knowledge). The report criticized Foxconn’s management style, which it called inhumane and abusive.
An estimated 18 Foxconn employees attempted suicide in 2010, with 14 deaths. The Foxconn suicides occurred between January and November, 2010. The suicides drew media attention, and employment practices at Foxconn, a large contract manufacturer were investigated by several of its customers. Foxconn is a major collaborator in manufacturing famous-name brands including Apple, Dell, HP, Motorola, Nintendo, Sony and Nokia.
The 20 Chinese universities’ report on Foxconn decried it as a labor camp. These conditions also led to several major strike actions at high-profile manufacturers in China. In response, Foxconn substantially increased wages for its southern China workforce, installed suicide-prevention netting (how empathetic, how sweet!!), and asked employees to sign no-suicide pledges (also very heart-warming!).
Despite HUGE glitches resulting in the deaths of thousands during the epochal change we now are suffering through, the end-result is shaping up to be the elites living in heavily fortified and supplied fortresses on high and dry land while the minions drown in squalor, disease, starvation and pestilence below.
Whatever the result of the turmoil made obvious by the Crash of 2008, the wish of poets like John Lennon–
“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one”–
–Has a chance-however miraculous-of coming true. Whether it will lead to a united world with peace, food, shelter, and medical attention for all human beings may depend on whether protests like Occupy can some up with fighters, martyrs, and, most importantly, the power and money to win out versus the well-heeled heels of the elite-not likely unless the 99 percenters are more willing to shed blood, sacrifice their careers and even their lives, and whether good-hearted millionaires and billionaires, can fund Occupy’s endeavors.
Yet, the dream of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Lennon and millions more for a “world living as one” is on the minds of many. One writer, Robert Koehler, a nationally syndicated writer said on Sept. 29, 2011 in TruthDig.com, “The nation-state, as far as I’m concerned [already], is an obsolete fiction. The division of the world into 194 random fragments, mostly born of war and exploitation, locked in a state of perpetual mistrust and ever-shifting tensions toward one another, is more problem than solution in the 21st century. Nation-states are a convenience of war. An easily exploited, ‘us vs. them’ exclusivity is basic to their identity, which explains the amount of energy that nations expend patrolling and defining their borders, as though these were in some way real.”
Koehler continued: “On a planet united not merely by technology and a global economy, but also by climate change and an array of problems that can only be addressed effectively with worldwide cooperation, humanity needs to claim allegiance both to the whole planet and to the well-being of every individual on it. Neither of these allegiances are the priority of nation-states, as Iran and the United States both demonstrate.”
“This is a plea not for ‘world government’ so much as a melting of the distrust between governments and peoples, and the flowering not of prisons but of an unprecedented spirit of openness.”
Koehler appears to be right, nation-states may melt away as the 2nd Industrial Revolution, involving world-ending weapons devised from genetic-engineering, nanotechnology and robotics makes World War III a lose-lose proposition. However, given human’s inestimable ability for folly and taking a look at fallen empires and nations throughout history (see the Easter Islanders who chopped all their trees down to glorify two competing leaders), scientist William Joy’s pessimistic view that, yes the world will live as one, but it will be one grayish glob of goo from out-of-control self-replicating nanobots and, given the world’s fight-to-the-death visible philosophy towards carbon-based fuel, the end is nigh. It seems doubtful that scientist Ray Kurzweil’s optimistic view that GNR will solve everyone’s problems, including food, health and shelter is possible.
If Kurzweil’s optimism is what Obama and the rest of the Bilgenbergers share and are planning, why don’t they tell us? Maybe, for the same reason my ex-coworker whom I saw at the movies passed along all my mistakes to higher-ups-selling me out so he could keep his job, even though he was lower than me in the hierarchy. He knew and understood the kill or be killed mandate of evolution, which is the dominant directive of our universe.
He knew that you must learn different Lennon lyrics:
“There’s room at the top they’re telling you still
“But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
“If you want to be like the folks on the hill.”