The Rich Stole Your Job, Too

Globalization done right could have made us more rather than less economically secure.  But the rich obscenities had to grab every last penny they could, everyone else, the nation and the world be damned.

Erik Loomis:

And let me reiterate, there is no such thing as market forces. These are not immutable laws like gravity. These are all a series of decisions made by humans. They have the option to make other decisions. They do not do so. But we should not naturalize this. We could have had a system of globalization that sought to share economic benefits equally. But because the process was controlled by the rich for the benefit of the rich (and let’s remember that the core reason for globalization in the last 50 years is CEOs and shareholders seeking to bust unions and escape environmental protection by moving overseas), that never happened. Today, the capitalists have naturalized the process to deflect how they control all of it. This is basically believed not only on the right and by elites in both parties but also by those liberal writers who believe that Paul Theroux is history’s greatest monster for pointing out the real costs of this to Americans. We have a long ways to go. Dean Baker is doing a lot of the work to help give us the tools to push back against this orthodoxy.