As the world looks the other way

[Mushroom]

BS! Your school may not have had a class, but in every school system I taught in, it was a required course and I often taught it.

Which is why people started to shop more off of price than quality or where things were made.

Hell, even the Unions saw this trend starting decades ago. I know most will not know of these, but these were once staples on US television.





Of course, the ILGWU vanished over 25 years ago. And the "Inspector 12" became pointless when over a decade ago they closed the last 30 of their US factories and moved them all to Asia.

This is not "corporate greed", it is called "fighting to stay alive". When people started to only shop based on cost and nothing else, they had to do the same thing when it comes to labor.

And what happened to the companies that tried to buck that trend? Who instead raised prices in order to keep working in the US? Well, look no farther than Magnavox, RCA, Quasar, and all of the other former electronics companies we once had. Either bankrupt and bought out by foreign companies (Magnavox is now owned by Phillips, RCA is owned by Sony), or just completely out of business (Quasar was bought by Panasonic then closed).

You say you laugh, but you seem to have missed how economics really works. It is not the company that dictates things, it is the consumer. And I started to see that trend in the early 1980s, as people started to shop based more on price than anything else. Who cares if the $100 Korean VCR only had 2 heads and might break down after only 3 years. It was cheaper than the $200 4 head US made one that would last a decade or more.

Which is now why we have TV sets that last a decade if you are lucky, and is cheaper to just throw them away instead of fix them. Which also had the effect of destroying another longstanding US industry, TV repair shops.

I even see that in my industry, as today few even consider fixing their computer. Our population has moved to a disposable mindset, predominantly because of the low cost of goods that they dictated. To the point that nobody wants to even pay for local domestic labor, just throw it away and buy a new one. You can't blame that on "greedy corporations", a great many are not even around anymore and have not been for decades. This the consumer has entirely done on their own.

 

[Mushroom]

My point was that most of our Western businesses are subservient to the PRChinese and don't dictate terms as much as the Chinese have done, and do.

That is both true, and not true.

Part of the problem is that many are simply trapped there.

Apple has well over $200 billion invested in China. And that money is trapped, both by China and the US. China will not let them divest much of their business there now, and the US would impose taxes of over 50% on any money that was divested and returned to the US. So it is simply cheaper for them to keep it there as opposed to lose over half of it trying to bring that investment back.

And a lot of companies are now wanting out of China. But they are stuck there, as if they tried to leave they would lose around 75% of that investment if they tried to bring it back.

I worked with a Telecom about a decade ago, and they were very careful with their dealings with China. Some things they could only afford to manufacture there, but they spread it out a lot. The chassis from one company, and the electronics spread through a dozen others. Final assembly done here in the US (with a few components made domestically or in other countries). That way any Chinese company would have a hell of a time replicating their proprietary hardware. They never actually saw it, only the bits and pieces they were contracted to make.

And it was even the same with their coding. The bulk coding was done in India, but final coding was all done in the US. Telecoms still tend to be very secretive about their hardware and infrastructure, more so than most other aspects of the US industry. And China never saw that. Only that we bought metal cases from one company, keypads from another, cameras from yet another, and proprietary motherboards were made by yet another. They could try to replicate what they did, and in the end would have little to show for it.

 

[badger2]

OP: 'China's allies in D.C.'

'Marx termed the twofold movement of the tendency to a falling rate of profit, and the increase in the absolute quantity of surplus value, the law of the counteracted tendency. As corollary of this law, there is the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorialization flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other.

The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value.'
(D&G, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp. 34-5, The Desiring Machines)