This is a rant prompted by all the free market hype that surrounds us. I swear I haven't seen so much inaccurate propaganda since the Soviet Union went out of business.
One of the many things that puzzle me about American life is the notion that the right wing is pro-business...more specifically, pro-small business. Groups like the Republican Party, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and their large corporate backers claim to fight for small business which is supposed to flourish under their version of free market economics.
As a bona fide independent contractor working in a small biz with a grand total of 3 employees (but with a somewhat larger number of associates and co-contractors), I am going to weigh in here from the point of view of a little guy.
The way the term “free market” is used in the USA is an insult to both freedom and to markets.
The decimation of the labor movement has had a devastating effect on small business. Working class people are the lifeblood of much of small business and if they don't have money to spend, small business goes down with them. Decimating the labor movement was the brilliant idea of our free market saviors from the Chamber of Commerce and their mega-corp allies. Gee thanks guys and gals.
If you own a little eating establishment or tavern across from that GM plant, you better start thinking of some other line of work. Heck, you don't even have to be anywhere near a major industrial facility to feel it. Just think of all those cute little ethnic restaurants, small speciality shops, neighborhood pharmacies, local auto repair shops and the like.
They wouldn’t have to struggle half as hard to stay afloat if working class people had more money in their wallets. Wages have been flat for years because of the savage beating the labor movement has taken. It's what both socialist Eugene V. Debs and that that old fascist Henry Ford both knew long ago, if workers don't have money to spend, businesses are in deep shit.
The decimation of what passes for social and labor legislation has had a devastating effect on small business. The rightwing has fought every effort for some kind of national health insurance since at least the days of Harry Truman. The result? What small business can afford to give their employees decent employer health benefits in this day and age?
The rightwing has fought to criminalize immigration so that unscrupulous employers can undercut wages with underpaid undocumented labor and force their competitors to match them in the race to the bottom.
The rightwing has opposed health and safety and environmental legislation so that unscrupulous employers can cut huge corners on worker safety while poisoning the communities around them.
If you are an honest businessperson who wants to do the right thing, try competing with these "free market" criminals. And as for enforcement, talk to some of our frustrated OSHA and EPA employees some time. You'll get an earful. The sprint to the bottom has become an Olympic event.
How is small business supposed to prosper in neighborhoods wrecked by dis-investment and where much of the population is in prison rather than in school? Our patriotic "corporate wise leaders" have packed up much of our industry and shipped it overseas instead of investing in technical improvements and worker training. The result? The highest executive compensation on the planet and some of the worst poverty in the developed world.
How can small business prosper when the stresses of life under this bizarre form of dog-eat-dog-cat-eat-mouse economics cause so many people to go off the rails mentally? This means depression, low productivity and an occasional fool with a gun who walks into a 7-11 franchise and blows away some total strangers who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Our drug laws drive up the prices of mind numbing drugs so that many alienated desperate people looking for solace turn to crime to pay for them. And guess who gets robbed to pay off the drug dealers and the crooked cops? Why small businesses and their customers of course. On the other hand, our drug laws do create an economy of sorts.
Low income working class people are virtually the only folks who get sent to prison for drug abuse. The dopers get to make license plates and rural America(where most of the prisons are) gets to guard them. It's about the only public works program left.
Oh, wait. Our free market saviors hate public works. Better privatize the prisons. Better still, let's privatize all governmental institutions. Let's make companies like Halliburton the gold standard of corruption and cronyism for all privatized government institutions. In fact, let's make two...three...many Halliburtons.
Small business demands a constant flow of creative and fast-footwork thinking just to survive. Yet our well funded educational "reformers" now insist on an assembly-line educational system where creative thinking is dumped for a barrage of memorization for standardized tests created and sold by guess who? Why our “wise corporate leaders” of course.
Visual arts? Theater? Music? Who can afford useless frills like that when there are schools in America where the kids have to bring their own toilet paper. Still, it's amazing to think of how much small business relies on the arts-- little galleries, tourist trinket shops, small communications and media shops, little birthday card gift shops and of course every small business needs artists to prettify their advertisements and signage...the list goes on.
To attract customers, small businesses clamor for artists to make their shopping districts look quaint, or ultra-moderne or just plain not boring and decrepit. They demand musicians to play summer concerts in the shopping malls or live theater performances to rope in the customers. Well screw them...if they can't find customers without a bunch of flaky artists, starving actors and strung-out musicians let 'em get a taste of bankruptcy court.
They say it's wise to get a college degree if you plan to go into business. But what is happening to our universities? Being a college prof these days means 3 jobs at widely separated schools with minimal or no benefits. Gotta see your professor, better catch them on the way to the parking lot and hope they don't drop that pile of term papers into a mud puddle.
And of course frills like women and gender studies and ethnic studies are always on the chopping block. God forbid we should study how to get rid of our racial and gender caste system. Those caught up in our gender and racial nightmare are told to start a business. Gee, thanks pal. Now that they've cut the Office of Women's Affairs or the Office of Minority Affairs, how are they supposed to learn to beat the big white boys who have a head start that goes back 400 years?
And don't even get me started on what they are doing to liberal arts. Liberal arts is where students are supposed to cultivate creativity and to weigh in on complex moral and ethical choices.
To hell with them. Let 'em Google it or look it up in the dwindling shelves of our threadbare public libraries. And as for debating complex moral choices, who needs that? Our moral guardians on Wall Street do a much better job than some bearded hippie philosophy PhD stuffed in a cubicle with their Plato and Camus paperbacks.
Small business has no moral and ethical decisions to make that can't be solved by some kindly advice from Fortune Magazine or Forbes. Who needs to read about some crazy Greek guy who pushes a rock up a hill? What a loser. So empty out those literature and history classrooms and put in some courses that spit out more lawyers and MBA's.
Our free market saviors need those universities to do product research on the taxpayers dime. Build more labs in "partnership" with multinational corporations so they can patent genes, drugs, crops, software routines, new life forms or whatever. Make sure that scientific and engineering research is closed off by fences around "intellectual property." Make sure that small businesspeople (and that includes the farmers who grow our food) pay through the nose if they want to take advantage of any of this.
As for being able to write a clear English sentence and string those together into coherent paragraphs? Let that be taught by some struggling underpaid grad student with a mountain of debt and no time to grade the gazillion blue books the poor sap has to wade through. Our free marketeers sure have a brilliant plan for our colleges and universities.
You know, once there was a place called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that was ruled by a corrupt economic elite who didn’t give a horse’s ass about everyday working class Soviet citizens. They ruled in the name of communism, a “communism” that only existed in the turgid propaganda of the Soviet Ministry of Agitation and Propaganda. Then one day the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics disappeared. Poof! Today if it is remembered at all, it’s referred to as the Former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
We live in the United States of America which is ruled by a corrupt economic elite who rule in the name of the free market. This “free market” only exists within the turgid propaganda of the Heritage Foundation. They don’t give a horse’s ass about everyday working class people either. Will the United States of America someday be replaced by the Former United States of America? If it is remembered at all?
Beats me.
I’ll leave that for you to chew on cuz I gotta get back to work. I’m supposed to be semi-retired but I have a whole list of digital snafus to figure out, copy to write, clients to query, bills to pay, invoices to create and cartoons to write for our semi-comatose labor movement.
Have a nice day and long live the free market.