By gollies, America is still an exporting powerhouse. In fact, our corporate chieftains have made us number one in exporting America’s most precious goods — our jobs, factories, technologies and middle-class opportunities.
With unemployment and underemployment devastating millions of families in our country, perhaps you’ve assumed that U.S. corporations aren’t hiring these days. Nonsense. They added 1.4 million jobs last year alone — overseas. For example, more than half of Caterpillar’s new hires in 2010 were in foreign countries. Many more of this giant’s jobs are headed offshore in the near future, for Caterpillar, which was once an iconic American brand, has recently invested in three new plants in China. It’ll not only manufacture tractors and bulldozers there, but it’ll also begin to ship its design work and tech nology development jobs to China.
Likewise, DuPont, once proud of its U.S. workforce, has slashed its number of American employees in recent years, while increasing its Asia-Pacific workforce by more than half. Indeed, DuPont no longer considers itself American — “We are a global player,” sniffs its chief innovation officer.
Such homemade brands as Coca-Cola, Dell and IBM are also among the multitude of corporations abandoning our shores and our middle class. Of course, they still keep their wellappointed headquarters here so the corporation and top executives can continue enjoying all that America has to offer. Calvin Coolidge once asserted that “What’s good for business is good for America.” That was myopic enough, but today’s narcissistic CEOs are even more self-serving, declaring that “What’s good for business is good for business, America be damned.”
If we are to have a united society, America cannot tolerate such raw selfishness by the privileged few. We can have a plutocracy or a democracy, but not both.
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