From Here to Bangladesh

Beautiful day here on the Platinum Coast of California, with plenty of sunshine on the red tile roofs, the luxury automobiles, the Farmer’s Market, and the tourists strolling along the waterfront. It’s enough to make a man think nothing but happy thoughts, but I found myself thinking about that factory in Bangladesh that collapsed, killing around 300 human beings.

Those people died because of “market forces” and the “globalized” economy; they died because the game is low wages and low prices at Target and Wal-Mart and Macy’s. For the labor contractors, wholesalers and retailers, it’s business as usual, collateral damage, not their fault. Nobody’s to blame -- it’s just the way of the world, everybody trying to pull down some coin.

Get the most labor you can for the lowest amount you can pay. In the global economy handbook, Volume I, page 1, this is described as sound business, not exploitation. Chase cheap labor from Mexico to Thailand to China to Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, and never lose a minute worrying about the welfare of the people down on the sweat shop floor. The world is divided into camps: slaves and masters, workers and owners, damned and blessed, losers and winners, unlucky and lucky. This is the way it has always been, and will always be.

If we paid those folks in Bangladesh a decent wage, allowed them to form unions, and get all uppity with rights and entitlements, American consumers couldn’t buy t-shirts at H&M for $6 a pop, and we couldn’t pay the CEO three hundred times what his secretary earns. And that would be awful, wouldn’t it?

About as awful as that ratfucker George W. Bush opening his library and museum down in Texas. The most anti-intellectual president of the modern era has his own library, a showcase for two disastrous terms in office, two wars, state-sanctioned kidnapping and torture, Guantanamo, Katrina, and an economic meltdown not seen since the Great Depression. The revision of history has begun in earnest. I doubt we’ve seen the last of W. A few years from now he’ll pop up as a GOP elder statesman, with his sordid past forgotten by the faithful.

But like I said, it was a beautiful day, full of light and color, reds and greens and blues. It’s a long, long way from the Platinum Coast to Bangladesh, but the thought I can’t get out of my head is that it’s not as far as we think.