Wal-Mart and the industrialized countries

A few days ago they showed on Tv a documentary about the largest company in the world, Wal-Mart, and its destructive policies not only in the domestic front but also overseas. They say that they save $3100 per family per year. What they do not say is that they impoverish their employees, their families, and the communities, in which they open the stores, as they put out of business every single Mom and Pap store, destroying small businesses. They don’t believe in organized labor, they don’t provide health care coverage. They have the highest turnover in the US.
Some friends of mine on both sides of aisle believe it is wonderful to export jobs out of the US. I look at China, where American companies invest in slave jobs that pay very little more than the average Chinese job does. This documentary showed Chinese workers working 20 hours or more per shift, in inhumane conditions. I wouldn’t consider that an improvement of their standard of living. And it is very easy to say the amount of Chinese that are able to consume, that is a joke. When you have 1.3 billion people, by just having 1% of the population that can consume, that is 13 million consumers. What about the vast majority of the population in China, how do they live?
Let’s look at another good example of how we improved people out of the US at the expense of American jobs. Many Mexicans came to live right across from the US with plants being built by American companies. The areas where the people had to live had no running water, no public facilities, raw sewage, and companies would not hire men, only women. Do we call that an improvement in their standard of living. Those are not new consumers of our products. They can’t afford them.
CAFTA is another example of enslaving locals for the benefit of a few who reap the benefit. Those local people are not able to consume the goods they produce.
Once these people reach a level where they can see the benefit of their labor I don’t take their jobs seriously.
Companies don’t build plants to help people overseas, they only do it to save money on labor costs.
And it isn’t just American companies doing this. This happens in Europe as well. Western European companies build factories in Eastern Europe to save money, not to improve the standard of living of those people making the goods.
And it also applies with pollution. A Finish paper company built a paper factory on the banks of the Uruguay River. Of course they say that this will create jobs, but at what cost to the people, to the environment. If it would be such a wonderful proposition they would have built it in Finland. But why not export the pollution to the undeveloped world? The interesting thing is that none of the paper produced stays in Uruguay, it goes back to Finland.