Index

Supply Chain Blues

Why Do We Care about China?

The American economy is being hit hard by a shortage of “chips” - not the potato sort, but the computer kind. While the COVID plague is responsible for a lot of it, the real problem in America is our self-destructive business management. Now we are paying for the short-sightedness of the business community.

Back in the days of Reagan, the corporate fascists backing him and his union-busting anti-labor actions were also working busily to shovel all of the work they could out of the country. They were sending it to places where labor was cheaper, and there were no safety requirements, child labor laws or pollution limits to run up costs - places where civilization had less of a hold than the United States. The first thing anybody noticed was when the auto companies and many others started closing American factories while they started up factories right across the border in Mexico, where they paid low Mexican wages for their labor. While their quality took a hit - the Mexican workers were neither trained nor disciplined to make the quality that American workers produced - the beancounters took that in stride. The maquiladoras were a big hit in the boardrooms.

This same frenzy also destroyed the American chip-making business. South Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, and later China were perfectly willing to let the corporate bosses dictate horrible wages and working conditions while the factories were spewing toxic chemicals all over. While some of those players have since changed their ways after their own people started suffering, the profits the corporate oligarchs raked in are now firmly locked into their bank accounts and overseas tax havens, never to be seen again.

Now the chickens are back home to roost. The “cheap” systems built to support all of this corporate profiteering have collapsed. The loss of cheap labor due to the COVID plague stopped a lot of suppliers. The supply chains that moved what they made also shut down. Those of us who had to live with the awful choke points in the automotive business saw this coming. Nobody expected this scale of failure, though.

The idiocy of the last administration and their stupid power games with China only accelerated this problem. Trump and his ilk needed a big foreign war to distract Americans from their complete irresponsibility and total incompetence at home, and China was a big, easy bull to wave a red flag at. While we are fortunate that they failed to start that war before the election, there is no guarantee that we can continue to keep the peace thanks to all of the damage they did.

Now that we have a real president, we have to clean that up along with all of the damage they did to our internal organizational structure. We still have to eliminate the crazy ongoing fascist attempts at destroying our democracy at the local levels. While the economy is important, stopping the fascists from destroying our system of government is critical.

Sure, the big corporations are feeling the effects of their short-sighted job and business exporting. It is the American people that are the ones suffering, though. Because the beancounters threw so much of America’s business existence out of the country while they chased low wages, there is nobody and nothing here to pick up the pieces when the results of their idiocy come home to roost.