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October 14, 2005

Things fall apart

My home desktop finally went stark raving mad, crashing every which way and sending a "disk full" error message. I searched for giant files, and found an apparent 90 gigs of giant files with impossible filenames piling up in the /program files/common files/Netscape/shared content/ directory.

As I tried to drop to DOS to delete the directory, the beast roared back and went black, choosing to beep rather than boot. Even the big On button failed -- I had to unplug the computer to turn it off.

A doctor visit yielded a diagnosis of bronchitis, sinusitis and eardrumitis, and a prescription for 20 tablets of the antibiotic Omnicef (cost without prescription coverage: $125) in one hand.

Then I ran into this round-robin story:

IMAGINE AN America in which factory workers are forced to take a 60 percent pay cut and -- in the name of keeping up with low-paid labor in developing nations -- do not earn that much more than the fast-food worker up the street....

while at the same firm, whose $27-a-hour workers would now see $10 an hour,

Under its proposed key employee compensation program, 486 U.S. executives would receive cash bonuses of 30 percent to 250 percent of their salary, totaling $87.9 million...

... President Rodney O'Neal would get a total cash bonus of $2.75 million, based on a $1.15 million average salary. Some 464 executives could earn bonuses ranging from $50,000 to $475,000, based on salaries of $120,000 to $450,000.

It's all happening right now, in America.

And if you want to get really spooked, read Alone, Sean-Paul Kelley's big excerpt from the influential paid daily Nelson Report ( Chris Nelson bio here).

Send your eyes straight to the gray boxes if you'd rather skip Kelley's anger at the President in this post. That isn't the point. This is (and there's much more):

...So the specific question for today is, what are the leadership implications? Even assuming Bush's team can come up with serious, meaningful approaches to the Delphi bankruptcy as a signal of the coming collapse of the Capitalist social contract with Labor (and what do you think the odds are on that? What are YOUR bright ideas?) how can this White House expect to enforce political discipline on a Congress just three months away from an election year, when it's everyone for themselves under the best of circumstances, and when a majority of Republicans remain incredibly uncomfortable voting for something as basic as Trade Adjustment Assistance?

We start with this right here now domestic political and economic crisis not because it's been unfolding for a decade, in slow motion, but because the increasing domestic crisis feeds, irreversibly, foreign policy pressures, and domestic trade policy pressures, to which no one, since NAFTA, has come up with any viable amelioration. Textile quotas to save the uneducated middle class? Twenty-seven percent tariffs on Chinese goods because we don't all want to end up working at Wal Mart, sans a living wage, sans any benefits, sans weekends off?

Delphi this week...and GM at some point, followed by its millions of suppliers and co-dependents. It's irreversible under the current system....

How much do Chinese auto parts executives make? Would parity there be on the table?

Can workers make auto parts without executives? (In the third world, blacksmiths often make auto parts by hand rather than wait months for a shipment by sea from Europe.)

It's hard to imagine that it's come to this in America, but it's high time we started imagining how to get out of this mess.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 4:33 AM | Permalink