Building Trades News

Where Have all the Jobs Gone? The Big Box Syndrome

By Richard Slawson, Executive-Secretary

Market domination through mergers, monopolistic practices and a failure of the federal government to enforce our anti-trust laws has had a devastating effect on not only competing businesses, consumers and workers, but on the government itself. On a national level the business domination of our government has been underway for over thirty years and that domination is expressing itself in the destruction of constitutional rights for the many to expand the rights of the rich and corporations. From year to year a new corporation will take the lead in expanding their market and using their connections with elected officials to block the implementation of the rules, any rules, on their, in most cases, predatory actions. Wal Mart, their subsidiary Sam’s Club, Enron, Tyco and hundreds of others are the worst public examples of out of control business in this Country. With the expanded involvement of corporations and business in legislative affairs and the elections, the average voter is deluged with propaganda against their own best interests. In the 1970s, big business made a conscious decision to take “control” of government. Corporations, organizations that are created by legislation in each State, have taken on the identity and claimed the rights of actual persons and citizens of America. This was never intended by the framers of our Constitution. Corporations, led by their insatiable drive for profits, supposedly for their stockholders but more and more seemly for the salaries and golden parachutes of their CEOs and other top management, have formed, so called, think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and Beacon Foundation, whose sole purpose is to formulate and publish pro-business, anti-individual citizen, (and anti-Union) propaganda. Papers on legislative initiatives, on issues ranging from those undermining Americans’ confidence in Social Security and Unions, to those supporting the glories of the “free markets” and “so-called individual rights”, continue to spew from these bought and paid for think tanks. All of the contributions that these companies make to political campaigns, the lobbying that they do and the propaganda that they produce has a tremendous effect on people’s rights. As reported in an article titled “The People’s Business” on a website InTheseTimes.com “the U.S. budget for 2006, proposed by the Bush administration, cuts the enforcement budgets of almost all the major regulatory agencies. [This] presents the possibility - indeed, the probability - that these public agencies will become captives of the private corporations they are supposed to regulate.” Fair market or pro-citizens rights’ think tanks exist, however, their number and funding are woefully inadequate. This gives you an idea of how big business has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, all with one purpose - to make more profits. Profits are good for our economy, but not at the cost of American jobs, the environment and control of the government. Businesses, and in particular corporations, are authorized by government to serve the people. Today, at least in the ultra-rich mind-set, people exist to serve business. People have to re-establish the first tenet - business are authorized to serve the people. Business’s take over of government, especially by the big box retailers, that have become the largest corporations in the world, is having dire consequences on American jobs and American families. With the drive to lower costs, and to raise profits, these companies are willing to do almost anything that they can get away with no matter what the consequences. Hundreds of thousands of small and large businesses have gone out business because of unfair competition induced by the huge corporations that have required them to reduced prices beyond their capabilities. The drive for every increasing profits forced them cut wages and benefits, layoff employees, and when that wasn’t enough the big box company bosses forced their small and large business suppliers to go out of the Country to find lower prices through both cheap wages and the lack of environmental laws. This is having a tremendously negative impact on the construction industry as well, through the loss of factory jobs and loss of the construction of the new factories. Almost every industry is being affected by the purchasing decisions that these giant retailers are making. General Merchandise, Electronic, Grocers, Clothing, Pharmaceuticals, Books & Movies and even Internet providers are affecting the decision to buy from American factories and manufacturers or to go overseas. We have all experienced the local factories that have been lost, some to environment issues but the vast majority to the foreign purchases of mega-retailers. With their impacts on government, which has eliminated or stymied the laws that have been enacted to regulate, restrict and control business, including anti-trust, labor and environmental, every American has to get involved to make change. As cited in Big-Box Swindle by Stacy Mitchell, Jeff Milchen, a Midwest community organizer assisting local independent businesses, said, “Ultimately, the goal is to create a national shift in the culture and a challenge to the assertion that what’s good for transnational corporations is good for America.” We can do our part by telling our elected officials what we want. Our newly elected Congress needs to know that we want American jobs and American industries and that we don’t support companies that are forcing the export of our industries and who are traitors to the American economy.

 

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