Is the United States of America obsolete?
That seems to be the attitude of the corporatist elite and their handmaidens in Washington.
The "best and brightest," be they on Wall Street, in C-suites, or on Capitol Hill, make their decisions to defend the well-being of "the global economy" rather than a strong and healthy United States of America.
The days of "what's good for General Motors is good for America" are long gone. Now, corporations are American in name only – and often not even that. Their interests don't coincide with America's national interest. They have no loyalty to the United States, or to any country whatsoever. They are, like al-Qaida, "stateless entities."
American corporations once felt an obligation to support American workers. No more.
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An executive for Apple Inc., which owes its very existence to inventions financed, developed and protected by American taxpayers, said bluntly, "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems." A child who acted this way toward the parent that fed and nurtured him would be called a psychopath.
While a corporate executive's drive to improve the bottom line at all costs is understandable, if not excusable, our government is supposed to do what's in the interest of all Americans. Instead, it kindles the flames to sacrifice our nation on the altar of globalism.
Speaking at an international corporate business summit in March, President Obama announced his administration is acting "to make it easier for global companies who are here … to temporarily move workers from a foreign office to a U.S. office in a faster, simpler way. … This could benefit hundreds of thousands of non-immigrant workers and their employers." To be clear: "non-immigrant workers" are not Americans.
Why is our government acting to help foreign workers instead of Americans?
While China and other nations demand foreign corporations provide jobs for their citizens and surrender product blueprints as the price of doing business in their country, Washington is making it easier for these same corporations to shelve Americans and replace them with foreigners.
The TransPacific Partnership, a global regulatory agreement negotiated by the Obama administration and which Speaker John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell want to put on the fast track, is just the latest so-called "free trade" deal that would allow global corporations to move workers around the world at will – without interference by Congress or American immigration law. NumbersUSA says a vote to fast track the TransPacific Partnership is a vote against the American worker.
The philosophy animating Washington policymakers makes no distinction between America and anyplace else. All that matters is corporate interest. The sovereign people envisioned by the founders morphed into "corporate personhood" in the 19th century and now corporate sovereignty in the 21st.
Testifying at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee hearing on the future of U.S. foreign trade policy in 1967, former Undersecretary of State George Ball declared "the multinational corporation must be able to operate with little regard for national boundaries – or, in other words, for restrictions imposed by individual national governments."
He told the assembled lawmakers to accelerate the "erosion of rigid concepts of national sovereignty" in order to usher in "the full realization of the benefits of a world economy." Fifty years later, everything is proceeding according to plan.
As far as the elites inhabiting the aeries of power in Washington and corporate suites, the "United States of America" is obsolete.
We must make them obsolete.