Bringing Business Back Home, for the Wrong Reason

GOOD NEWS, AMERICA! Our manufacturing base is returning to the fruited plain of the lower forty eight. General Motors, formerly known as "government motors", is back to being general motors, and has announced its intention of building five assembly plants in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana. We the people saved GM with a fifty billion loan, and we only lost ten billion in the deal. A bargain, no matter how you cut it. Barack Hussein Obama saved GM, by cajoling us to save it. He saved the Bank of America, and he saved a huge handful of other mainstay American corporations, including gigantic Citigroup and AIG, taking heat from conservatives the entire way. Now, all the saved companies are profitably in business, and the American economy, so we are told, is recovering, albeit a bit slowly. Can you imagine the American economy today if all its major financial services corporations had vanished? According to strict conservative capitalists, government should have stayed out of it, let the business comunity sink or swim on its own merits, and let the chips fall where they may. They don't really believe that, but to them it sounds good, and it allows them toslcling to their free market dogma, without seeming hypocritical. It would appear that, with numerous European and American corporations sending labor to third world countries with low standards of living. the strategy has paid off, in a most unexpected way. The price of labor has risen sufficiently around the world that it is now difficult to find workers who can be exploited any more effectively than American workers can be expolited back home. Thus, back home come the businesses. Not because they have experienced any patriotic catharsis of guilt and redemption, but because they know where to go to get the greatest profit by the greatest exploitation of workers. The American laborer is so cheap, and American labor unions so weak and ineffectual that Japanese auto makers are now preferring to make their machines in the United States. The result is good for America, even if the motivation behind it is, shall we say, mercenary, and thus a bit less than honorable.