I Never Bought Levi's That Didn't Say "Made In The U.S.A.

I grew up in a time when it was not only possible but affordable to dress yourself in clothing made by unionized American workers. It was just a thing, nobody thought twice about it. And when I got my first job, I bought Levi Jeans which were union-made in the U.S.A. After all, why shouldn’t the people who make our clothes earn a decent living?

Then came a day when I saw on the news that Oshkosh B’gosh was closing its plant in Wisconsin and was going to manufacture in Mexico. This didn’t concern me over much because they mainly made children’s cloths, but I remember the shock and anger of the workers they interviewed who would be losing their jobs.

It really hit me when Levi’s announced that they too were closing down operations in the U.S.A. and shipping operations elsewhere. I proudly continued to where the jeans I owned that had the Made In U.S.A. label on them, but I never again bought another pair of Levi’s. It’s foolish to show loyalty to those who are incapable of loyalty themselves.

Then before you knew it, every clothing manufacturer was closing up shop in the United States and moving overseas. I recall news programs covering this phenomena and how it not only hurt American workers but relied on near-slave labor in other countries.

Of course, while the truth of the way the workers were treated could not be denied, the news segments were always certain to have some economist or business executive on to explain why this was not only necessary but beneficial to our country and the world at large. They told us that American workers were destined for bigger and better things. And that while the workers in other countries were paid barely subsistence wages, this was no different than how things had occurred in the United States. They were starting the climb up the economic ladder and they would have to start at the bottom, just as we had. But in starting this climb they would soon elevate themselves so that everyone in their country would achieve the same kind of wealth Americans had achieved. It was merely the first step that would be the difficult one.

I felt in my gut that this was a lie, that there was no reason ever to treat people like slaves, to allow young girls to work long hours and then dismiss them when they had outlived their usefulness. But the people on the TV were so calm and certain in their arguments. They were the experts and I was just a kid fresh out of high school who knew nothing of the world and the way it worked. I knew in my heart they were wrong but because I could not match their arguments with sufficient facts, I did not speak out as loudly as I should have. And for a long time I simply ceased to worry so much about where my clothes come from. There are so many issues to deal with in life and, for a time, this one has taken a lesser place in mine. But I have still never bought a pair of Levi’s.

Time has born out my concerns. The United States continues to export its work and the people doing the work are still working for slave wages. For the most part, our clothes are still made in places where union organizers are murdered and workers earn nothing compared to what American workers once made. It turns out the people who sold this economic lie were nothing but sociopaths that placed the wealth they stood to make by supporting such a system over the welfare of their fellow men and women. And still the apologists are to be found on the media, spewing out their rationalizations for how worker exploitation is a good thing for Americans and the rest of the world.

But now the truth has hit home to a bunch of blue-collar Americans, who are feeling the pinch of thirty years of job-exportation. The pain they are feeling can not be explained away by the so-called experts who are really nothing more than spokespersons for the interests of multi-national corporations. These people are angry and are looking for someone who will speak up for them. More than anything, they’re looking for anyone who’s willing to call bullshit on the lies that have been fed them by the “experts” all these many years. And those who are still listening to the experts, who’ve not seen their jobs shipped overseas, well they have little interest in the problems of the people who's way of life has disappeared.

Enter a new set of authority figures. They’re willing to tell those who’ve lost their jobs, who live in communities with shuttered factories, that they’ve been screwed over and they have every right to be angry. They point the blame overseas to the people and nations that now do the work Americans once proudly did.

Unfortunately, this new set of spokespersons are working for the same interests the old set of spokespersons did, they’re just putting a different spin on things. It wasn’t poor people from other countries who took our jobs. Corporations had a choice, and they chose to ship your jobs overseas for greater profits. They figured out it was cheaper to bribe politicians here and overseas, pay influential experts to pedal their narrative, and ship merchandise all across the globe, than it was to pay decent wages to the workers who produced them.

People have a right to be angry. But be smart angry. If you’re listening to talking heads who get rich spinning the story the way the corporate bosses want it told, you’re being stupid angry, and that is a very dangerous combination. Those people overseas working long hours for subsistence wages are not your enemies, they’re being used the same way you were. They’re suffering more than you, don’t make their lives any worse by blaming the victims. Because when you blame other victims, you are no longer worthy of anyone’s sympathy.

And for God’s sake, buy responsibly. It takes a little extra effort and a little extra expense, but it’s the right thing to do. Start small, but start.

Nature Gave You Water, Capitalism Gave You Waters

I was in the waiting room as my car was being repaired recently and I heard a woman offer a young girl “a water”. That was perhaps not the first time I had heard the term, but it was the first time I realized how strange that would have sounded to a younger me, or my parents, or their parents, or anyone living in any past age. Only in this time and place can “a water” exist. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before I am asked if I would like “an air”. 

Water was a free-flowing liquid with no set boundaries before it entered the free market. Only capitalism is capable of taking something so far-ranging and nebulous as water and atomizing it. Because that’s what capitalism does. It takes what is ours and breaks it down into yours and mine. The next time you’re on an airplane, take a look down at the neighborhoods and see how all of nature has been broken down into individual lots. Primitive man couldn’t have understood this concept. They wouldn’t have been able to understand how one person might own water while another person is allowed to go without.

Capitalists will tell you that ownership is natural and that the government needs to keep its nose out of their right to ownership. But the truth is the government exists to enforce ownership rights. Nobody could own the water or the mineral rights of an area unless government granted such rights to a certain group of people. Without government you would have no private ownership of anything other than the most basic of possessions, the sort of things the working class might have ownership of: a modest house, furniture, tools, etc. It is government that grants private ownership of what we would otherwise consider common resources.

Capitalists are fond of telling you how bad it is that the government gets involved in business, but there would be nothing but the smallest of business interests if corporations did not create governments to justify their ownership. There would be no private beach, no shopping mall, no plot of farmland except that a government exists to decree it so. 

John Malone owns 2,200,000 acres of land. How did he come to own so much land? Did we the American people or the citizens of the planet decide to give it to him? No. “Ah,” you say, “he purchased it fair and square. It is his by right.” “Purchased it from who?” I would ask. “Why, from the rightful owner.” But who did he purchase it from? Surely another rightful owner, but let us work our way back to the beginning and ask how land originally came to belong to anybody. Who decided that someone owned what once was not owned by anybody but shared by everybody? Only the government has such authority. And what kind of government would bestow land that was shared into the hands of someone who wants the land all to himself? Only a government that was working for an elite few at the expense of the rest of us.

So the next time you hear some propagandist for the ultra-rich complaining that the government is meddling in the interests of private companies, remind yourself that more than likely they are meddling for the benefit of those private companies far more than they are against them. Whatever limits government places on the wealthiest of its citizens is done so only because the avarice of the wealthy elite has become so great that if some limits had not been placed the people would have risen up and gotten rid of them by now. Rest assured that it is mere window dressing. 

As water has been broken down into individual units, so too have human beings. In both cases it is not a natural condition but one that was carefully constructed. We are divided into two parties, but more than that we are divided from each other, have been taken out of our natural state of communal living and been set one against the other in a competitive model. This is not our inclination, but we are taught to follow the lead of the capitalists, in whom the communal aspect of their personalities is peculiarly lacking. It is true that in a healthy society we are to a degree both communal AND competitive, but the environment we inhabit now has become one of toxic competitiveness. Capitalists call it “freedom”. Keep in mind that to a capitalist the word freedom means the ability to accumulate as much wealth as possible and little else.

As our water and our citizenry are divided into individual units, so too are the nations of the world. As we view our fellow Americans as threats and competitors, so must we view other nations in the same light. With such a worldview, we will never know peace, cannot even lay a contextual framework for imagining peace. In the world as it now stands, each waning war corresponds with the build-up to the next one.

As the capitalist desires ownership of the land and resources here in the United States, so too is he covetous of the resources of other countries. As he seeks to profit from the labor of his fellow citizens, so does he wish to profit from the work of citizens of foreign lands. To this end he will once again employ the government he allegedly despises to threaten violence against other nations in order that his profits might increase greater still.

We see the wealth of the great capitalists and we mistake it for a sign of their great human qualities rather than their great human flaws. And in making that mistake, we allow ourselves to accept the mindset of the extreme capitalists as a good one, we see competition as preferable to cooperation. We see what divides us all rather than what it is we together share. Until we cannot even see water as a shared blessing but instead individual commodities to be purchased. And so we end up with our lakes and rivers as receptacles of our single use water bottles. We pollute our common resources with our selfish behavior, as we pollute our shared values with our inability to see what is in the best interest of all. The picture you see below is the result of thousands of selfish decisions and the unwillingness of each of us to work together for a common good. 

Corporate Values Are Not Human Values

      

A line can be drawn quite neatly between corporate interests and human interests. You can throw in the interests of animals as well, because to corporations they have value only in so much as they have capital value. If it is cheaper to shoot an animal than feed it, there is no question what the corporate choice will be.

Same thing with humans, although a thin facade of concern for the sanctity of human life must be maintained. So rather than mercifully killing us quickly, corporations and corporate government do not actively kill human beings, but they do allow them to die slow and preventable deaths.

Corporate values and human values are two very distinct ways of looking at life. For a while now we have rationalized that corporate values could serve human values. For a time we were able to ameliorate the suffering that corporate values impose upon the majority of humans. But the choice between the two value systems is becoming increasingly stark as corporations are gaining control of society as never before. A hundred years ago corporations attempted to wrest all power, but there were other institutions and schools of thought that held the minds of the masses. The mindsets that once held back complete corporate dominance are mostly gone now.

A century ago, religion still played a major part in most people’s lives. Say what you will about religion, it has its own agenda and way of seeing the world, and many of its tenets run contrary to the corporate set of values. If you have any doubts, I invite you to read Capital And Labor by Reverand Hugo C. Koehler, an analysis of the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI. In the 80 years since that was written, it was not merely modernity and science that have been chipping away at religious institutions, it has also been corporate forces. Where the church has opposed corporate values, it has been attacked, and where the church has been amenable to corporate values, it has been corrupted. Witness now the religious right that mirrors not Christ’s teachings but the values that support corporate control of our society and the world. Religion no longer presents a significant barrier to corporate values.

As the church was still a strong influencer of people’s values a hundred years ago, so to were the values of feudalism, nationalism, and monarchy. A social compact still existed that stated that, while not everyone was equal and some were born to rule while others born to serve, everybody had a place in society. Nobody was outside, everybody was (theoretically) valued. Not so in a corporate system. While a nation had to admit that even the lowliest of us were still members of the country in which they live, corporations were able to slough off those who provided no value to the corporation without compunction. Whereas individuals in the past had a sense of belonging in even primitive feudalism, they no longer counted as anything in a corporate society. The worker who was not needed by corporations was a man without a country. His loyalty was demanded of him but no loyalty could be expected from a corporate system. Pre-corporate ways of viewing nations are no longer a barrier to corporate values.

Lastly, communism and socialism were forces to be reckoned with. Constructed from first-hand-observations of what corporations wrought upon the underclasses, such ideologies jibed with the ideas of community, fairness, kindness, and inclusion that existed within feudalistic and especially Christian values. Whereas feudalism justified the superior position of one human being over another as God’s will, corporatism stripped such justifications away. In a corporate system, money was all the proof needed of superiority. And the best way of acquiring money and therefore success was to make money for corporations.

Also, the means of indoctrinating the masses were not nearly as great as they are today. Whereas humans interacted face to face a century ago, they now mainly communicate with each other through electronic means. Instead of sitting around after work at bars, clubs, or front porches discussing ideas, many now are on social media, where billionaires who received their wealth through corporations decide what we are allowed to see, hear, and think. Post on Facebook and there is no way of knowing who will see your posting. Write an article on your blog, and you have no way of knowing where Google will place you in their search lists. More than ever before in history, corporations have placed themselves between the communication of people. Even within the sanctuary of our own homes, propaganda is constantly flowing in while our personal data is flowing out. 

Survival of a species is not a corporate value. Not even the survival of the human species. Certainly, corporations could not exist without us (at least in the present, but who knows if in the near future they could be self-sufficient. Sounds, crazy, doesn’t it? But so does destroying the planet for profit), but corporate values don’t factor the survival of the species into the equation. I assure you if you were to enter a boardroom of any of the largest corporations, nobody will be talking about the threats that face us as a species but instead will be plotting paths to increase profit.

If survival of the human species is of value to you, it is necessary to realize that your values are quite different than those of corporations. Corporate media will tell you otherwise, they will try to pretend that corporate values ARE human values.

That’s because they are lying. You see, truth is not a corporate value.