Senator Marc Rubio, one of the icons of American neoconservatism, gave a very interesting speech late last year. Ditching the tons of hatred towards China, the educational level typical of an American politician and the obligatory expression of sympathy towards Islam (just American political folklore), Rubio said a lot of interesting things:
„This is the dream my immigrant parents and millions like them achieved here in this country: not a dream of becoming rich, but a dream to have a stable and dignified job that allows you to get married, start a family, own a home in a safe neighborhood, retire with dignity, and leave your children better off than yourself.
To view Americans solely as consumers ignores the dignity that comes with work, and it ignores how corrosive it is to the individual and ultimately to a community when good jobs are no longer available.
To view Americans solely as consumers ignores the dignity that comes with work…
Greater returns on investors’ stock portfolios can’t make up for the closure of a factory that left behind a hollowed-out community. And record corporate prices can’t make up for the insecurity that comes from being a nation that can’t make masks during a pandemic or produce the active ingredients in our most basic medicines.
we learned that when American companies are forced to choose between what’s good for America and bigger profits, they will usually pick bigger profits.
The market must serve our people, not the other way around.“
If you allow unlimited competition, and if the only measure of success is profit, then it must lead absolutely necessarily to managers preferring higher profits to decency, honesty…
In Europe, such thinking is called socialism. But how could an American neocon admit that perhaps socialists might have a reasonable vision on some economic issues. How could he admit that if you allow unlimited competition, and if the only measure of success is profit, then it must lead absolutely necessarily to managers preferring higher profits to decency, honesty, morality and patriotism.
But U.S. senators are not trained to ask such questions. So towards the end of the speech, there is a passionate defence of capitalism (meaning global and unfettered) and a whine that China is using its power against American businesses. I wonder what the Americans have been doing for years? Who is ready to start a war or stage a coup if anyone opposes the interests of American corporations? Who is destroying local economies in dozens of countries in a totally unfair and non-market way? Is Westinghouse bidding to build the Czech nuclear power plant in a fair way or is US intelligence pressure coming to bear on the Czech government?
China is doing to Americans a fraction of what America is doing to the rest of the world.
China is doing to Americans a fraction of what America is doing to the rest of the world.
And therein lies the American dilemma. If they want a world of national economies, that means they stop sucking the rest of the world dry. If they want global capitalism, it means China will buy them.
But overall, it’s on the right track. Another two generations or so and American Republicans will begin to understand what the problem is. Maybe.
