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The New Robber Barons
#5
We got a fair warning from Karl Marx: the proletariat has nothing to offer but its toil. Maybe it can mix a little capital (a car and a cell phone) with its toil, but that capital is always an item that quickly devalues through depreciation and is expensive to maintain.

So far in this Crisis Era, the Great Devaluation seems to be of the value of labor. Capital has become a tool of elites and elites alone. America's economic elites are often on a moral plain just slightly higher than planters of the Old South if they own the assets and the Soviet nomenklatura if they wield bureaucratic power.

An Uber driver is basically an unlicensed cabbie. Cab-driving has been a miserable and dangerous job, and the only improvement that Uber offers is that the driver needs not carry cash that attracts a 'fare' that intends to rob the cabbie. But this is a specific.

Our economic elites are cruel, selfish, and rapacious to an extreme. To be sure, they have their Messiah -- Ayn Rand.

An illustration of how bad the American economy is getting is to be shown in a recent article of the New Republic.So a depressed community with the assets of (1) being close to some good roads, and (2) being close to Chicago should be able to 'live well and prosper' by attracting warehouses of several successful retailers (Wal*Mart, IKEA, Amazon, Home Depot, and Target. Goods go in, goods go out. Truckers fill their tanks at gas stations and maybe pick up some sandwiches, snacks, and video at the gas station. People out of work are able to get jobs that don't require much education. So what could possibly go wrong?


Quote:It’s hard to find anyone who will admit to it now, but when the CenterPoint Intermodal freight terminal opened in 2002, people in Elwood, Illinois, were excited. The plan was simple: shipping containers, arriving by train from the country’s major ports, were offloaded onto trucks at the facility, then driven to warehouses scattered about the area, where they were emptied, their contents stored. From there, those products—merchandise for Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot—were loaded into semis, and trucked to stores all over the country. Goods in, goods out. The arrangement was supposed to produce a windfall for Elwood and its 2,200 residents, giving them access to the highly lucrative logistics and warehousing industry. “People thought it was the greatest thing,” said Delilah Legrett, an Elwood native.

In addition to bringing more containers and warehouses, the Intermodal promised to foster vital growth and development. In a town without sidewalks, grand pronouncements were made in the run-up to the Intermodal’s debut. There would soon be hotels, restaurants, a grocery store; flower shops and bars would follow. Property values would surge, schools would be flush with cash. Most importantly, there would be great, high-paying jobs, the kind that could sustain a community devastated by farm failures and the wide-scale deindustrialization of the Midwest. In Will County, of which Elwood is part, the unemployment rate soared to a high of 18 percent in the 1980s, before gradually coming closer to the national average in the 1990s. In Joliet, the nearest urban center, it hit 27 percent in 1981.

An opportunity as great as the Intermodal came with a cost. First, to help seal the deal, the town had to offer the developer, CenterPoint, a sweetener: total tax abatement for two decades, until 2022. Second, the town would have to put up with an influx of truck traffic. No matter: With large-scale manufacturing shifting to the Pacific Rim at the turn of the millennium, the warehousing and logistics industry offered a chance to get back in the good graces of a global economy that had, for decades, turned its back on rural America. Elwood yoked its hopes to warehousing, which would carry the town to the forefront of America’s new consumer economy.

In a few short years after the Intermodal opened, Elwood became the largest inland port in North America. Billions of dollars in goods flowed through the area annually. The world’s most profitable retailers flocked to this stretch of barren country, while the headline unemployment rate plunged. Wal-Mart set up three warehouses in Will County alone, including its two largest national facilities, both located in Elwood. Samsung, Target, Home Depot, IKEA, and others all moved in. Will County is now home to some 300 warehouses. A region once known for its soybeans and cornfields was boxed up with gray facilities, some as large as a million square feet, like some enormous, horizontal equivalent of a game of Tetris.  

The jobs came in, but most filtered through temporary agencies that employers like dealing with because temps don't unionize and get no benefits. The temps are paid nearly nothing and are often unable to afford cars or decent apartments -- and this is in a rural area. Traffic is a nightmare, with truckers obliged to work on inhuman schedules just to meet the timing of the warehouses -- and they crash often. Workers who get near-starvation pay are unable to form a consumer market that supports hotels, restaurants, bars, a grocery store, flower shops, or the like. The only retail addition to the town is a dollar store.
The labor is provided -- people must work just to avoid starving -- but it is treated badly.
https://newrepublic.com/article/152836/e...y-its-hell
(Cue bleak music from  Dmitri Shostakovich).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist  but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.


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Messages In This Thread
The New Robber Barons - by beechnut79 - 01-10-2019, 04:45 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by beechnut79 - 01-10-2019, 04:55 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by David Horn - 01-10-2019, 05:40 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by Eric the Green - 01-11-2019, 03:02 AM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by pbrower2a - 01-11-2019, 03:50 AM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by Bill the Piper - 01-12-2019, 11:08 AM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by Eric the Green - 01-12-2019, 12:39 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by pbrower2a - 01-12-2019, 04:49 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by Bill the Piper - 01-13-2019, 05:06 AM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by pbrower2a - 01-13-2019, 10:10 AM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by David Horn - 01-13-2019, 12:47 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by David Horn - 01-13-2019, 12:37 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by Bill the Piper - 01-17-2019, 08:11 AM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by Eric the Green - 01-18-2019, 02:45 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by beechnut79 - 01-14-2019, 07:49 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by pbrower2a - 01-15-2019, 12:42 AM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by David Horn - 01-16-2019, 10:39 AM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by pbrower2a - 01-16-2019, 12:03 PM
RE: The New Robber Barons - by beechnut79 - 01-14-2019, 08:47 PM

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