"Managing One Million Animals Gives Me A Headache"

The next time someone wearing an 'Adam Smith' tie starts to tell you about the glories of unregulated and unfettered capitalism ask him to explain the morality of a system where an important component (contract manufacturing) of the globalist system views  his employees as animals.

No you cannot make this up......it is recorded in print.  The secular 'saint', Steve Jobs, who recently died left an estate of $6 billion and a philosophic jumble of new age aphorisms about higher consciousness, brands and high tech mumbo jumbo.   Multiply his $6 billion by hundreds to estimate the wealth of the Apple Juggernaut dispensed to other venture capitalists, investment bankers, employees and shareholders.

On the other hand there are thousands of empty factories from Silicon Valley through the entire industrial Midwest.  You cannot place the entire blame on this USA deindustrialization upon companies such as Apple or GE but they have been the major beneficiary especially their managers and enablers such as Mitt Romney and Bain Capital who have reaped billions in bonuses and compensation in playing lead roles in the development of an immoral economic system.

Pundits say well that change is unavoidable and an inevitable part of 'progress' and maturation of global capitalism.  If so, why hasn't Germany seen similar deindustrialization in recent decades and a displacement of German workers?  It is simple....the German government and people will not allow it and have taken steps (labor law liberalization, emphasis on automation, etc.) to stem the tide of plants and jobs leaving Germany.  Of course it has happened on the margins in Germany but it is still a great export economy and the engine of Europe. The same processes could have happened here in the USA but unfortunately our political system has been so corrupted by global financial interests that instead of implementing policies to retain jobs, the government created tax incentives (and trade treaties) for companies to leave the country.  People like Steve Jobs and Jack Welsh were only too happy to participate and ................take the money and run!

We have all heard the saying that all that matter is the 'bottom line'.  The Wall Street analysts who judge companies performances could care less about foreign worker exploitation, child labor, suicides, loss of domestic jobs and damage to the overall economy.  It is an immoral system all around from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to the industrial and environmental wastelands of China.   Let us not forget us - the consumer.  Everyone of us participates in this immoral system by making conscious choices on price.  We are like horses with blinders when it comes to our buying of products that come from China and other authoritarian countries where workers are viewed as animals...exposed to horrible working conditions and toxic chemicals.   It will continue as long as the majority of us are 'forced' to make choices due to reduced disposable income and an economy in depression.  

The current globalist economic system is totally contrary to two millennium of Catholic teaching.   We would do well to listen to church teaching over the past 150 years on economics, just wage and the rights of workers.  If global capitalism is just another form of slavery, how in God's name can we not oppose it?

It is a tragedy that the US system is so rigged that we will not hear this issue discussed during the 2012 election.

Pope John XXIII
Pacem in Terris, 1963, 

"It is clear that (the human person) has a right by the natural law not only to an opportunity to work, but also to go about (that) work without coercion. To these rights is certainly joined the right to demand working conditions in which physical health is not endangered, and young people's normal development is not impaired. Women have the right to working conditions in accordance with their requirements." 

"Furthermore, and this must be especially emphasized, the worker has a right to a wage determined according to criterions of justice and sufficient therefore . . . to give (workers and their) families a standard of living in keeping with the dignity of the human person."