Another Idea Plagarized from Someone Else (Thanks Yves and Rodrik)

I was over at Naked Capitalism and was doing my daily dab at reading what is going on the world. This article struck my eye and got me to thinking.

I spent a couple of years of my life shutting down a couple of factories here in the US and setting up factories in Thailand and China to replace them. I still feel like an asshole for having done this, but the money was good and I wasn't thinking (Which by the way, I feel would serve as an excellent logo/trademark/motto for America during the last 15 years, I think that I will register it with the patent and trademark office).

Anyway, the deal is this, China is a moral and environmental cesspit. It is ruled by the same sort of greedy, self-absorbed, non-communal communists that ruled the Soviet Union before it imploded (Perhaps they can immigrate here and go directly to work for the Democratic party). Comrade Deng waited in the wings until Chairman Mao had the good grace to die, then waited a decent interval before carving up China and offering it as slave labor to the multinationals of the west. The management and officers of the multinationals jumped at the opportunity to fuck their workers, strip their factories, and line their own pockets with the glossy rewards of "global wage arbitrage" (Which, as Neal Stephenson so aptly puts it, is the state where all wages throughout the world are smoothed to the level of a moderately well-off Bangladeshi bricklayer).

Well, now the wages in China are rising nicely. The workers there are employed and coming in off the farms at an astounding pace to work in these shiny new sweatshops. The made-in-china salad shooters (Thanks J. Kunstler) are proudly lined up in Wal-Mart for folks to buy with their tax rebates. But the truth of the matter is...the wheels are starting to come off this system.

The slick boys of Wall street and their brothers in arms in the sleazy little mortgage companies in the country have sucked the marrow dry. Now we have a bunch of credit slaves working in jobs that pay less and less every year. But the credit slaves can't seem to stop buying, and the banks egg them on with more and more credit. But the end is in sight. Everyone is now starting to realize that things are tapped out. Gas is a fortune and food is following suit and the credit cards are comining back "declined".

The party is starting