No, Max. You are twisting things. Oil corporations ARE guilty of theft. By the time gasoline has arrived at the pump, a whole series of intermediary steps have taken place that can only be described as crimes against humanity. The economies of the industrialized nations thrives on cheap oil. Cheap oil is guaranteed through thuggery, as Smedley Butler said,
"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragus for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."
>"The issue." Uh hmm. So now we are
>entertained with the *question* (sic),
>are workers incomes (no problems here
>with terminology) too high? It's only
>a matter of time before some New Age
>boss tells his employees, "your wages
>need to be placed in context."
No, what will happen is that prices will reflect the cost of labor that is sufficient to give every human being a decent life. Plantation workers who pick coffee, oil workers in Nigeria, teenagers who stitch sneakers together will all be entitled to food, clothing, medical care and shelter. As long as imperialism exists, these sorts of people get exploited because military goons won't allow unions. They should be able to form unions under capitalism. Under socialism, they would govern themselves as part of a world socialist system. Nobody who picks coffee for a living will go hungry or worry about their children dying from diarrhea because of lack of clean water. When everybody has put these sorts of worries behind them, then we can talk about moving forward. But as Harry Magdoff put it in a recent MR article, these are the basic necessities of life that the majority of the planet does not enjoy today.
>I would argue the contrary: it is
>quite impossible for workers' incomes
>to be too high. It is possible for
>nations to be disadvantaged by unfair
>or positively unjust trade relations,
>not to mention actual imperialism.
Okay, this is the point.
>If *workers* in Portland, as opposed to elite
>professionals or executives, are getting
>"fabulous" salaries in this age of wage stagnation,
>it's because of their productivity, not
>exploitation. [I was under the impression that
>Nike didn't actually make any shoes in the U.S.,
>but that's beside the general point.)
Nike can afford to pay their white-collar workers in Portland fabulous salaries because they make life miserable for their production line workers in East Asia. Productivity is not an issue in corporate headquarters, where office cubicles rather than assembly lines are the norm.
>
>By contrast, I would suggest that economic
>growth in the U.S. creates the basis for
>rising incomes and a more benevolent
>posture towards the less-developed
>nations.
This is just garbage written in bad faith. Economic growth in the United States is directly related to its historical role in plunging other nations into dependency. Every time there has been an effort by a developing nation to assert control over its own resources, we have sent goons in to destroy the experiment. The list is endless:
Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Zaire, Nigeria, Cuba, El Salvador, Panama, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Libya, Iraq, the Soviet Union, Korea, China, Greece, etc. As Smedley Butler put it, we crush people militarily in order to exploit them economically.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)