CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

264 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
Now translate the unacceptability of massive disparities in rich
nations onto our shrinking sphere. Successful globalization is dependent
on narrowing global divisions. Thomas Friedman, the outstanding
New York Times columnist, often asks the question, “What
happens when everyone knows how everyone else lives?” Driven by
satellites, television sets, and cell phones, that awakening is rapidly
approaching. As the world grows inescapably closer and more interdependent,
what today is intolerable in any one rich country will tomorrow
be intolerable in a closely linked planet. The existing global
gap and the future globalized world are incompatible. Several billion
living in squalor juxtaposed with one billion living in splendor is
simply unsustainable. The 31 to 1 disparity has to diminish, and the
pace of diminution needs to exceed the pace of globalization, and
there is little indication that this is happening at the present time.
2. Richer people have a vested interest in increasing the purchasing
power of poorer people, so that modern goods and services devised
in industrialized nations can find broader markets. The best analogy
is Henry Ford in the United States. Ford understood more than a
hundred years ago that if he was going to sell more cars, workers had
to be able to buy them. He soon doubled the wages he paid to $5 a
day, stabilized his work force, and maximized their efficiency with assembly
lines. His success and influence encouraged rising pay across
the United States, hastened the enlargement of the middle class, and
thus helped propel western progress, especially in the second half of
the twentieth century.
Another Henry Ford or several Henry Fords are needed to propagate
similar goals and encourage rising incomes across the globe in
the twenty-first century. This is certainly not the situation that currently
prevails. Instead, western firms chase the lowest wage employees
around the world, to Mexico until they get too pricey, then to
China until they get too pricey, and then finally corporations farm
out production processes to subcontractors who can get away with
low wages and poor working conditions, for which western firms
buying the subcontractors’ production take little or no responsibility.
Capitalists need to figure how to be long range in their global thinking.
Instead of paying $2 for that toy or garment, how about paying