[spudbuddy]

I'd admit readily that I'm a big fan of Jim Hightower - read just about everything he's written - and I don't know if he coined the term or not, but I agree heartily with just about everything he has to say about "Globaloney."

Ever since I first clued into this idea, I've been just itchin' for a good scrap and rumble on this angle.......

-that Jim Kunstler's 3000-mile Caesar salad nothwithstanding, our depletion of ever more precious fuels is evermuch the byproduct of the transnational-globalist's pet wet dream.
This bugger makes all of his fat profit, by traveling the ways and means and manufactures of said commodities wherever in the world the cost of labor is the cheapest, and environmental impact is ignored...pounding out the outsourcing and offshoring of local jobs, and creating havoc among the workers of the world - period.

As if this isn't bad enough - the thought that my little "town" consumes a few billion tons of commodities daily - much of what could have been produced locally or regionally - yet most of it comes from the other side of the world.
Here's what really fries me:
I know damned well we grow carrots locally - but we don't sell those carrots locally. We ship them somewhere else where the profits are better - and import carrots from somewhere whose labor costs are so cheap we get to buy them cheaper in our supermarket.

It is this kind of stupidity, escalating exponentially - sucking up fuel to shove this stuff around the planet - all for some suit's profit-penile orgasms all over the boardroom carpeting - that pisses me off.
While local, regional and even national control of economies gets drop-kicked over the goalposts of the "free" trade endzone, it's all made better by ever-cheaper kewpie dolls in Walmart....
(why is it that shopping rambles now remind me of carnival midway game arcades?)
I become overwhelmed by all the junk.........

I don't think Gobalization brought on Peak Oil....I just think it rubbed a whole lot of arsenic into an evermore gaping wound. (emphasis on first syllable - as in a beatnick sniffing a bull's behind, don't you know.) Whatever - toxic is what it is.
I think I understand the why of it well enough - a real cute game of siphoning up the wealth, really...
But what absolutely mystifies me is where they hide all the fuel costs - the fact that you can boot a product 10,000 miles and that's cheaper than paying someone to make it right here.
Could this be why there is such a furious amount of lobbying going on to subsidize the cost of fuel? I'd say.

When I first clued in to Peak Oil - the very first thing I thought was:
-imagine.
A Mexican maquiladora stretched from San Diego to Laredo - a thousand miles long and a hundred miles deep.
Followed by 24 lanes of interstate pointing north, at 50-mile intervals.
yow.

My oldest Levis are holy (not necessarily sacred)
I suspect they sponged up a bit of salt from San Fransisco bay....

This sandwich tastes a little bitter - but a bit of Midwest mustard improves the flavor somewhat.

jp

You're just as robbed by a fountain pen
as with a gun, son.

[mrflora]

spudbuddy wrote:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'o')ur depletion of ever more precious fuels is evermuch the byproduct of the transnational-globalist's pet wet dream.

sucking up fuel to shove this stuff around the planet - all for some suit's profit-penile orgasms all over the boardroom carpeting - that pisses me off.

[spudbuddy]

Your Freud is showing...
[wink]

[threadbear]

Hightower is great, and your comment about the 1000 miles of maquiladora is spot on. Thanks for the post. Very well put together, good insights.

[Kylon]

The way they hide all that fuel cost is by using slave labor.

If it cost you 100 dollars a day to employ someone in making some product that's going to drive up the price.

If you use a person for 1 dollar a day, that 99 bucks you can pocket. With those 99 bucks, you can easily cover up for the fuel cost.

Also, you have to take into consideration that in many third world countries (and second world communist countries) the pollution standards are absolutely horrible. Companies get away with pumping out huge quantities of toxins and poisons that they wouldn't be able to in the United States.

Also, companies don't have to provide healthcare or life insurance for slave labor.

So all in all, it does make economic sense, at least for the suits at the top.

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Kylon', 'I')f you use a person for 1 dollar a day, ...., companies don't have to provide healthcare or life insurance for slave labor.