The American automobile giant, General Motors, will be filing for bankruptcy today, Monday, June 1, 2009. The symbolism of this is awesome, as is the significance. General Motors, like U.S. Steel and Standard Oil, for example, represented, both within the United States and internationally, the essence, the mountain top of the American industrial and manufacturing might which emerged so dramatically after World War II.
Industry and manufacturing are mainstays of military power, so that when the Berlin Wall collapsed twenty years ago, signaling the fall of communism, it seemed to many observers that capitalist America had ridden the industrial and manufacturing horses to the point where Uncle Sam was planet earth’s dominant military machine and indeed, the world’s only superpower.
In fact, however, by the time Russia communism collapsed along with the Berlin Wall, the American economy had already begun to move away from industry and manufacturing into service activities and computer/information technology. American companies moved their factories abroad, where the low wages they paid non-unionized foreign workers increased their profits and reduced prices for American consumers.
Until last year’s financial collapse, international bankers and investors were rushing to bring their money to the United States, where they believed absolute security existed.
But the American people themselves had begun to lose the foundation of their power when their industrial and manufacturing base moved abroad, even though the American dollar continued to be considered the gold standard, so to speak, in international currencies. Wall Street was able to concoct elaborate schemes to speculate and increase profit margins in the financial district, but the United States had begun to weaken.
Consider what happened to General Motors. Toyota and other Japanese companies began to build better cars than the Americans were building from thirty years ago and more. Free trade meant that Toyota could enter the American market and compete. The Toyota product was clearly superior to the American one. The American and other consumers, by the hundreds of millions, chose to buy Toyota, as opposed to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
Why did the Americans continue to make an inferior product while the Japanese and other automakers were building superior ones? The United States had become the most powerful country in the world because, after World War II, they were building the best products in almost any industrial/manufacturing discipline you could name. The General Motors’ bankruptcy is dramatically symbolic of how that has changed.
In Belize, we began to become Americanized in Panama during World War II. When our workers went to Panama, they were impressed with the American “vibes.” After the war, our people began to move to the United States, which seemed a nation of much greater possibilities than Great Britain, under whose colonial rule British Honduras had remained stagnant for almost a hundred years. Belizeans became Americanized. Where the percentage of our working population who are in the United States is concerned, Belize is arguably the most Americanized country in Central America and the Caribbean.
If nothing did so before, today’s General Motors bankruptcy tells Belizeans that the great America is feeling pain, in real human terms. This means that the United States will be sending even more deportees back home to us. Fewer American tourists will be coming to Belize. The moneys Belizeans in America send home to us are being reduced daily. America pain means Belizean pain.
Our political leaders and economists need to figure out how to lessen the greater pain Belizeans are bound to feel. If they can’t, then the social ills which are bedeviling Belize, will become worse. Belizeans will become more hostile to each other. Not good.
All power to the people.