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A Global Gilded Age

In Reply to: Third world, sweat shops, ridiculously low wages posted by Ekaf Eman on October 13, 1997 at 13:48:56:

You write that the United States, itself, went through a period when the burgeoning upper-class exploited child/immigrant/female labor. I assume you're referring to The Gilded Age, when Robberbarons Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan built their fortunes on the backs of seven year olds, their mothers, and immigrants who greeted Lady Liberty with stars in their eyes, only to be replaced by darkness and disillusionment. The Gilded Age was so named because, on the surface, the economy appeared to be booming, while beneath that glittering exterior was poverty and privation the likes of which the nation had never seen. Have you ever read POVERTY AND PROGRESS (Henry George)? Or LOOKING BACKWARD (Edward Bellamy)? George, writing in the middle of The Gilded Age, questions how a nation could be at once so rich and so poor. How is it possible, he asked, that the nation is experiencing such economic prosperity while millions of families are destitute? More than 80 percent of the nation's wealth was controlled by something like 5 percent of the nation's people. In LOOKING BACKWARD, written just before the dawn of the twentieth century, Bellamy asks how any shred of human integrity, compassion, or morality could have survived such a dark age.
Indeed, the United States may have stopped exploiting their own citizens; instead, "megacorporations" much like those of Morgan and Carnegie and those outlawed by the Sherman Anti-Trust Law are, even as you read this, exploiting the labor of the poor and vulnerable people of third-world, developing nations. We are moving into a Global Gilded Age, where fortunes are built on the backs of Pakistani children, or Chinese-immigrants in Chinatown, or women in Saipan. Here in the United States the economy is flourishing, but at what cost? We are experiencing social/economic/and political stratification on an immense scale. The Gilded Age has gone global, when one-fifth of the people living in the world's richest nations control 82 percent of the world export markets, 68 percent of international direct investment, and 75 percent of the world's telephone lines. The world's poorest nations can't even "reach out and touch us." President Clinton recently alluded to "archaic practices from a Charles Dickens novel." Dickens was responsible for exposing The Gilded Age's tarnished underbelly; he was the time's most brilliant and effective critic. Bellamy heralds him as the one man who truly understood the plight of the masses and devotedly advocated their cause. Who will be THIS age's Dickens? Perhaps we can all take part in criticizing and acting against our nation's ignominious practices.

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