Walmart - East India Company; Part Deux

North American Governments and Modern Corporations — each in its own way encourages amnesia. The facts of history are dangerous things. They call to mind ways of thinking, ways of living, that are inimical to the modern American way of life.

Corporations have emerged as the dominant governance institutions on the planet. The largest among them reach into virtually every country in the world and exceed most governments in size and power. Corporations are characters in the larger stories of industrialization and capitalism.

Then:

Everyone knows the Civil War was fought the twin issues of slavery and states' rights, but how many Americans know the Revolutionary War was fought to stop corporations? The revolt over the Tea Tax was not a revolt over the fact that the tax had been raised, but rather, over the fact that it had been lowered.

The new, lower tea tax allowed a multi-national corporation, the East India Company, to flood the American market with cheap tea, thereby driving small mom-and-pop tea shops into bankruptcy. In that respect, the Boston Tea Party was akin to an attack on the local cornerstore, the Founding Fathers were dedicated in part to destroying the ability of corporations to operate on American soil.

Now:

There is genuine apprehension that small shopkeepers and intermediaries would be adversely affected by the arrival of the global retailer in India. In the United States, many mom-and-pop corner stores have shut down and others struggle to survive where Wal-Marts open.

Small entrepreneurs and the burgeoning middle class are the backbone of the Indian economy; and it will be a sad day for the Baniyahs of Bombay when they get savaged by Wal-Mart's organizational innovations, advanced inventory system; its bulk purchases of goods, price discounts; and a ferocious anti-labor policy.

John Menzer, the president and CEO of Wal-Mart's international operations said, "India represents a $250 billion retail market, growing 7.2 percent a year, but modern retailing is just starting to emerge." India is not only "a huge organic growth market for Wal-Mart," he said, but also a fast growing outsourcing market, with an expected $1.5 billion of merchandise export to Wal-Mart stores this year.

For those you who dont like reading too much and have better things in life to do just so you know, "Wal-Mart is thinking of operating slave-labor camps in India. They plan to do this through their suppliers and, increasingly, in walmart's own name." "Manmohan Singh and Chidamabaram have jumping up and down silly, giggling like teenage school girls ever since they heard Menzer say the F-word.[FDI-Foreign Direct Inverstment-Of course!]"

Domestic:

Wal-Mart has 2000 stores worldwide; and sells almost every thing at low prices, giving low and middle-class people access to goods which would have been otherwise beyond their monthly budgets. The retailer is able to do so by buying massive quantities from inshore and offshore sources and hiring people, mostly women, at blood and sweat wages.

The seamy side of the retail giant, include its denial of health coverage to employees, unequal wages for women and the elderly, ethnic and gender discrimination and many other not-so-legal practices. Wal-Mart rezones cities, determines the real minimum wage, channels capital throughout the world -- and conducts a kind of international diplomacy with a score of nations.

International:

Walmart's business practices may have greater impact upon the world than Al Qaeda, tsunami and earthquakes if we choose to pay attention. As the retail giant scrounges and sponges the third world for cheap goods, in the process it also creates employment for hundreds of thousands of people in developing countries. In the United States it keeps overheads low by hiring mostly female workers.

Implications:

The Wal-Mart department store chain, which employs 1.3 million people at 4,700 stores worldwide, and in 2002 became the largest corporation in the world, is levelling economies of the U.S., industrial nations, and the Third World.

Wal-Mart is a driving force behind the decadent Imperial Roman model of the United States. Unable any longer to reproduce its own population's existence through its own physical economy, the United States has, for the past two decades, used an over-valued dollar to suck in physical goods from around the globe for its survival. Wal-Mart is both the public face and working sinews of that policy. It brings in cheap pants from Bangladesh, cheap shirts from China, cheap food from Mexico, etc. Workers who produce these things are paid next to nothing. Wal-Mart Is Not a Business, It's an Economic Disease.Wal-Mart is destroying communities; it represents an institutionalization of the values which stink."

Not since the days of the British East India Company as the cornerstone of the British imperial system, has one single corporate entity been responsible for so much misery. At the core of its policy, Wal-Mart demands of its suppliers that they sell goods to Wal-Mart at such a low price, that they can only do so by outsourcing their work to low-wage factories overseas. This causes the exodus of millions of production jobs from the United States and the setting up of slave-labor concentration camps around the globe. Wal-Mart's policy includes crushing living standards in America, forbidding its workers from unionizing, bringing in workers illegally from abroad, and bankrupting tens of thousands of stores and outlets on Main Street, ripping apart communities and their tax bases.

Wal-Mart uses its power to ferociously attack and decimate labor power, and it is the leading force in the mass exodus of North American manufacturing capacity and jobs. The company is militantly anti-union. Reportedly it has instructed its managers never to hire workers who once belonged to a union.

Alarms Bells in My head going off:

It's not the prowess of Walmart that worries me more than the deviance that will be employed to get the niche in the market. As of now, Indian consumers are happy with the convenience of the kirana shop but they were content with watching Ramayana & Mahabharata on the big sister channel too [DD] too. Its when Macaulay's children make food and grocery buying an ambience-driven exercise that I would be concerned.

Conclusion:

The traditional model of American capitalism from the mid-20th century was that American corporations were respected because they were globally efficient, but they also paid their workers a good wage so that workers could become consumers and part of the middle class of American society. I think we've lost that model today, because globalization has pushed Wal-Mart and companies like them towards global efficiency, where consumer prices are the only things that matter.

Confessions of an Academic Hit-man

Education, like other social services such as health, is far from being a simple ‘product’. The forces of supply and demand can’t be the only factor taken into account, because education is a right recognized in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But the education market is no longer simply a matter of choice and competition between educational institutions. The education market is a diffuse, expanding, and sophisticated system of goods, services, experiences and routes – publicly and privately provided.

The rendering of educational processes into a form which is more readily privatized – into a contractible form, into a form for cost and profit calculation, into a version of education which can be reduced to a commercial exchange based on output indicators, which can be monitored.

Within institutions – colleges, schools, universities – the means/end logic, education for economic competitiveness, can transform what were once the social process of teaching, learning and research into a set of standardized and measurable products.

As part of seeking after new ‘markets’ and the re-orientation to the customer, new forms of ‘delivery’ and consumption of higher education are being created which can result in learning becoming increasingly fragmented. Colleges have been turned into value/commodity producing enterprises. They become institutionally rearranged on a model of capitalist accumulation.

College students are rendered as active consumers but passive learners, a development that further reinforces the idea that a diploma is a commodity that (hopefully) can be exchanged for a job rather than as a liberal education that prepares students for life.

The economy of student worth - seeking success in the performative culture – is very much a product. If only there was some way of curbing the derogation of ethics, brought about by privatization and the ‘disciplines’ of the market. In the business of survival in the marketplace, the niceties of care and equal value become easily dispensable. The social relations between providers and ‘clients’ and among the providers themselves are changed significantly. This is a process of 'ethical-retooling’.

The currency of judgment in education provides an infrastructure of comparisons which value practitioners and institutions solely in terms of their productivity, their performances! Productive individuals are the central economic resource in the reformed, entrepreneurial public sector. The performances of individual subjects or organizations serve as displays of 'quality', or 'moments' of promotion or inspection.

Metrics are constructed which are used to make different sorts of activities commensurable. The use of metrics, targets, linked to incentives and sanctions, and the constant collection and publication of performance data, embeds instrumentality into everything that is done. What they stand for, or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organization within a field of judgment.

In the process, what we do is emptied of all substantive content. Increasingly, we choose and judge our actions in terms of affectivity and appearance. Beliefs and values are no longer important - it is output that counts. We have come to value others solely for their performance, their contribution to the performance of the group or the organization, rather than their intrinsic worth as persons.

The commoditization of academic labour has shifted the carriers of culturally valued knowledge bearers into a struggle for authenticity. Authenticity and performance are as easily replaced by compliance and silence. Academic entrepreneurs are determined to improve academic productivity creating a bureaucracy of academic auditors. The pervasive presence of business ethos in the education industry is a sign of the changing balance of power between the state and the market.

The specificities of human interactions involved in teaching and learning are being erased. The practice of teaching is being re-made and reduced to externally generated rule-following and target achievement.

The prerequisite of the commerce of education, is that Knowledge is no longer legitimated through ‘argument and reasoning', rather, through the pragmatics of ‘optimization’ – the creation of profit rather than ideals.

So, what makes up today’s college student? Today's college student is defined by shallowness, flexibility, transparency and represented within performances. Their ‘professionalism’ is in turn their willingness and ability to adapt to the necessities and vicissitudes of policy.