The Poet's Perspective

Buying Out the American Dream

The following article appeared 9 years ago in the Cape Cod Times'  "My View" column. I find that the passage of time has actualized some of the dangers I warned against and presented others I didn't anticipate.  It's a younger man's rant, so please forgive the machine-gun style. I was tempted to edit it during the transcription process but I had to keep it original.

Buying Out the American Dream

by Jonathan Mayo

Recent economic trends threaten the social landscape in America, nurturing complacency, weakening our manufacturing base and quietly funneling money away from our towns, states and the nation as a whole.

             Let us first consider mergers. They happen so frequently that we can barely keep track of them. Time merged with Warner. Time-Warner merged with CNN. Time-Warner CNN merged with AOL. Time-Warner CNN AOL merged with EMI records, creating a $260 billion juggernaut that many of us support monthly by paying our MediaOne cable bills.

            But what exactly are we supporting anyway? The problem is that endless mergers and acquisitions create conglomerates so nebulous that that ordinary people cannot appreciate their scope or modify their consumer habits accordingly.

            One thing is certain. The lifeblood of mergers is blank, faceless math. It is not customer service that spurs them, but rather bigger market shares, lower costs and fat profits at our expense. Make no mistake; in many arenas big business is eating small business for lunch.  The primary motives of today’s economic movers and shakers are to either squash the competition or buy them out.

            Consider Cape Internet and Excel Switching, two groundbreaking Cape Cod businesses. Both were bought out last year. They were simply too successful to squash.

The siren song of big buyouts goes like this: “I have an offer you can’t refuse.” Ordinary people seem powerless to resist.

      Now Cape Internet’s new owners have run radio ads that nauseatingly claim, “Hometown Internet, ah, what a heartwarming phrase..” apparently a spoonful of sugar helps the mergers go down.

             Whatever happened to the banks that once stood on Cape Cod? Do you remember BayBank, Falmouth National, NBIS, Fleet, Bank of Boston, BankBoston, Bass River Savings? Federal regulators take our silence to be tacit approval for such monopolistic deals. Slowly but surely we consent to the dismantling of local character and local control.

            In Barnstable, a town where it’s difficult to find a mom-and-pop coffee shop, there are now seven Dunkin Donuts franchises, three of which are contained in a single square mile. As town government caters to deep pockets, soon entrepreneurs will have little hope for success unless they buy a popular franchise. Countless blinking neon signs with logos we all know will herald the death of the American Dream.

         Sweeping trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT aim to centralize the world’s industry in countries with the cheapest cost of labor; which also happen to be the countries with the fewest human rights.  It is obscene that our flag flies over negotiations to grant permanent favorable trade status to China, in light of the fact that it has stolen our nuclear secrets, has missiles pointed at us and doesn’t care one whit for human rights.

Perhaps our cheap VCR’s, Happy Meal toys and trinkets are worth more than principle or national security. We have strange bedfellows, indeed.

      I was shown locally the effects of Chinese oppression when, at the age of 14, I washed dishes at a restaurant in Woods Hole. I scrubbed pots beside Chinese microbiologists from WHOI. Menial wages were a king’s ransom to these PhD’s. I soon wondered how “ordinary” workers were treated in their native land. But most disturbing was the fact that these humble and brilliant men would risk arrest at home for simply speaking their minds. Our daily purchasing decisions support this kind of injustice. All our flag-waving and talk about freedom and liberty is hot air when we support oppression abroad with our dollars.

      Along with the destruction of our economic independence comes the loss of our political voice. Countless mergers mean countless lobbyists, wooing politicians with fat campaign contributions and swanky cocktail parties. If only the average citizen could offer such perks we might be able to scare up better representation. 

            And so it goes. We happily send our money off to Timbuktu. We tolerate the creation of conglomerates that pay pauper’s wages to Third World workers and then we wonder why local businesses have trouble competing. The saying used to be, “Let them eat cake.” Today we are placated by plastic cars and bargain electronics. We forfeit our manufacturing base in favor of a slanted service economy, belying the independence, innovation and ingenuity that were once America.

           Rest assured that if our Founding Fathers exhibited such complacency in 1775, we might still be a colony of England. Paul Revere might not have left the warm glow of his computer screen. Our world is rife with distractions, from SUVs to HDTVs. We should hunger for meaningful progress, meeting our neighbors, minding our pocketbooks, supporting small business and avoiding preoccupation with the bottom line.

       One of the first American Political  cartoons depicted the 13 original colonies as a vulnerable snake. The caption read, “Don’t Tread on Me” These days more than ever we must be vigilant not to let ourselves be trodden upon.

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Fast-Forward 9 years

         Several points come to mind when I think about these trends and the passage of  the past nine years. While I was aware of the enormous power held by these large companies, I missed maybe an even more important point, that is, the bigger you are the harder you fall.  We learned a few lessons from Enron, AIG et al. Clearly the dangers of oligopoly are multifaceted.

           I also didn't forsee that the effects of our economic imbalances would permeate so fully,  so as to harm the value of our currency and ballooon the trade deficits.

       My larger fears were justified, that slowly the money and control would seep out of our communities and nati0n as a whole. We can see that without manufacturing

we are hamstrung. It isn't about cheap appliances anymore, it's about our  survival.  Any stockbroker will tell you to diversify your holdings. To put all one's resources into a narrow market is the scarlet letter of foolhardy investment. So too goes our economic policy, as we cannot survive on a slanted service economy.

       It seems like some of the nation's best and brightest are working in dumbed-down professions,  heads buzzing with new ideas, running full-speed into the roadblocks of

the new economy.

       Innovators and entrepreneurs encounter what are termed "barriers to entry" in any given market. Modern times have presented even greater barriers to entry, many of which are self-created.

     The FTC allows oligopolies to exist. The Federal Government, under the guise of  ”free trade" enables foreign entities to exploit labor, resulting in artificially low  production costs. Trade schools now rarely teach manufacturing.  Machinists go the way of dinosaurs,  such that the means of production are strangled.These are the sorts of barriers to entry that the hungry innovators face.

        This is un-American. Let me explain. It took an awful long time for civilization to temper the harms of the Industrial Revolution. Child labor needed to be stopped.

Sweatshops and tinderboxes slowly became more humane and less combustible. It was considered a point of enlightenment that mankind could engage in mutually beneficial commerce, that the worker could perform a safe & honest day's work at a decent wage and capitalists could enjoy a reasonable profit in exchange for their investment. 

    Then globalism arrived. Everyone was elated over the  assumption that foreign products were cheaper, yet they were  blind to the idea of WHY, that those countries were operating under last century's laws and consequently last century's cost structures.

      We need to rebuild our sense of perspective, what it means to be American. Our governing principles are broader than one might expect. Taken seriously they serve to indict our most recent economic strategies.

     I believe President Obama should be handing out grants to fledgling entrepreneurs, to try to build something new rather than repairing an inherently flawed system.

        I won't hold my breath.