Globalize me, baby

The blame game is always fun to play, regardless of your political bent, station in life or field of interest. So let's indulge.

Many streams feed the raging river engulfing the hamlets and hilltops of our American landscape of getting and spending. Subprime mortgages, derivative securities, volatile oil prices, fast-buck investment bankers, criminal lenders, mortgagees who never learned their multiplication tables, falling house prices, foreclosures, disinterested regulators, to name a few. Heck, let's throw in poor little lambs who have lost their way and gentleman rankers out on the spree. Baa, baa baa.

But I'd like to focus on one pernicious species of futurist and smarter-than-thou thinkers who extolled the blessings of globalization. Now, this breed may indeed be right that the earth is flat and we're all better off for the opportunities created by the employment of cheap labor offshore and unleashing of free markets without regard to national borders. In any event, it doesn't matter if they're right or not because it is here to stay. No Smoot-Hawley bills are in the hopper.

My quibble is with the argument that the dislocations would be just an irritating rash, a minor matter that would soon be overwhelmed by the application of entrepreneurial cortisone. These superior brains (many of whom who also drank the Iraq War kool-aid) assured the benighted masses that workers' concerns were small beer compared to the blessings that would follow.

The obvious, glaring example of this miscalculation is the plight of U.S.-domiciled auto manufacturers and their employees.

I can hear the ideologues now: It's all the unions' fault for their out-of-touch demands. And that's fair up to a point ("job banks" that keep paying laid-off workers for years and benefits for retirees will have to go, for example).

But the truth, in my view, is that the clock began ticking when foreign manufacturers set up shop in the U.S. with non-union labor. To overcome that built-in disadvantage, the Big 3, locked into contracts with organized labor, turned to light trucks for the North American market and built fuel-efficient, costly but profitable machines for overseas markets. Should the unions be blamed for forging a deal that Toyota, etc., would undermine in time with the steady drip of good, cheaply produced cars? Are the unions to blame for the price of gasoline dictating the manufacturing whims of management?

The idea spun by the flat-earthers that the pain inflicted by markets without borders would be negligible is now proven risible. Do Jets fans now feel they were better off getting rid of the reliable Chad Pennington for the go-for-broke Brett Favre? For the record, I thought the Jets would be better off, too. And they may yet be.

Globalization, as real and irreversible as it may be, has finally overwhelmed GM and Chrysler and threatens a standard of living once thought a birthright. So be it. It is neither to be rejected nor embraced, damned nor praised. It's only the way the world works, not a religion, so spare me the best-of-all-possible outcomes palaver from the deep thinkers.

Back to Miss Market tomorrow, as well as thoughts on the curse of free substitution in football, Bud Wilkinson, Bernie Madoff's golf scores and the sweet, athletic joy of kids' swim meets.