American Everyman

by Scott Creighton

One ad from South Korean company Hyundai focused on heart-warming American militarism. They call it “Operation Better” and on their website featuring the ad they say “Millions of people just watched the Super Bowl, which wouldn’t be possible without our troops”

Really? Iraq was planning an invasion that no one told me about? Maybe Syria or Libya perhaps? Somalia? Pakistan?

And since when does a South Korean company call them “our troops”?

A number of commercials last night got into politics in a big way. Budweiser is suffering a bit of a backlash as Trump fans are planning to boycott their crappy piss-tasting beer, something they should have done years ago.

84 Lumber did a version of the Bana manufactured story from Syria when they put together an epic piece involving a little girl and her mother walking from tin-pot dictatorship land to the home of the free and the land of the brave. Along the way the little “Latina Bana” piece up pieces of garbage and starts to craft a garbage American flag for the big finish.

Coka-Cola, Airbnb and Ford also contributed to what I am calling the Open Border Super Bowl.

Ironically enough, Coke and Airbnb are known for their undying support for Israel and all their illegal, immoral practices against the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza.

Ford, well, Ford famously set up production plants in Nazi Germany next to work camps so they could profit from forced slave labor. The U.S. actually bombed the hell out of  Cologne near the end of the war but war-planners were polite enough to instruct their bombers to avoid hitting Ford’s plant in the city that was making engines for the German war machine.

“Henry Ford is mentioned in Mein Kampf, and was hailed by Hitler, who kept a portrait of the industrialist above his desk, as “my inspiration”.” Telegraph, 2003

Airbnb actually lists property for rent in illegal settlements where “immigration” of Palestinians to those locations is strictly prohibited… even by walls.

And aside from honoring IDF war-criminals like Brigadier-General Ben-Eliezer, Coke enjoys cheap labor in various illegal settlements controlled by Israel in both Jordan and the Golan Heights. And that is too say nothing of Coke killing union organizers Columbia.

Somehow I doubt all these companies suddenly care about the welfare of the common migrant or refugee. But you wouldn’t know that from watching the “Global Flexible Workforces” Super Bowl yesterday.

This is all due, in part, to Trump’s professed nationalist leanings in terms of border security and protecting U.S. workers from migrant labor forces that drive wage structures down and company profits through the roof. Of course, according to a leaked draft of an executive order, they only Mexicans he intends to send back across the border are the “violent” criminals and those who aren’t working hard enough to stay off the government dole. The draft is titled “Executive Order on Protecting Taxpayer Resources by Ensuring Our Immigration Laws Promote Accountability and Responsibility” and has been called his “public charge” order.

You guys didn’t really expect a billionaire developer who charged his sons with baby-sitting his business for a couple years to actually send all those cheap construction laborers back home, did you?

lol. That’s funny.

“The development of Japan’s first lost generation was primarily attributed to the neoliberal “structural changes” that began to occur in the Japanese business industry in the mid-1990s. The Japanese Federation of Employer’s Associations, an influential Japanese business lobby, proposed a strategic human-resources policy to increase firm competitiveness. They advocated for the generation of a flexible workforce within the Japanese labor market that would allow firms to adjust labor costs at their convenience.” Lifelong Learning in Neoliberal Japan

Japan isn’t the first or the only nation to understand the promise of the “flexible workforce”, a staffing system built on the idea that you keep wage structures low by bringing in migrant workers without benefits or even rights for that matter.

Baker & McKenzie is an international law firm based out of Chicago (where American neoliberalism got it’s start) who happen to run a division which focuses entirely on helping clients ship in cheap flexible workforces for Big Profits for those Big Businesses. They call them the “global contingent labor”:

“The Global Employer: A Global Flexible Workforce - Temporary and Other Contingent Workers Abstract [Excerpt]

Baker & McKenzie’s Global Employment Practice Group is pleased to present its 53rd issue of the Global Employer entitled A Global Flexible Workforce: Temporary and Other Contingent Workers . In times of fast-moving market conditions, straitened economics, changing workforce demographics and an increasingly global and mobile labour market, many multinationals are relying heavily on global contingent labour to provide greater flexibility, bridge gaps and manage costs. However, the challenge of using temporary and other contingent workers-temporary agency workers, independent contractors, freelancers, project workers, fixed-term employees, outsourced workers etc. - cannot be underestimated. As the trend towards more flexible labour increases, so do concerns about the social effects of a disenfranchised workforce. It is no surprise then, that global scrutiny and regulation of contingent worker arrangements is on the rise” Baker & McKenzie’s Global Employment Practice Group

American businesses, like those who ran ads during the Super Bowl last night, wish to be allowed to take advantage of the global flexible workforces that other competitors are accessing at the moment. In the UK a 2015 study showed how much Big Business depended on flexible workforces and migrants coming into various countries desperate for work. They care not about the disenfranchised workforces here in the country.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a study in 2014 which began with the core problem facing Big Business when it comes to the importation of cheap labor to crush wage structures:

“The economic impact of migration has been intensively studied but is still often driven by ill - informed perceptions, which, in turn, can lead to public antagonism towards migration. These negative views risk jeopardizing efforts to adapt migration policies to the new economic and demographic challenges facing many countries” OECD

This is the point of those sappy ads last night during the game. Some “rugged individualist” coming over from Germany and starting a beer company or some poor mother fighting across a wasteland of Latin American countries with her cute little, American flag sewing daughter in tow.

Who could possibly oppose such people?

Of course, the companies involved in many of these ads have long histories of backing regimes who regularly practice all sorts of human rights violations, so I seriously doubt they have since grown a conscience as a company.

What they want is cheap labor that gets no benefits.

What they want is to help our “national interests” abroad by continuing to provide access to a new life when someone agrees to help the CIA or the State Department overthrow their native country with a color revolution or some “humanitarian” “moderate” terrorism.

This is the trend in global business and American companies are determined to stay competitive in the neoliberal race to the bottom.

But it’s not enough to simply get Trump to allow an open border type of system so they can ship in as many “flexible” laborers as Coke, Microsoft, Ford and the other want. That’s only looking at half the problem.

The other half is using identity politics to convince the disenfranchised and out of work population to keep their mouths shut about the problem as these companies take advantage of the new global trend in Big Business.

That’s the real purpose behind all those ads during the “”Global Flexible Workforces Super Bowl” last night.

Immigrants brought you Bud beer!

How could you even think about throwing out that little girl and her garbage flag?!?

What are you, an unAmerican monster?

HEARTLESS GODLESS COMMIE!!

As the sweat shops open up with more regularity and we start to see our first lost generation like Japan did back in the 90s, commercials like these will become more and more insulting to the American people. Truth is, they should be already.

These companies don’t give a damn about little girls forced to trek across the Mexican wasteland for an opportunity at a better life. If they did, they could just instruct their factories down there to pay a living fucking wage. But they wont do that because THEY WANT MOMMY TO DRAG LITTLE NADIA ACROSS THE WASTELAND SO MOMMY CAN COME HERE AND WORK FOR NOTHING AND MAKE AMERICAN CITIZENS HAVE TO WORK FOR NOTHING AS WELL JUST SO THEY CAN HAVE A JOB.

And don’t even get me started on the business model Ford wants to see adopted here in the states. Let’s just say it involves de-licing chambers, “work will set you free” signs and absolutely no paychecks.

As for the game itself. I hate Brady and today I hate the NFL a little more than I used to. I wonder how much damage that spoiled brat of a quarterback did to their precious brand last night. But you gotta give him this, the prick can play football.

Filed under: Uncategorized |