The United States is Posed to Be Number One

in the worst poverty rate in the world if it keeps up with ruinous neoliberal economic policies.

In most of the developing world, the cost of living is a whole lot cheaper than it is in the United States, which people tend to forget.

Anyway:

With the full backing of the Obama administration, US and foreign-based corporations are exploiting levels of mass unemployment and poverty not seen since the Great Depression in order to transform the US into a cheap labor platform in direct competition with Mexico, China and other low-wage countries.

Tennessee, like nearly half of all US states, has an unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent, and its real jobless rate is probably double. When Volkswagen began taking applications for 1,700 jobs in Chattanooga, it received over 65,000 responses in the first three weeks. On the basis of cutting labor costs by at least a third at its US factory, Volkswagen is able to sell cars for $7,000 less than comparable models made in Germany.

Aided by the plummeting dollar, the wage gap between American workers and their brutally exploited counter-parts in Mexico and Asia is increasingly being narrowed. Asked by a New York Times columnist why Siemens chose to build a new plant in Charlotte, North Carolina instead of China, a spokesman said that for highly skilled work, the labor cost differential wasn’t very big. “For this kind of manufacturing,” he said, “the US can compete with China.”

There is no political party standing up for workers. None at all.