Chasing China: How Alaska's Don Young and Wal-Mart are Sinking the American Dream

Kodiak, Alaska

If the U.S. House of Representatives is a Caribbean full of Pirates, Captain Don Young is the only one who sails back home to Alaska. And he sails back with a two million dollar campaign treasure chest locked up in his stateroom.

That chest was easy for him to fill. As the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, lobbyists line up with wheelbarrows full of cash to dump into his campaign account. Other Republicans nationwide have cried bitter tears wondering why he isn't more generous funding their campaigns with money he culls so easily from huge corporations. Capt. Don has a ready answer. He has told reporters you never know when some wealthy candidate or benefactor will sit down and want to play political poker. And apparently the buy-in for this game is two million dollars.

He has a point. Politics at his level takes a ton of money. Most of it comes from a lobbyist who twists the arm while he greases the palm. And companies wealthy enough to go around palm greasing and arm twisting do not often lobby for a free market and fair wages. They lobby for no bid contracts and federal highway funds.

OK. Right here I should probably make a confession. I am not really a liberal whacko. I'm a disgruntled conservative whacko. As a teen I huddled under the sheets with a flashlight and a copy of "The Fountainhead". Ayn Rand's sexy ideas about individuality and freedom and the nobility of good work were very exciting to me. Freedom is good. Capitalism is good. Capitalism is the pursuit of happiness. It's what America's all about. I voted for Reagan. Shouldn't business be unshackled from pesky government interference?

Alan Greenspan was an Ayn Rand fan. Our former Federal Reserve chair is a believer in Adam Smith's 'invisible hand", the idea that the most good can come from free people working in their own self interests. But just before he stepped down, Mr. Greenspan spoke up- about the growing gap between the working man and the rich. His theme is that the American Dream, the idea that anyone can improve his lot through hard honest work, is in jeopardy. The first step is too tall. "As I've often said, this is not the type of thing which a democratic society - a capitalist democratic society - can really accept without addressing."

Mr. Greenspan and I agree: we need the government to referee. Because a big corporation, although legally a "person", will do things in the heat of the game that no decent person would do. Don't get me wrong, most companies are perfectly cool. A corporation is a legal structure for a person to hang his business on. But you have to admit some of them develop a distinct Jabba the Hut quality when they reach a certain size. Exxon the Hut. Monsanto the Hut. Dupont the Hut. Most real people would feel a twinge of guilt about paying a bone bare subsistence wage to dirt poor workers while poisoning their groundwater. But who's going to stop them? The referees are on the payroll.

Captain Don is Alaska's referee in the U.S. House. Wal-Mart was his second biggest corporate contributor this year. Last year Captain Don tacked allocations for hundreds of special projects onto a 284 billion dollar transportation bill just one day before passing it. Among them was thirty seven million dollars to widen the road connecting Wal-Mart's headquarters to the interstate. It was penciled in at three million when the bill was in committee. Yes, the U.S. taxpayer is building a road for poor, struggling Wal-Mart.

Ah yes, Wal-Mart the Hut. If there is one thing I admire about Wal-Mart, it is that they are able to corrupt both the United States and China at the same time.

Here in America Wal-Mart has put such intense pressure on both its competition and its suppliers in its crusade to offer low prices that it has squeezed the American manufacturing worker out. In his place is a Chinese worker who is happy for a chance to simply subsist. Thread maker Carolina Mills once supplied cloth for half of Wal-Mart's clothing makers. Pressure from Wal-Mart sent their customers scurrying for Asian cloth. Says Steve Dobbins, Carolina Mills president: "We want clean air, clear water, good living conditions, the best health care in the world--yet we aren't willing to pay for anything manufactured under those restrictions."

So Wal-Mart scours the planet for its poorest, most disadvantaged workers. Then it pays them a wage calculated to keep them in poverty. Just well fed enough to keep working. Wal-Mart's corporate affairs manager in China, Jiang Lichun, won't say how much Chinese workers are paid, only that it's calculated to be enough to "guarantee the workers' basic existence." China's only legal labor union is the one linked to the Communist Party. They don't actually do anything for Chinese laborers; the leaders just march into the manager's office and shake them down. When they pounded the table at Wal-Mart they were told to take a hike. They had already cut a deal with the Chinese version of Captain Don. Wal-Mart doesn't do unions. Even fake ones.

The irony for China is that their attempt to change communism into a "socialist market economy" in order to bring more money to the masses is failing. Instead they have frozen their workers in carbonite and delivered them to Wal-Mart the Hut. And here's the ultimate irony. Managers of China's Wal-Mart stores, worried about the high cost of Chinese labor, are starting to outsource in countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam, where workers are more desperate, and labor is even cheaper.

So America and China, the Larry and Curly of the world, are having their heads knocked together by its Moe, Wal-Mart. China is morphing from communism into what The Nation's Carl Goldstein describes as "a corporatist, quasi-fascist system marked by close, often corrupt, ties between government and big business." And we are going to the same place from the opposite direction.

Vote for Sarah Palin. "Her hand is not greasy, nor is her arm sore."

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