Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: Obama's Deal with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, by Robert Reich.  From the post:

Virtuous cycle? American businesses are doing quite nicely as it is. Their profits are soaring. And one reason they’re doing so well is they’re holding down costs, especially payrolls. So why would they ever agree to add more workers now?
From the standpoint of the nation as a whole more Americans working may mean even higher profits overall. But publicly-traded companies aren’t in the business of spending money to help other companies. To the contrary, they’re competing with one another to show high quarterly earnings in order to boost their share prices. They’ll “get in the game” and begin to hire large numbers of Americans only when it helps their own bottom lines.
And when will that be? Not long ago I debated a conservative economist who argued American workers had priced themselves out of the global labor market and would therefore have to settle for lower real wages and benefits before they’d be hired back in large numbers. By his logic, many health and safety regulations would also have to be compromised or abandoned, since they also make American workers more expensive.

Business is arbitraging the differences in standard of living between the developed world and the developing world.  It is not a long-term business strategy, but it is profitable for the time being.  It also masks the unsustainability of the difference in consumption of energy between the developed and developing world.  I don't see much chance of preventing our standard of living from going down some as it is improved in the third-world.