Now that it is clear to millions of Americans that their jobs and in fact their country’s industrial base has been shipped out, never to return, they should begin to question the role of Corporate America in the plunge in their standard of living.

Some 30 years ago, at the outset of the reign of St. Ronald of the White House, there were discussions among some wageworkers, at least, about the meaning of “capital flight,” which was how the domestic corporations’ running to low-wage countries was described.

The discussion never reached the national or even the state level and there was never a thought to stopping the hemorrhaging of our productive capacity and our jobs. That is, basically, how we came to be in the condition we are in. No one seemed to be alarmed about it, not the economics departments of our great universities, not politicians, not the unions or the union movement. They seemed to be ready to just ride it out.

Great economic minds had said that the closing of American factories would, in the long run, be good for America and good for American workers. In fact, no less a personage than the vice president, Dick Cheney, said publicly that shipping the jobs overseas would be good for the country, since it would engender creativity and make us successful in our new chosen line of work, computers, technological gadgets, and information technology.

It has been two years since the Bush-Cheney Administration was turned out of the houses of power in Washington and, so far, there hasn’t been a shred of evidence that impoverishing American workers has released a flood of creativity. Instead, the U.S. has increasing unemployment and low job creation numbers and there is great concern for the coming generation who are taking any jobs they can get to pay off their student loans, waiting for the opportunity to find work in their chosen fields. In the meantime, they have a mountain of education debt to pay off. Try living under those conditions.

Since the U.S. is a “free enterprise” nation, there was no control over what our transnational corporations did with our industries or our jobs and, therefore, they were free to seek out the lowest cost countries in which to do their business. They wanted the lowest wages (that goes without saying), they wanted the lowest costs for material and equipment, and they wanted the least effective environmental laws. At the least, they wanted assurances that any environmental laws that did exist in the countries chosen for exploitation would not be enforced.

They got all of that and more. The U.S. government even went so far as to provide subsidies to some, if not most, of the companies that left the country, supposedly because the success of American-based corporations in other countries would translate into jobs for American workers. Unfortunately, those jobs would be rather low paid jobs in retail and service “industries.” The higher-paying jobs are not for the Americans.

Some prominent CEOs in Corporate America even brag that they are not the heads of U.S. companies, but that they lead “global corporations” that will go anywhere in the world, so long as it brings their shareholders the biggest return. There is little loyalty to the nation and certainly not any loyalty to the people of the U.S.

Wealth of American corporate CEOs and others who have been enriched by the U.S. economy is in places where it is secure from taxation by the nation, which they falsely call home. They have bank accounts, homes, and estates in countries unknown to most Americans.

In the early 1980s, there were t-shirts sold and widely worn by working men and women that listed some of the biggest corporations in the country that said, “I pay more taxes than…” and you could name the corporation. It’s likely that those t-shirts bear just as true a statement today as they did then.

Yet, the politicians who make the laws are loath to tax the wealthy and the corporations their fair share of the burden of paying for the running of our country. Their excuse, if there could be such a thing, is that they don’t want to discourage them from making money and seeking profits. Taxing them fairly, it is claimed by politicians and their corporate sponsors, would simply be “punishing them for their success.” And, too many people, including wageworkers at the bottom of the economic scale, buy that argument.

As the country suffers economic, political, social, and environmental decline, the powerful in Corporate America and those who do their bidding in the political arena continue to find ways to shelter their wealth and the wealth of their companies so that, today, an obscenely small number (1 or 2 percent) of the populace controls some 80 percent of the wealth. No nation that suffers such a disparity can be long for this world.

Why do the corporations even bother to maintain headquarters in the U.S.? They aren’t going to move their headquarters to a country in the European Union, because Europe has a long tradition of controlling the disparity in wealth and of providing a wide array of public services to their people. They aren’t going to put their substance in the few remaining oil-rich countries; they’re too unstable. They’re not going to put their money and substance in virtually any other country, no matter how friendly the elite of that country.

Rather, they keep their headquarters in the U.S. because it has, at least up to now, been very stable and extremely unlikely to nationalize their businesses, as has happened from time to time in the past in other countries. This state of affairs allows “American” CEOs to brag that they head “global corporations,” while minimizing the danger to their global profits and their $10 million or $20 million or $30 million a year in personal compensation. And, they keep their shareholders quiet with an annual payout on their stocks.

There doesn’t seem to be much that can be done about the current state of affairs in the declining American empire, since a sizable percentage (although apparently not a majority) of the people are convinced that the way things are is the way they ought to be in America. We still have the problem of not having enough to pay the nation’s bills.

A proposal: Since we can’t seem to get the corporations to pay their fair share of the taxes that exist, we should charge them for our political stability, say, 5 percent of profits made around the world, in the places that are beyond the reach of Congress’ ability to tax (or find the spine to tax the powerful). It’s a modest amount, but a pittance for people who want to keep being paid thousands of dollars a minute. After all, the alternative might be moving their companies to Bahrain, India, China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt (until the events of the past several weeks).

Many of the largest American corporations already have substantial investments all around the world, but they keep their headquarters here. There must be a hundred countries that would welcome any of the biggest “American” corporations with open arms.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.