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opinionAlso in this section: A no-brainer for a political class with atrophied brains by Eric Jackson It would be most inappropriate to call Henry Ford a son of a bitch. To do so would be to cast a gratuitous and unfair aspersion upon humanity's ancient allies, the dogs. Henry Ford was a vicious racist and anti-Semite, the Hitler supporter who financed the translation into English of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." This infamous screed was a forgery by the Czarist secret police wherein the Medieval slander about Jews using the blood of Christian babies to make Passover matzoh was converted into the infamous Blood Libel. Henry Ford hired thugs to root out union organizers, installing one Harry Bennett, the head of Michigan's parole board, as his security chief. Ford goons beat the United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther and several of his colleagues nearly to death in a celebrated act of brutality that has come down to us in American labor history as "The Battle of the Bridge." Ford Motor Company was the last of the major US auto companies to sign a union contract, which had as one of its key provisions the dismissal of Harry Bennett and the dismantling of the private army that he headed. Ford destroyed the lives of nearly everyone around him, most notoriously that of his son Edsel. But as the United States entered World War II Franklin Roosevelt couldn't tolerate a Nazi symp at the head of one of the country's major industrial combines, so under government pressure the old man was forced out in favor of his grandson, Henry Ford II. Henry Ford didn't invent the internal combustion engine, and wasn't the one who figured out the potential of powering wheeled vehicles with it. His true inventive genius was in applications of the assembly line --- a technique he didn't invent, but did perfect on a grand scale --- that made industrial production far quicker and cheaper and mass marketing possible. So even if Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, he invented the modern automobile industry. As miserable of an excuse for a human being as Henry Ford was, he was a shrewd businessman. One brilliant perception in the man's malevolent mind was that his fortune could only grow to its maximum potential in a society whose members could by and large afford the big-ticket products that his company manufactured. And thus Ford Motor Company adopted the at the time unheard-of wage for factory workers, $5 per day. On that kind of a wage scale a man who worked on the Ford assembly line could buy one of the cars that he helped to build. Indirectly, perhaps, but as it rippled through the US economy the Ford wage scale became one of the great milestones in the development of the American middle class. But many decades after the innovation that followed this realization, powerful forces would like to see it reversed, to see more primitive economic relations restored. Economic thinking that's retrograde even in comparison to the thinking of the miserable Henry Ford forms "The Washington Consensus" and down here in Panama the Torrijos administration and the political class in general appear to have bought into it. The middle class is being squeezed ever smaller. Those who sell things at stoplights and collect scrap metal are growing economic sectors. With the Seguro Social reforms we would within a few years --- starting about the time Martín Torrijos is scheduled to leave office --- have hundreds, then thousands, of impoverished senior citizens sleeping on sidewalks and eating out of garbage cans in Panama City. But what does that do to the proprietor of a car dealership, an upscale boutique or a tourist business? How many Panamanians are going to be able to buy new cars if the canal workers get beaten back from their current US-standard wage scale to the $400 a month or so that their counterparts in the rest of the Panamanian economy are lucky to get? Can upscale businesses owned by members of the old Creole aristocracy avoid ruin if their customer bases are reduced to little more than their owners' narrow segment of society? How many tourists are going to come to Panama if a walk through our capital entails running a gauntlet of panhandlers and muggers? These are not abstract questions. There are natural consequences of policies that are being urged or already pursued. It will be especially bad if the painful tax reforms and intolerable Law 17 are exacerbated by a Panama-USA free trade deal that devastates our rural economy. No, we can't ignore the world around us. But yes, we can choose among several viable economic models or various mixtures of them. We can throw in our lot with Washington's NAFTA-style regional economic integration or go with a more equitable offer that's shaping up within MERCOSUR. We can swallow the Bush offer of globalization without democratic institutions, or insist upon something closer to the elected regional system that the Europeans have developed. We can be a society with just robber barons and the downtrodden, or one with a large and prosperous middle class. The TV channels and the dailies will feed you propaganda about how organized labor is a bunch of stalinoid manipulators with a sinister hidden agenda to destroy democracy. The big taboo in our big media is to acknowledge that for a large part of the Panamanian working class, SUNTRACS et al are the front line in a dispute which will determine if they ever in their lives get to retire. So what's organized labor REALLY up to? They're trying to keep Panama from reverting to an economic model that would be backwards even from the point of view of the despicable Henry Ford.
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