Everything is Relative

My guess is that most of the particularly ignorant postings from Americans on this thread are from young people. For thirty years now, ever since the “Reagen Revolution” and the gutting of media ownership regulations, our news has been increasingly controlled by a few major corporations. If you are under 30 years old in America, you have been exposed to corporate propaganda masquerading as news all your life. The worst offender, of course, is the Fox News Channel, owned by Rupert Murdoch (thanks, Australia). Fox News is a propaganda machine that would make Goebbels proud. It actually fired and sued one of its own reporters for not reading a story on-air that they ordered her to read and she knew to be a lie. The ignorance of a large segment of the American public has been purposefully engineered by major corporations’ successful 30 year effort to “control the message”.

Making all this worse is one of the stupidest legal decisions in world history. In 1889, the U.S. Supreme Court declared a corporation to be a “person”, with all the freedom-of-speech rights from the U.S. Constitution as a real human person has. This ludicrous decision has stuck and become solid law in the United States. You can find out more about it here: http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.html This decision makes it very hard under U.S. law to restrict corporate control of our political process. The Republican Party is now completely controlled by big business and religious zealots. The Democratic Party is much better, but the corporate influence is still extremely strong. Our current political debate over public health care, which must seem totally incomprehensible to Europeans, is clear proof of how completely major corporations control the American political process.

The Military-Industrial Complex is very, very real. It IS the driving force behind America’s incredibly short-sighted foreign policies of the last 50 years, starting with Vietnam. The world is actually in a great period of relative peace and prosperity now. There are no Napoleons, Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Spheres, Hitlers, or Stalins. The main identifiable “bad guys”, Al Qaeda, can only do terrorist hits, not mount a full scale war.

I don’t think that America is an evil nation, but we are in a very dangerous period right now. The danger is illustrated by some of the ignorant comments by Americans on this thread. Barack Obama is a great hope, but that is all he is right now — a hope — and he is limited by how much he can accomplish through our political process. (These are the same limitations that prevented Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush from becoming a Hitler or Stalin, by the way). I hope for us and for the rest of the world that we make the right choices. Feeding starving children, and preventing WalMart from selling goods made under essentially slave labor conditions would certainly help.

Thanks trepak for the perspective. I think the solution to much of what you are talking about is conceptually straightforward, but it would be politically difficult. If Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the U.S., the British Commonwealth, the E.U. and maybe a few other countries I have overlooked, all agreed to use trade policy to enforce consistent standards of health and safety, no child labor, collective bargaining, basic human rights, and a living wage, most of the other countries in the world would soon start distributing the wealth more equitably. In other words, treat your workers fairly or we don’t trade with you. China would certainly come around very quickly. If it can go from complete Communism to exploitive Capitalism in twenty years without a change of government, it can transform to responsibly regulated Capitalism just as easily. The British Commonwealth would have to get some of its member countries up to the standards, and hopefully the U.S. would improve its distribution of wealth also. Although politically hard, this idea is not much different from the admission process that the E.U. has been imposing on its new member states. If you can do it over there, why can’t we slowly expand the concept beyond Europe.

Congratulations, by the way, on the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, especially the Charter of Fundamental Rights. I wish America would update our Bill of Rights to match it.

I know I have posted a lot on this thread, so I promise that this will be the last.

This is a letter to the opinion page of “The Daily Illini”, the student run newspaper of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. It illustrates well how many Americans think, which is probably very different from world view of Europe and most other cultures. It is from Luke, a senior in the Engineering School of the University. Luke is probably a very nice, reasonable young man. It is about an on-going labor negotiation within the University. I have copied the entire letter, only omitting details about the negotiations, which would not be very meaningful or interesting.

“When I was very young, my father worked 45-50 hours a week as a janitor/handyman in addition to taking classes to become a paramedic. He only got paid for 40 of those hours, and minimum wage at that. Why? Because the place he worked at refused to pay overtime, and if he failed to get everything done on time, they would have fired him for incompetence. Eventually, after 7 years, he screwed up and they did.

“Why am I telling this little story? Because in the years since, and at the time, my father never complained about the way he was treated by his employer. Not because he was some type of saint (he complains all the time), but because they were doing him a favor. The economy in the late 80’s early 90’s was bad and my hometown was worse. Getting a full-time job was virtually impossible; it was a small town, the factory had closed, etc.

“[The union at the university] complains about not getting a living wage. I, and millions of other US citizens, sympathize; it really is not fair. [rest of paragraph about the union negotiations omitted]

“Welcome to the real world, where it has everything to do with supply and demand, and nothing to do with fair. Multiple people apply for every opening… [If the union] went on permanent strike, there would be new [workers] by the time Christmas rolled around.”

Now Luke is obviously a smart, articulate student that came from an impoverished background. He must have worked hard to get into the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, because it is the premiere public university in Illinois and only admits the best high school students.

Notice, however, that both he and his father are oblivious to that fact that they are victims of illegal worker exploitation. It was illegal in the United States back in the 80’s and 90’s, and it still is, to require that hourly employees work overtime without pay. At time-and-a-half, those 5 to 10 hours of overtime would have been about a 20% to 35% raise in pay for his father. That money was due his father. His father earned it. It would have made a tremendous difference to his family’s standard of living. Instead of that money going to his family, where it would have been spent locally on necessities, thereby creating more jobs within that economically depressed community, it probably went to the owners or the stockholders of whatever business his father worked for so they could buy a Mercedes 500 series instead of a Mercedes 300 series (this was before Lexus became the luxury car of choice). No offense to the German economy, and assuming the Mercedes were not made in the U.S. back then, but that money was needed more in that American community.

Yet to this day, Luke simply attributes the exploitation to inevitable capitalist forces. He is anti-Union, the very thing that would have helped his father and his family. If Luke gets his Engineering degree and is reasonably successful, he will probably have a decent middle class American lifestyle. He probably is a Republican, and will continue to vote for the Republican Party. He will view his situation, and his impoverished past, as “I worked my way out of poverty; Why can’t they?” The “they” being, of course, other poor people. He will not acknowledge that he was able to work his way out of poverty because of at least 16 years of tax supported public education. (Including my tax dollars, by the way, as an Illinois resident — but that’s O.K. because it really is better for everyone that Luke be an Engineer, even if he is a Republican, than for him to be stuck in his father’s circumstances).

I present this posting because it is so typical of the world view of many Americans. I wish Luke well, but I do hope he broadens his viewpoint and gains a deeper understanding of the society in which he lives.

If anyone is still reading me, I hope my posts have been helpful.