something you need to know about the U.S. December 14th, 2009
one thing that’s really nice about this whole interweb thing is that you can learn about whatever you want. this post will provide links/info/opinions for those of you who want to know about one of the big reasons things in the US are so screwy.
some links-
interesting & informative movie “the corporation” watch it.
movie “food inc.”
both movies are pretty easy to find in video stroes, netflix, etc. and probably online too…
if you’re down for more depth- a book by Thom Hartmann: Unequal Protection- [the rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights] (you can get used copies for pretty cheap)
if you’re wondering what i’m talking about, read on…
corporations in the US have waaaay too much power. they have the rights of US citizens, but without the conscience, and without the responsibilities. the purpose of corporations is to make money- nothing wrong with that, but they need to do so in an ethical manner that benefits our country rather than beats it down (or at least beats down those of us who are not part of the corporate profit-taking). in the long run, even the profit-takers will not benefit from most of the corporate actions, because they will end up destroying the economy, the environment, and the populace.
our responsibility is to keep the corporations where they belong- in their proper role of providing services and benefiting society. corporations used to be accountable to state governments- but now many have become so large and wealthy that they can (almost) do whatever they want.
watch one of the movies. it will make you smarter.
i’ve been reading a book by that title, by Thom Hartmann. the title says it all, i think.
i think it’s very important for us to understand the changes that have taken place recently due to “free trade”, the WTO, and the juggernaut transnational corporations that control so much of what happens here on planet earth.
in this post i will print an extensive quote from the book, as an overview for the uninitiated to this topic. if you aren’t interested enough to read this, you don’t really understand what’s at stake. please go to a video store and rent “the corporation“. then come back and read this.
from a section on “free trade” in the book: [my comments are in brackets]
-If a company wanted to compete with the one that had gone offshore for labor, it faced only two choices: 1) shut their domestic factories and move manufacturing offshore, or 2) go out of business. The result–on a vast scale–has been that the larger companies have moved offshore and the smaller companies who lacked the resources to do that have gone out of business. The number of competitors has dwindled and markets have become concentrated in fewer hands. [ie. wal-m*rt]
-As a consequence, well-paying manufacturing jobs in the developed world have evaporated at a startling pace. This echoes all the way up from the local level, through state and national economies, finally showing up as a general lowering of the standard of living in the developed world. Wages drop, benefits vanish, jobs become scarce, and people become insecure.
-Along with the economic changes come social changes. The worst of it shows up at the bottom first- the number of people in prison explodes, as do other negative social indicators. Antidepressant drug use goes up, suicide goes up (particularly among teenagers, who are developmentally most fragile and are watching their future earnings prospects evaporate), and spouses and even children got o work to help support the household. Debt goes up as the society becomes progressively poorer.
-Wealthy nations respond to the offshore challenge by trying to be competitive, which means lowering wages and benefits further. Companies may even cut promised benefits to their longtime employees who have already retired. But even if the local company cuts wages in half (doing enormous damage to the local economy), a transnational corporation is still able to hire a dozen or more workers for the same job in a poor nation. Consequently, the race to the bottom gathers momentum- the bottom is where more than 6 billion people compete for the same work that was, until recently, performed in a tariff-protected economy of 1 billion people (the developed world). Resources won’t stretch that far. The bottom is worldwide poverty supervised by a wealthy few, also known as feudalism.
-In the developing nations where these “new jobs are created,” people who have been doing traditional farming leave the land for the sweatshops, and the land is turned over to intensive corporate agriculture. People who in previous generations were independent, self-sufficient farmers become urban slum-dwellers, the working poor, dependents on the corporate farmers and supermarkets for their food.
-When the new sweatshop nation’s urban working poor begin demanding higher wages and benefits, the corporations move to another country where labor is cheaper. It happened in the 1990s when a mass exodus of multinational corporations left Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand for the ultra cheap labor of Vietnam, Burma, and China, leaving the economies of those former “Asian tigers” shattered and desperate. Poverty explodes as slums overflow with crime, drugs, and prostitution: the symptoms of people seeking some sort of income when the real jobs are gone. It is just like strip-mining, and it’s a sign of the worst corporate citizen- one without the slightest concern for the impact it has. [i've heard people say "well, at least they have jobs over there now". slavery and sweatshop conditions are not a job. they are the results of unregulated, unrestricted corporate greed. if you can lower the wage of that worker by 10 cents, the CEOs get another million dollar raise.]
-In the process, the multinational corporations become richer, moving their “mining” activities from one nation to another as profits dictate. As multinational cormporate wealth increases, stock prices go up and the top few percent of the socioeconomic pyramid become wealthier. [click HERE for an interesting illustration of wealth disparity in the US] Nations learn to watch the stock market, thinking–in complete error– that it is an accurate indicator of the nation’s wealth and economic health. In fact, from the Dutch Tulip Market collapse in 1637 to the U.S. stock market rise and crash of 1929, rapidly increasing markets have historically been indicators of an economy on the edge of implosion or undergoing radical social transformation.
here is an NY times article about how american gas companies are returning to Iraq for the first time since Saddam Hussein came to power 36 years ago.
so- the US invades Iraq for no good reason, and now that we’re committed to being there for an undetermined amount of time, US gas companies are moving in. i guess we’ll be keeping US troops there for quite a long time in order to protect “our” interests.
wait- whose interests? big oil’s? yeah, that’s worth getting killed for. sign me up.
