Beautiful day.
Sunny, and not a copy of the Irving press in sight. Even better,
there are some good news sources to catch up on.
There are these
photos of a refugee camp at Dunkirk, France.
While we slap
ourselves on the back for our incredible generosity in helping
refugees, the reality is we help very few, and those not very much.
As for the U.S., it had no trouble supplying 23,000 tons of bombs to
Saudi Arabia to be dropped on an almost helpless Yemen, no trouble
building and sending drones to kill all over the world, no trouble
supplying weapons to whatever warlord might want them; but it won't
lift a finger to help the casualties of the misery it has created in
the middle east. And the worst offenders in the U.S. are the Jesus
Jumpers. Meanwhile, Britain is still the racist and bigoted place it
has been for the last 600 years.
And Canadians swoon in front of mirrors in self-admiration and even
ecstasy for their very limited offer of help.
The Guardian has an
excellent history of the Koch family, multi-billionaires who buy
elections, buy journalists (even at the New York Times), who have
spent hundreds of millions to deny that climate change is happening,
and who were early into the game of creating 'think-tanks' which are
really propaganda agencies for big business (and are much loved by
the Irving press.)
Then there's the big
issue in the U.S. election. No, no. It's not the stunning rise in
poverty and homelessness, not the growing wage gap, not the worsening
of racism, not the collapse of public schooling….. Nope. It's the
need for every American to have his or her own gun for protection
from ISIS which, apparently, is hiding under every bed in the country
.
Then there's the
arms business which is enjoying its greatest boom ever, supplying
anybody who can pay for it with the latest equipment for up-to-date
mass murder. The U.S. industry is the greatest beneficiary, then
Britain and France and, recently, Canada. All of these countries have
signed agreements not to sell weapons to countries with bad human
rights records. All of these countries sell weapons to Saudi Arabia
which permits no human rights at all.
_________________________________________________________________________
And here is an
interesting story on the gullibility of the U.S. (and Canadian)
press. I've read many stories that fit this description.
And here is
something to put it all into perspective.
And from here on,
you have to settle for just me.
My first thought is
for all those who are ardent believers in capitalism- and few of whom
seem to understand the meaning of the word. Big business is usually
not capitalist. It rarely takes risks. It rarely goes into ventures
without state support – whether financial (as with Atcon and with
tax rules), or military (as in much of the world right now, or heavy
political influence (as in blocking study of its use of pesticides,
buying forests at bargain rates….)
Small business
owners are suckers for this line. They like to kid themselves that
they are just like big business. In reality, they are victims of big
business just like the rest of us.
And at some point,
capitalism became a religion, a branch of Christianity.
It began in 1775
with the belief that Americans were a special people – that they
were the beginning of democracy and human rights in this world. These
were images endlessly reinforced in schools, in history, in novels,
then in film and TV. In reality, of course, Americans were leaders in
none of these. On the contrary, they were centuries late.
Democracy? Human
rights? In a country whose business leaders depended on the labour of
slaves who had no democracy or rights? In a country in which women
had no democracy and very few rights? In a country in which those who
didn't own enough property were commonly denied the right to vote? In
a country which permitted all citizens to keep and bear arms?
Well, anyway,
keeping and bearing arms had nothing to do with democracy. It was in
the constitution because, by definition, only white folks could be
citizens; and they needed guns for occasions when they might have to
shoot a few slaves. They also needed guns to kill native peoples so
they could steal their land.
Funny how the
history books miss that.
All this took on a
religious air quite early. The U.S. was, after all, a religious
society if only because there was no other show in town on a Sunday.
But more important, like all imperialists and slave owners, white
Americans had to convince themselves they were racially and morally
superior to slaves and native peoples. Britain and France and Spain
and Portugal had already taken that path.
Enter God. (An
acceptable guy. White. Spoke English. Their belief in the Christian
God was evidence of their racial, intellectual, moral superiority, a
superiority that justified their exploitation, theft, and murder. By
sometime early in the nineteenth century, this had morphed into a
belief that Americans were God's chosen people.
This first revealed
itself as “Manifest Destiny”, the belief it was God's will for
the U.S. to conquer the Americas – and more. That belief justified
the war on Mexico and the theft of much of its territory. It
justified setting up civil war veterans, mostly Irish, to invade
Canada. It also justified threats to Canada by President Theodore
Roosevelt, and the Spanish American war which gave the U.S.
dictatorial power over the inferior peoples of Cuba, Puerto Rico and,
in World War One, Haiti.
Manifest Destiny is
still with us. Jeb Bush can tell you all about that in a document he
helped to make. “The New American Century” makes it God's will
for the U.S. to rule the world. That's what Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya
and Syria have been all about.
At some point – or
as a culmination of several points – the U.S. made capitalism a
part of manifest destiny and of the definition of what was American.
The most striking example came in the 1950s when Senator McCarthy
commanded the stage with his House Unamerican Activities Committee.
It defined a belief in capitalism as being essential to be classifed
as an American. Many people were destroyed by his committee just for
thinking about communism – or anything communist lie health care.
And so it is the
U.S. has been manipulated into becoming a sort of religion of
whiteness, Christianity, capitalism, and God's chosen. If I were to
move to the U.S. and became a citizen, I would be an American. But if
I were a Mexican who had become an American, I would always be a
Mexican- American. And a hundred and fifty years after the freeing
of the slaves, African Americans are still second-class , at best.
The U.S. has always been a melting-pot only for people who fit the
right image. Americanism is essentially a racist religion. Jews have
only recently been accepted. People of African descent have, for the
most part, not been accepted. And it's a very fanatical religion –
something like ISIS.
Nor has capitalism
proven to be in a class with the Ten Commandments. It has been a
system of very uneven performance for most people. The industrial
booms of the U.S., Canada, Britain, France of the latter part of the
nineteenth century were made possible only by the massive use of
their own people as cheap labour with no security, no social
services, no hope of ever escaping the miles of slums and filth they
had to live in.
It was made possible
also by enslaving or virtually enslaving the people of India and
China and Africa, Latin America. It was the golden age of a very few
made possible by the squalor and early deaths of hundreds of
millions.
Then, shortly before
World War One, the system crashed. War spending revived capitalism
for a time, then, in 1919, it crashed again – this time for ten
years. And again, it was saved by war. And it's been very uneven, to
say the least, since the late 1950s.
Then Mulroney began
the dash to cash in on the poverty of most of the world through 'free
trade treaties', which soon pulled jobs away from Canada and the U.S.
so employers could cash in on the massive poverty of the world's
poorest countries. - and push up the rate of poverty in Canada and
the U.S. It also enabled employers to be free of those awful
regulations that got in the way of profits – things like minimum
wage, environmental rules….
In general,
capitalism does not have a good track record of creating prosperity
(unless you are one of the billionaires) in this world. On the
contrary, it has been extremely unreliable and, in most countries,
actively destructive.
Then came the moment
the world should have paid more attention to – the US $700 billion
dollar bailout mostly of banking institutions in 2008. (plus many
bailouts in other countries.)
The failures were
due to those institutions breaking laws in order to steal higher
profits. Iceland put people in jail for it. But most western
countries rewarded them, and boards of directors of those
institutions got billions in bonuses out of their criminality. This
was a turning point in history.
Capitalism had
become so powerful it could not be punished for breaking the law. In
fact, it had become so powerful if could ignore the law. We have yet
to recover from that – and it does not look as though we will in
any near future.
Capitalism has done
a lot of things. It has created mass poverty all over the world for
the last 500 years or so. It has been extremely unreliable over the
years. It has been a major factor in spreading poverty even to
developed nations. It has made life a horror in the undeveloped
nations. It has been the cause of an unbroken series of wars for
several centuries, with death tolls, especially of civilians, at the
highest levels in history – and now with the potential for world
destruction.
It also has become
the major force in ignoring climate change, ignoring poverty,
ignoring homelessness.
If capitalism was
God's idea, it was not one of His better ones.
Minimally, we need
to put severe controls on it. And at that, I don't see how a world
can survive an economic system whose only reason to exist is to
satisfy the insatisfiable greed of a few.
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