In some countries repression is obvious and brutal, while in others citizens habitually and willfully limit their personal mental content to infotainment, not having a sufficiently broad range of relevant knowledge to recognize the downside of vidiocy (i.e., the tendency to be undereducated due to being obsessed with video infotainment and propaganda). At one time in this country, during my lifetime, there was a great deal of manufacturing. That period followed WWII when Europe, the USSR, China, Japan, and Korea were devastated from war, and thus there was little competition for U.S. manufacturers. Further, the industrial base had been built up to support the war effort in the U.S. while other countries had suffered damage to infrastructure. In 1972 President Richard Nixon opened trade with communist China for the benefit of investors and industrialists who realized that what was previously called communist slave labor, now called competitive labor markets, was a fabulous opportunity to make great amounts of money by having things made by dirt-cheap labor in China. Some other countries have offered attractive sweat-shop labor rates, too, but Chinese elites have had the greatest success. It has been all downhill since then, little by little the U.S. working class being pushed downward in socioeconomic status while buying goods cheaper because they were made in sweatshops in China and elsewhere by peasants working for a tiny fraction of U.S. wages and no benefits. The result is what is known as the de-industrialization of the United States. Wealthy investors in general are not inclined to reduce their personal profit just to pay livable wages to American workers, and consequently a great many chose to move their production site out of the country. Others simply could not compete in price with imports made by former peasants who left their dirt-road villages to get a factory job in some Chinese city. The current downside of being in the so-called working class in the U.S. is not likely to change any time soon, not within your lifetime. Recall that there was a depression in this country in the 1930’s when people could expect to starve or die due to lack of medical care, or just freeze to death because they were on the road looking for work but jumped a train going in the wrong direction. Keep in mind that the 2008 bailout of wealthy investment firms that were, among other things, selling bad mortgages on purpose was funded by the U.S. taxpayer—you. The investment firms who profited from that are calling the shots. Our President and Congress work for them and other wealthy contributors. They only address the rest of us from time to time with platitudes eliciting votes, and occasionally dole out favoritism for ethnocentric special interest groups that can deliver large blocks of votes in return. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DREAM_Act Note that Obama’s energy program is no different than that of Bush/Cheney, with the exception of adding nuclear reactors—and this despite the Fukushima catastrophe in 2011 (and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986). There is a reactor like the Fukushima facility but located on the coast of California in a fault zone, right up to the water where a tidal surge could engulf it: San Onofre. North of us is Canada, where everyone gets medical care because the people tax themselves for Health Canada. In the United States it is closer to dog-eat-dog competition and you get health care only if you can pay for it, usually by paying a private health insurance company or being insured by ones employer. Millions of citizens have no health insurance at all, and the new plan is probably not going to change that. That is unlikely to change under Obamacare because the Medicaid issue is decided by states, and there is much variation from state to state. The Obamacare initiative was a payout to wealthy health insurance corporations, not an attempt to establish universal health care in the United States. Those among us who cannot afford the unregulated rates the government and health insurance industry demand they pay will be fined by the U.S. government. But both the Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the current President (Obama) believe they deserve health care insurance and that we ought to pay for it. Congress never asks the rest of us how much we want to pay them. They decide that in Congress and send the bill to us. They always decide to pay themselves enough to purchase the best health care insurance they can buy from a plan they arranged for themselves. Universal health care in Canada: hc-sc.gc.ca/index-eng.php Universal health care in the United Kingdom: nhs.uk/Pages/HomePage.aspx Health care in the Third World: ramusa.org/home/clinic-schedule Do you ever wonder why we now have a volunteer military? It is not because people are more patriotic. The draft was ended in 1973 largely because of the huge backlash against the government for drafting men to fight in Vietnam from 1961 to 1973 for the benefit of politicians, not much else. The draft can be reinstated at any time. But so far the socioeconomic status of so many U.S. citizens is so low that they are willing to volunteer in order to survive economically. That is one of the benefits of de-industrialization, at least as far as Congress and the President (any one of them) is concerned.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:57:16 +0000