The Sacking of the Third World

Why does the rest of the world hate us?

George W never figured it out ... and still hasn't.

In the Middle East, for example, 80% of the Arabs believe that the U.S. and Israel are the biggest threat to their welfare. Only 10% believe Iran is and 52% believe that Iran should have nuclear weapons for defense. The Arabs hate the democracies of the U.S. and Israel. We ignore these facts and the media doesn't even report them.

So why do they hate us?

They hate us because of what we have done to Iraq, what we are doing to Afghanistan, how the IMF, the World Bank and the corporate capitalists are spreading poverty in the Third World. The free market is not really free and it is not a market. It is a pillage.

How so?

Western agribusiness unloads subsidized surplus produce in the Third World at a price that local farmers cannot meet. Looking for a quick cash crop, the corporations literally take arable land and introduce a monoculture (single crop) that requires the use of pesticides. This interferes with the organic farming that the locals employ to feed their people. In the end, the corporation usurps the local farming industry and in time destroys it. In the process, the corporate capitalists limit the amount of food available to the local population and further reduces the income to the farmers. Eventually, the people are forced to leave the land and look for other work if available. And this is how the populace is pressed into poverty.

There is another way that the Third World is impoverished; it is through the World Bank and the IMF. A country needs to strengthen its economy so it borrows from the World Bank. Over time it cannot meet the high interest payments because exports have fallen, so it needs another loan. This time it borrows from the IMF. The IMF is much tougher. It requires tax breaks for investor corporations, demands a reduction in wages and privatization of nationalized industries. In order to have money to pay their debt, the country is required to cut back on expenditures for health care, education and food. This policy is deliberate in order to gain control of the country's resources, limit competition and shamelessly increase the wealth of the western corporate investors.

In contrast to this destructive policy, Third World countries need to introduce a form of social and economic change similar to social democracy. Social democracies have changed since WWII. Today it is state capitalism with an emphasis on universal health care, public education and improvement in the welfare of the working class as well as the urban slum dwellers.

Social democracy is not so bizarre as one might think. One can find Social Democratic political parties all across Europe and Scandinavia. In other parts of the world, for example, there are dominant Social Democratic parties in India, Australia and Brazil. The U.S. is the only Western industrial nation that has no Social Democratic political party.

The fear of Social Democracy among the power brokers of this country is intense. The right wing Republican politicians work very hard to keep any form of Social Democracy out of the country and if they could, they would like to roll back all of our present social welfare entitlements.

It is vital also to recognize that workers and their families world wide are migrating from rural areas where there is no subsistence, to urban centers where there is no employment. It is known as the “urbanization of poverty”. As a result, the migrants are “warehoused” in slums or as one “slum dweller” described it, “a semi-death”. According to the UN, the population in slums planet wide is increasing by a mind-boggling 25 million per year. Obviously, neither corporate capitalism nor the free market system have been able to cope with the over whelming social and economic problems that they have created. At the moment world capitalism has no workable plan to bring this workforce back into the world economy.

As one observer pointed out, right wing Republicans encourage people to volunteer in their countries. Why? Because volunteers work for nothing. And Republicans have been trying to get people to work for nothing for a very long time.


References:

George Carlin
Noam Chomsky
Mike Davis
Michael Parenti
Wikipedia