Trump diplomacy
- 2017-01-20
Although each generation acquires their own knowledge, it was Eisenhower who first warned the nation of the Military Industrial Complex that he helped create.
Since then, pharmaceuticals, food, and now silicon have joined the defense, oil and chemical industries that lord over the U.S.
What has changed in the past 30 years is the addition of a new pernicious meme: government is bad.
Few U.S. citizens are fans of big business, but they believe that markets and corporations are preferable to government bureaucracy of any kind.
As you are reading this you will likely feel yourself agreeing with that corporate PR.
In the 1960s U.S. society had common values for the quality and importance of the worker as well as the quality and importance of the 'civil servant'. BOTH values have been blotted out by corporate PR for reasons of capital consolidation.
Labor is the largest expense of all industrial activity. But Labor is the primary form in which capital is redistributed.
Government jobs were the means with which most minority groups entered the middle class in the early 20th century. Irish through the police departments.
Italians through sanitation and urban construction. Blacks through court and city administration.
Those jobs are largely gone.
Government jobs were NOT wasteful but they were UNPROFITABLE. The idea that 'markets always work better' is fallacious; all economists agree. You need merely observe U.S. education, healthcare, and infrastructure to recognize that Washington Consensus Capitalism does not solve problems in those areas.
Last year, the Los Angeles Times published excellent articles about Purdue Pharma's highly addictive OxyContin and, specifically, about the traffic of the drug by Los Angeles gangs who carried the drug to Everett WA, a city of 100,000 north of Seattle. OxyContin did - and is still doing - a lot of damage to that city
Today I just read (link below) that because of those articles, the City of Everett is suing Purdue based on the fact that Purdue's internal investigation unit knew about the illegal traffic; they even had a list of some 1,800 suspect doctors.
And New Hampshire recently issued a subpoena for Purdue's records.
I so hope that every state does the same.
I also read recently that Purdue is now targeting developing countries, the way the tobacco industry did after they were severely curtailed in the US.
Let's keep the discussion going.