On  Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:37:19 -0700 Shawn Gordon <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> By continuing to transfer trillions of dollars from the "haves" to the
> "have nots"?

However, every reputable economic study involving transfers of wealth
between and within societies since 1960 to present demonstrates that
this claim is unsubstantiated and unfounded.  After declining
significantly form 1940 to 1960, the concentration of wealth in the
USA in the top 5% of the population has since increased to over 59%
of the total (and the top 1% controlled 38% of that total - 1998)
while the percentage of the population controlling less than 10% of
the total wealth has increased to something approaching 50% (the
bottom 20% effectively have no wealth at all and literally live day
to day).  Not only are the poor in the USA poorer than they were in
1975 their are more of them and their poverty is greater in an
absolute as well as a relative sense.

The case of the developing nations is mixed, with China and India
accounting between them for almost all of the statistical improvement
in poverty rates, but generally the flow of capital to the United
States as a consequence of its profligate spending on unproductive
assets like military force and its requisite borrowing to fund that
which it cannot afford, has had and continues to have a profoundly
adverse effect on development, increasing the degree of poverty world-
wide.  And it is the evident inequality of opportunity that results
which fuels most of the antipathy that the USA encounters abroad.

It is a remarkable myopticism that fuels the conventional, and
utterly self-defeating, response that greater military might is the
answer to this increasingly active resistance to, if not outright
rejection of, the liberal values that American commerce and
capitalism fundamentally require to operate.  If the rest of the
world retreats into illiberal political concepts in reaction to
American unilateral actions taken to advance their narrow self-
interest and eventually come to exalt social above individual values,
then capitalism has very limited prospects indeed.  Yet this is the
very reaction that American interventionist policies are engendering,
a growing political reaction that demonstrates the intellectually
bankrupt policies of the neo-conservative movement.

Iraqi recovery was supposed to be a show-case for neo-conservative
polices.  An emphatic and undeniable example of how free market
forces can positively transform a society.  Well, they have had a
free hand to do what they wish and have been at it for over a year
now, and they will still be at it nine years hence when they finally
give up and leave.  Apologists will proclaim that the experiment
failed because of external factors and violent resistance, but that
is the point is it not? Those are the very issues that underlay
thoughtful resistance to these policies, that the necessary element
of violent coercion would overshadow all else, promote resistance and
render impotent all other political initiatives.

And after all the killing and the maiming and the destruction and the
expense, all that they will have shown is that you cannot transform
coercive violence into a social good; something most child
psychologists could have told them at the outset.  You cannot beat
people into doing what you have decided for them is in their best
interests, and it is particularly difficult when your own interests
are so evident and so visibly at odds with the wishes of the
subjugated.

Iraq is, and will remain, a bloody tragedy, not only for Iraq but for
the American body politic as well.  It will corrode public trust in
their officials and erode political will to participate in world
affairs.  In pursuit of ephemeral security Americans will surrender
hard won political rights and, as Ben Franklin forecast, will
ultimately have neither security of person nor right of redress. All
this to satisfy the mystic beliefs of a handful of over-wealthy
malcontents, the haves and the have-mores. It is a tragedy that the
ancient Greeks would appreciate, the mortal flaw of hubris writ
large.


--

***     e-mail is NOT a secure channel     ***
James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB.<token>@Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
Canada  L8E 3CE               delivery <token> = hal

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *