#1745: Ives responds to Gill on US "intent" (fwd)

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From: Kim Ives <kives@gateway.net>

Gill writes:
"the question of intent is important.....many on this mail list refuse
to give up the idea that such
policies of intentional "hurting" do not eminate from Washington......

for some conspiracy to exist, one would have to find where the
corporations,
in order to fight higher wages/benefits, successfully manipulated
policy in
DC to accomplish that end, and with the collusion of said
agencies......to
keep Haiti, for example, in poverty so the corporate threat of moving
there
was viable..."

What is Gill saying? US corporations and the US government _want_ to
see wages in Haiti and other Third World nations rise?

The "question of intent" is a red-herring. Whether we accuse
Washington and US corporations of "murder" or, as Gill would have it,
of "manslaughter" is not the point. The fact remains: the policies of
corporate America, as carried out and defended by Washington, from
Yugoslavia to Iraq to East Timor to Haiti, are resulting in misery and
death for growing millions of people, either from bombs and embargos,
or from the sheer economic ruthlessness of capitalist "globalisation."

As some philosophers have stressed, many if not most people are quite
unconscious of their social position as exploiter or exploited,
parasite or producer, oppressor or oppressed. Most capitalists and
Washington bureaucrats act as they do obliviously, according to the
logic of a system, not some conspiracy.

Does this mean that _all_ Washington bureaucrats are completely
stupid? No. Some know very well what they are doing. This was well
documented by a 1992 National Labor Committee report (www.nlcnet.org),
as well as several ensuing ones on Haiti, where they conducted a sting
operation on USAID and demonstrated how "the U.S. government has spent
hundreds of millions of dollars to promote the flight of companies
from the U.S., destroying the jobs of thousands of American workers"
while "Central American and Caribbean workers earn only 40 to 50 cents
an hour and are denied their most fundamental human and worker rights"
and "have seen their wages slashed by their governments' programs to
make their country more attractive to foreign investors."

A conspiracy? Capitalist laws on display? You be the judge.

Kim Ives