Americans and those in other nations around the globe can look to China to see what the future has in store for them. A pattern is emerging that bodes sorrow and suffering for a large segment of the low income and rural populations of both developing nations and those once considered the most developed.
Nation’s that once had leaders and elected representatives who were compassionate and caring for all of their citizens have been taken over by corrupt corporatists who live for personal power and wealth alone. These wealthy, elitist corporatists who, like the robber barons and overlords of past times, are driven by obscene greed and lust for power. Even the elected members and career employees of democratic governments like the United States have become severely corrupted and serve only a personal and corporate agenda – not the people they hypocritically claim to serve.
The cause is simple to determine – a moral and ethical breakdown and worship of power and wealth equal to any of the dark times in world history. The checks and balances once in place have been severely eroded by legislation and restructuring of government bought and paid for by wealthy corporatists to further their quest for more money and more power.
Extreme corruption of the world’s corporate leaders and of the governments they control is out of control and threatens both world peace and the world’s delicate, overstressed environment. Globalization of the economy and free trade practices that favor corporations and wealthy investors, and not the workers, are concentrating wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people creating a huge disparity between the haves and have-nots.
In decades past a corporate president or CEO traditionally never earned (in any combination of benefits) more that 20 times the lowest paid member of the organization. Now that number is out the window with chief executives and board members being awarded salaries and stock options 1000 to several thousand times more than the lowest paid employee.
Pension plans are being raided and bankrupted as employees who joined companies based upon those assurances that these plans were part of their salaries are being left holding an empty bag after giving their life to these companies. The expense of health plans which were another incentive to cast your lot with a company has been shifted to the employee or no longer offered at all. Employers are outsourcing American jobs to third world countries where workers can be paid slave labor wages and no benefits while American employees of these same companies are asked to work for lower wages in addition to the reduction or complete loss of benefits.
These companies that insist they can’t survive in the competitive world markets are the same companies that bribe legislators to pass legislation that open up these markets they claim are the problem. Free trade agreements are sold by those few who stand to profit as good for each nation that participates although the average citizen of those countries see wages fall, jobs outsourced, social services reduced, healthcare costs become unaffordable and opportunities to rise out of poverty diminished or eliminated.
Anyone who has worked for a large corporation over the last 50 years can recognize the change in corporate philosophy that has taken place. This greed driven, wealth and power worshipping, cut-throat, laws-only-inhibit-success philosophy has now been installed in the White House, the halls of Congress and the US Supreme Court. Corporatism, which our founding fathers warned us about, has replaced our constitutional government and our democracy.
When a corporation tells its employees it is enacting change and it will be good for the employee you can bet your reduced benefits it’s just the opposite. And, by the same token, when a corporate controlled government makes any change and sells it to the citizenry as good for the people you can bet your ass the only good that comes from it is for corporations and wealthy investors.
Reducing taxes are an example. While taxes may be reduced for some workers they lose much more in social services including public education and cost for maintaining essential services and infrastructure. Sharing the wealth is not a part of the corporatist’s philosophy. How much of the federal tax burden do you think is shouldered by corporations?
Over the past 50 years corporate tax revenues have averaged about 17 percent of all tax revenues collected by the government of the total tax take. But currently, corporate tax revenues account for only 7 percent -- the second lowest level since the Great Depression. Who do you think pays the rest of the taxes that are wasted, stolen and divvied up among corporate crooks and lobbyists? Additionally, the avoidance of taxes by use of corporate tax shelters, most illegal but unchallenged by our government, represents somewhere in the range of $250 to $300 billion per year.
This new corporate world order is enveloping almost every nation. Take China as an example. China is emerging as the next huge economy. Consider what has happened to the state of healthcare in China and project those conditions upon our own future if we allow the new world order to prevail. The walled cities and serfdoms of medieval times may not be too far off.
Gary
The following was excerpted from an article in today’s New York Times.
Until the beginning of the reform period in the early 1980's, China's socialized medical system, with "barefoot doctors" at its core, worked public health wonders. From 1952 to 1982 infant mortality fell from 200 per 1,000 live births to 34, and life expectancy increased from about 35 years to 68, according to a recent study published by The New England Journal of Medicine.
Since then, in one of the great policy reversals of modern times, China has dissolved its rural communes, privatized vast swaths of the economy and shifted public health resources away from rural areas and toward the cities. Public hospitals were urged to charge commercial rates for new drugs and most procedures, and today the salaries of health care workers are typically linked to the amount of income they generate for their hospitals.
More than half of urban residents, by comparison, enjoy some kind of coverage, which is supplied by their employers.
The recent emphasis on profit, meanwhile, has led doctors and other well-trained health care workers to abandon the countryside, with a result that peasants are left at the mercy of unqualified caregivers and outright charlatans who peddle expensive, improperly prescribed drugs and counterfeit medicines.
"From the liberation to the Cultural Revolution, conditions in the rural areas were fairly good," Dr. Wang Weizhong, a physician and member of the National People's Congress from Jilin Province in the northeast, said of the period from 1949 to the 1970's. "There were township clinics in every area, and there was no problem getting at least small illnesses treated everywhere."
Dr. Wang insisted that the government was working hard with its recent health care reforms to address the problems, but agreed that the old public health system that once protected peasants "had dissolved."
Unable to afford proper care, the first recourse of most peasants when they fall ill is to take whatever drugs they can find on the market to relieve their symptoms and hope that their ailment goes away. Often, of course, they merely get worse or, if their illness is communicable, spread it to others. Once a peasant's illness becomes debilitating, his relatives can face a double catastrophe: the serious decline of a breadwinner, and medical bills steep enough to bankrupt the family.
To read the complete report go here:
Wealth Grows, but Health Care Withers in China
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/international/asia/14health.html?th&emc=th
