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THE SILENT GENOCIDE
The Christian idea
has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult,
and left untried.
-- G. K. Chesterton, “What’s Wrong With the
World” (1910)
They (corporations)
cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they
have no souls.
-- Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) in
“Sutton’s Hospital Case,” 10 Rep. 32
Did you ever expect a
corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned,
and no body to be kicked?.
-- Edward, First Baron Thurlow (1731-1806,
attributed)
Not long ago my e-mail
started acting up, downloading double and triple e-mails and timing
out without downloading anything. My local Internet service
provider is Earthlink, but my e-mail is forwarded from CompuServe.
I hate to call customer service for either of these companies,
because after a ten minute voice-mail maze they put you on hold for
half an hour until one of their two technicians is available to
handle your call.
Only this time, my call
wound up in India.
After the voice mail maze and the obligatory 30 minute wait, I got
an Indian female. Now with all due respect, Indians believe they
can speak English, but in fact what they speak only resembles
English. What she did only resembled customer service,
too. I'm sure she was speaking off a script on her screen, but even
I, the computer illiterate, knew that what she was trying wouldn't
work. Finally she gave up and passed the buck. Surely it was not
Earthlink's fault, but CompuServe's.
Once again, I went
through the ten minute voice mail maze, then the 30 minute wait,
tortured by bad Muzak. When a voice at last answered, it announced
itself as "James." But "James" spoke in heavily Indian tones.
After explaining my
problem several times, James, too, came to the conclusion that it
must be Earthlink's problem, and not CompuServe.
I had just wasted
two hours on the telephone.
THE TREND
What I had run up
against was not just Third World incompetence, but also the trend in
customer services. That's right, industry after industry is closing
down its customer service operations in the United States, and
moving them to India or other low wage countries.
But it is not just
Internet Service Providers that are moving their customer service to
India. Corporations are also moving mortgage services to the
Philippines, software engineering and programming to India,
insurance and banking processing to Ireland, even hard engineering
services, and who knows how many others. The following data from
Richard Russell's 7/2/2003 Dow Theory Letters, page 3,
www.dowtheroyletters.com, explains why they are moving.
"Average yearly salaries for Information Technology programmers:
US,
$63,331
Poland & Hungary,
$3,800 to $8,000
India,
$5,880
Philippines,
$6,564
Russian Federation,
$5,000 to $7,500
China,
$8,952
Canada,
$28,174
Ireland,
$23,000 to $34,000
Israel,
$15,000 to $38,000
How many other
industries are moving?
FROM MANUFACTURING TO
SERVICES TO UNEMPLOYMENT
Fifteen or twenty years
ago the globalisation gurus were telling us not to worry about
destroying US manufacturing and exporting manufacturing jobs
overseas. The US would become a service economy and sell
services to the world, and we would all get rich doing each other’s
laundry, world without end, amen.
Today we are finding out
the truth. Before our eyes are being played out George Fitzhugh's
insights from his 1852 classic, Cannibals All! Fitzhugh, a
Southern apologist for slavery, pointed out the fatal weakness of
the so-called "free labour system" Once the serfs had been freed,
all the old customs, laws, and institutions that had protected them
at least in part from the exploitation of their masters vanished.
Also, it created a vast surplus of labourers. Where before
emancipation their masters were responsible to provide for them in
infancy, sickness, infirmity, and old age, now no one cared for
them. Because the power of capital was so much deeper than that of
labour, capital would always grind wages down to starvation rates.
Because the competition for jobs is so fierce in an oversupplied
market, labourers would vie with each other to lower their own
wages, just to get a job. For proof, Fitzhugh pointed to the
abusive treatment of labourers in England and New England in his own
day.
CORPORATIONS RATIONALISE
Add to the shift of
technical services and engineering overseas "corporate
restructuring" at home. (Recent headline, “RJR restructuring to
eliminate 40% of jobs.”) As the economy contracts, more companies
go out of business or are bought out. In every industry power is
concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
And stop kidding
yourselves. Corporate kingpins don’t care near as much about
employees as a medieval lord cared about his serfs.
When the buy-out occurs,
the first thing the new broom does is sweep clean. All the
experienced personnel who have worked there long enough to acquire
competence, vacation time, and a higher pay scale are swept out.
They are replaced with the young, inexperienced -- and cheap.
Without recounting the details, in the last six months I have seen
friends mauled, lied to, defrauded, and then laid off by conniving
corporate leadership. "Despicable" is the nicest word that comes to
mind to describe these shameless exploiters. Huge numbers of middle
class, middle management people are finding themselves not merely
unemployed, but unemployable.
What sort of future can
US workers expect? None, it seems, other than an
ever-shrinking income and standard of living. Globalisation, it
turns out, will only level down, not up.
NOT LIMITED TO THE
ECONOMIC REALM
Ruminating on all these
gloomy trends, I was driving home from church when I saw a man
afflicted with obesity standing outside his trailer.
Genocide!
Suddenly I saw the
system of industrial capitalism from a hundred different angles at
once, and all led to the same conclusion: genocide.
Modern industrial capitalism promotes genocide. Now understand that
I’m not talking about free enterprise, but "the American Way," the
government-big business partnership that rules us.
WAR ON HEALTH
Think about it. It
promotes a sedentary, indoor, passive life style centered around TV
and "entertainment" and as little exercise as possible. Life
outside the air-conditioning lies beyond the discomfort level people
should be made to suffer. The food industry and its massive
advertising apparatus promote a high carbohydrate, sugar-saturated,
highly processed diet utterly bereft of live, fresh, or nutritious
foods. This leads to obesity, high blood pressure, epidemic
diabetes, food allergies, asthma, chronic indigestion, cancer,
etc. (I have to laugh out loud every time I walk into a
hospital with that smug sign out front, "This is a smoke free
environment." Yeah, but inside they're poisoning every poor patient
with sugar and carbs and drugs. Plain, untreated tobacco has
never killed a tenth the people sugar has.)
In other words, the
system promotes personal living habits that kill you. If the
promoters all weren't so rich, they'd go on trial for murder. The
millions of people who suffer are genuinely victims, because they
are propagandised to adopt the life style that kills them, and
propagandised to reject any alternatives. (The fiercest government
wrath and persecution is reserved for those who witlessly discover
and artlessly promote health alternatives.)
WAR ON HUMANS
Socially the system
profoundly hates humanity. It promotes a frantic sexual
preoccupation through feminism, homosexuality, and the entire
Kulturapparat out of Hollywood. Yet it remains a pointless
sexual preoccupation, because contraception, abortion, and a
deep-seated, ubiquitous prejudice against children disrupt normal
fertility.
If stuffing the gut and
playing the slut brings problems, then the system provides the
blessings of pharmaceuticals (from the Greek "pharmakeuein",
to practice witchcraft). Are you tired? Dyspeptic? Depressed?
Manic? Mad? Motivationless? Doesn't matter, modern witchcraft can
fix you up. And if your prescription solves one complaint but
raises two more, well, we'll just write you two more. (By the way,
a few nights ago I asked a pharmacist what prescription she filled
most often. She paused a minute and said, "Hard to say off the top
of my head, but it would probably be Xantac or some other
anti-indigestion prescription -- that, or blood pressure
medication.")
For the most part,
Alduous Huxley seems to have envisioned the future correctly in
Brave New World. Oh, sure, the details may differ, but
all in all the modern witchcraft has just about replaced religion,
and the state has replaced the family. The old customs, laws, and
institutions that once protected us from our masters have vanished.
It’s a bad time to
discover also that our masters have no souls.
A COVENANT WITH DEATH
Now the outcome of all
these trends -- rooting out Christianity, shipping jobs overseas,
promoting health-destroying lifestyles, materialism,
a-drug-under-every-rug, and depopulation -- intentionally or not,
constitute genocide against all Americans. They are
destroying us as a people, literally killing us, and resettling the
land with Third World immigrants who don't expect to live well, and
won't complain if they don't.
Years ago, government
and business convinced our fathers, and then us, to trade our
independence and self-sufficiency for economic benefits -- leisure
and wealth and welfare and medical care, new gods for the old. They
promised security from cradle to grave, but about 2007 state-run
social security systems around the world will begin bankrupting.
Corporate pension funds are already in trouble, and who knows
whether state and federal pension systems are really solvent?
Now that we have
given up our birthright, they are reneging on their promise.
The new gods have feet of clay. In the end, they will have stripped
us of land, independence, prosperity, posterity, and, finally, life
itself.
Even in these modern
times, a mess of pottage remains a lousy deal.
-- F. Sanders
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