[GB] From 1949 to 2009 – some notes made on reflection
Guest blogger: Gabriel Yiu, former BC NDP candidate for Vancouver Fraserview
To clearly stand out a guest blogger entry, all such headlines will begin with [GB].
The recent visit of the Taiwanese academic and public intellectual, Professor Lung Ying-tai, created quite a splash in the immigrant communities from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Her two public lectures at UBC were delivered to a full house. The thousand or so seats in the Chan Centre were not only filled, late comers had to stand at the foyer to watch the video of her talk. The audience was touched by the sad stories of ordinary Chinese people in the year 1949 when the Communist took over China and the Nationalists fled to Taiwan.
Lung said her latest book, “Big River, Big Sea–Untold Stories of 1949″, was dedicated to the people who were trashed, abused and wounded during that time.
As I left the Chan Centre concert hall, I couldn’t stop thinking about 2009. Who would care for the little people being trashed and abused in our era?
1949 was the year of political, social and economic changes.
Although history has shown that communism has failed, in 2009 we have seen great chaos brought about by capitalism. The problem is getting worse and it’s global in scale.
In the past, “evil” was generated by hatred, religion, the differences in political systems and the struggle for power. Today, “evil” comes from greed and wealth.
When war is waged against a country, and innocent civilians become casualties and communities devastated, the ulterior motives behind it are the interests of the weapon and oil industries.
Earlier, the United Nations released a report on the living condition of our world. Over 1 billion people are starving. The problem of the gap between the rich and the poor no longer exists between countries, nor between developed and developing countries. The problem is getting worse everywhere, in every country, be it Canada, US, China or Hong Kong. The wealth of the rich is expanding, the burden of the middle class is increasing, while the number of those with low income is swelling and their living condition worsening.
Today, hard working people in North America may not earn enough to feed the family. Wages in China and India are cheap, so “low skill jobs” are being exported to these countries and abandoned at home. The frightening fact is, even high skilled jobs are also being exported (the most advanced computers and mobile phones are now manufactured in China) while the workers in local jobs that cannot be exported are being exploited. The workers on the phone who answer our technical enquiries on the latest high tech devices are technicians in India. Rather than buying from North American shipyards, the B.C. government had our ferries built in Germany.
Earlier, I watched an interview with a renowned Hong Kong social worker. He talked about the suffering of the working people. Some workers had dedicated over 30 years of their life to an industry that was being moved to China. At an age close to retirement, how could these people upgrade themselves and find a new job and a new way to live? Are these people responsible for their situation and their suffering? Do they deserve their miserable fate?
Under the banner of globalization, big businesses move their plants and jobs to developing countries in the name of maximizing efficiency and profitability. The model of lower wages and a disregard for environmental responsibilities has indeed given big corporations more profits and consumers cheaper merchandise. But the increased consumption, energy depletion and environmental pollution are not good for our planet at all.
When a society blindly follows globalization and the so-called “free economy” and “free market” and exports its industries and jobs to other countries, does that serve its national interest and confer benefit on its people in the long run? Or does it just serve the interests of international big businesses? When a country’s many industries and employments become hollow, what is there on the other side of the equation to balance the huge deficit of social and human resources? How many sad stories of ordinary people are there waiting to be told?
In today’s capitalistic world, honest hard working people have little future whereas cheaters, exploiters and speculators amass riches. The recent financial tsunami has shown that the entire Wall Street, with its banks, insurance, accounting and audits, risk and credit assessments and monitoring, is collectively responsible for the subprime mortgage fraud. The question remains: who pocketed the money and who is going to fill the hole?
In order to protect its own interest, the cigarette industry had an elaborate mechanism to bribe politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, media, think tanks and business organizations to deny and challenge the notion that cigarette are harmful to health. Today, there are 6 million deaths every year resulting from smoking cigarettes.
Although the evil of cigarettes is finally exposed, the tactics of the cigarette industry are now deployed by the oil industry in order to deny and challenge the notion of climate change, even when the world’s top scientists have concluded that climate change is man-made. But in order to protect its own interest and wealth generation, the oil industry does not stop from trying every means to deceive the world and to block the world effort to tackle climate change.
Whether it’s the private health care industry fighting to break into Canada, or its desperate and despicable efforts to stop public medicare in the US, behind their contradicting logic, lies and high-sounding slogans lies the motif of big money.
The mechanism of political donation, media manipulation, collaboration of think tanks and business organizations runs slickly in today’s world. The resulting scenario played out day after day is like this: earning big money requires paying little tax; market is monopolized with regulations removed; public resources are given away to private enterprises; business taipans collude with politicians; labour is exploited; the environment is polluted; hate is ignited to become war; benefits are transferred back and forth from government to business; and so on and so forth.
What I’m trying to say is this: it is clear that capitalism has many faults and weaknesses. There is a need today to re-examine it and reform it. To give one example, protectionism is widely seen as a bad thing. However, if North America does not have a tariff mechanism to protect its auto industry, there won’t be any Japanese auto plants in the US and Canada. Whether it was the former Japan or today’s China, their economic foundations are built not by free market or free economy, but by planned economy and protectionism. The point is not difficult to comprehend. The problem is that the public has been brained-washed by the corporate media and right-wing think tanks.
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