:
: : It seems that Americans are happy with capitalism because it has worked for us while people of other nations appear to be jealous of our prosperity.: Either that or it is causing them to starve to death, but who cares, right?
: After all, their not even Amerikans!!
"Jealousy" above is more properly called "identification with the oppressor." One recalls this children's game, popular amongst young Jews in Nazi Germany, where one child would play the Nazi and the other would play the Jew...
It doesn't work so simply today. Here's the plot of today's US oppression. The World Bank and the IMF cut a deal with the dictators (or "elected" officials) of some nation in South America, Africa, Asia, or eastern Europe. Written into the detail are provisions where the nation signs away most of its rights to set economic policy, labor resources, and natural resources to multinational corporations. The corporations come in, extract whatever can be marketed to the well-off peoples of US, Japan, the Common Market, and the ASEAN nations, and leave this nation adrift in the capitalist world if the rate of profit gets too low.
In the end, the subject nation is left attached to an "austerity plan" that forbids the government from materially supporting its subjects, still (usually) devoid of democratic values, and continually ripped off by the enlistment of its peoples in super-low-wage labor contracts.
Jeremy Seabrook describes the plot even more simply in VICTIMS OF DEVELOPMENT. Here's the summary: the industrialist mania for "development" has coerced the world's human majority into leaving a relatively-benign state of rural poverty for a desperate and dangerous situation in urban poverty, for the sake of a few cans of Coca-Cola and maybe a television set.
None.
