How America Impoverished the 90%

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Godfree Roberts
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How America Impoverished the 90%

Their poverty is a feature, not a bug

GODFREE ROBERTS
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON SEP 16, 2023
 
 
 
 

The doctrine of developmentalism – that countries develop best by educating their people, fostering strong domestic markets and imposing high tariffs on imports – enjoyed a golden age postwar. By 1969, says Naomi Klein, the Southern Cone looked more European than Third World. Workers in new factories formed strong unions that negotiated middle-class salaries and their children went off to study at new public universities. By the Fifties, Argentina had the largest middle class in South America, while Uruguay provided free health care to its 95% literate people.

Ike’s War On Development

Since developmentalism is rooted in equality, justice and independence, the US painted it as the first step towards godless communism, forever tarnishing it in Americans minds. Then, in 1953, President Eisenhower launched the war on development by appointing the Dulles brothers – who had represented the Cuban Sugar Cane Co. and United Fruit Co. – as Secretary of State and CIA Director.

When Iran elected a fervent developmentalist President, Mohammad Mossadegh, Eisenhower and the Dulles set out to destroy him and his country, a project that remains a White House priority.

Despite his good image for having "warned us" about the MIC, Eisenhower like all US presidents was an unapologetic meddling imperialist.

Empty calories

Ike’s anti-development policy was called Capitalist Modernization Theory: [According to this], Western societies are inherently progressive in ways older civilizations can never be, and the wealth they generate is distributed unevenly because some people work harder than others. But the only road to economic evolution and social modernization leads through free trade, individual effort and capitalism, and those who stray from the path will be destroyed.

So thorough was the anti-developmentalist campaign that the US carried its attack to the UN, where it blocked all resolutions recognizing food, shelter and national development as human rights. Learning of this a horrified Harold Pinter wrote,

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. "U.S. foreign policy is best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.” – Nobel Prize lecture, 1958.

To keep developmentalism dormant, the US systematically destroyed developing economies and assassinated defiant leaders. To this day, the Joint Chiefs reassure the nation that they are ready to nuke China for having the audacity to develop its economy.

Enter the Dragon

Maurice Meisner,

Starting with an industrial base smaller than that of Belgium's in 1952, the China that for so long was ridiculed as "the sick man of Asia" emerged at the end of the Mao period as one of the six largest industrial producers in the world, comparable to the industrialization of Germany, Japan, and Russia.

  • In Germany the rate of economic growth 1880-1914 was 33% per decade.

  • In Japan from 1874-1929 the rate of increase per decade was 43%.

  • The Soviet Union from 1928-58 achieved a decadal increase of 54%.

  • In Mao’s China from 1952-72 the decadal rate was 64%.

By maintaining Mao’s breakneck pace for seventy years, China has created the largest and most complete (war-fighting) economy on earth – so resilient that, in the face of embargoes and threats, its trade has grown by $1 trillion under the embargoes and the economy by $1.6 trillion this year alone.

 

Washington’s last stand?

China’s development represents a defeat far more consequential than America’s combined losses in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Ukraine. China not only defied America and developed, but is supplanting it as leader of the world.

Godfree Roberts' SUBSTACK depository is at https://substack.com/@herecomeschina. His bio box can be seen at the bottom of this page. 

Addendum

Even the CIA-redacted Wikipedia accepts, however grudgingly, that China has accomplished  a virtual miracle in a much shorter time than ANY capitalist nation in history thanks to its socialist core. The quote below testifies to this:

[4][5] which still stands in 2022.[6][7][8]

The Chinese definition of extreme poverty is more stringent than that of the World Bank: earning less than $2.30 a day at purchasing power parity (PPP).[9]Growth has fuelled a substantial increase in per-capita income lifting people out of extreme poverty. China's per capita income has increased fivefold between 1990 and 2000, from $200 to $1,000. Between 2000 and 2010, per capita income also rose at the same rate, from $1,000 to $5,000, moving China into the ranks of middle-income countries.

(See Poverty in China, Wikipedia)

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•The Tiananmen Story—as it really was. (Part 1)

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. BREAKING THE EMPIRE'S DISINFORMATION MACHINE IS UP TO YOU.

GODFREE ROBERTS

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Tiananmen, Part 1

Prelude to a riot.

GODFREE ROBERTS
JAN 31, 2024
 
 
 
 
 

In 1980, with fanfare and high hopes, Deng Xiaoping launched his ‘decade of reform and opening’ and foreign media, businessmen and politicians saw only blue skies. But Deng was unqualified to manage the transition to capitalism – as our media hopefully labeled it – and he resigned before decade’s end. Says Dongpin Han, a student at the time,

Official corruption had disrupted China’s economy. The government, facing bankruptcy, had printed more money in 1984 than in the previous thirty-five years combined. Prices of commodities, previously State-controlled and stable, exploded. Meat rose five hundred percent. My parents had saved two thousand yuan. They’d bought their first house for four hundred yuan then, overnight, their savings lost 90 percent of their value. My mother rushed to the store and bought two hundred feet of plain cloth. Her neighbor bought four hundred pounds of salt and another bought forty TV sets. They believed that war-era inflation had returned and their money would become worthless. People started publicly denouncing corrupt officials and their children’s promotion to high office. Beijing’s Consumer Price Index had jumped 30% in 1988 and salaried workers panicked when they could no longer afford staples. State-owned enterprises were pressured to cut costs. Mao’s iron rice bowl–job security and social benefits ranging from medical care to subsidized housing–were suddenly at risk”. 

 

Harvard’s Elizabeth Perry:

The Cultural Revolution left a significant mark on popular protests in post-Mao China. Repertoires of collective political action popularized during the Cultural Revolution—such as singing revolutionary songs, marches, rallies, and hunger strikes—had a great impact on the 1989 protest movement. The haunting specter of the Cultural Revolution also had a crucial impact on the Deng regime’s interpretation of—and thereby reaction to—the movement..

The bleak reality of growing socioeconomic disparity, environmental degradation, massive layoffs of workers in state-owned enterprises, evisceration of social protections, rampant official corruption, illicit appropriation of public property, and exploitation of rural migrant labor has led to the unraveling of the broad but fragile consensus regarding the direction and rationality of post-Mao reforms that dominated Chinese intellectual discussions of the 1980s.

Amid soaring inflation, widespread corruption and elite privilege, graduates had found themselves in the worst employment market since the War. Only those with political connections got hired, and then earned less than high school matriculants. Government subsidies and professors’ incomes were slashed and parents, students and faculty demanded⁠ ‘more money for education and higher pay for scholars’. Famed scholar Ding Shisun told an interviewer, “People ask me whether as Beijing University president I fear student protests? I tell them what I fear most is not having enough money,” and students in Tiananmen Square satirically offered to shine congressmens' shoes.

Deng’s withdrawal of Mao’s tuition subsidies crushed the dreams of millions, while his decision to maintain them for African students touched off race riots in Nanjing, where students rampaged through the Africans’ quarters. Beijing students carried banners ("No Offend Chinese Women,” "Kill the foreigners!”), screamed insults at Deng, and marched on Party leaders’ living quarters at Zhongnanhai.  

Workers echoed students’complaints. One explained that everyone in her industry had much less opportunity to participate within the system than in the 1970s, when meetings were called for every problem and people could raise opinions that today would result in their dismissal. By the Fall, State-owned companies had dumped millions of workers into an unprepared labor market, where inflation consumed their six months severance pay in six weeks.

Demands

 

When the deposed Hu Yaobang died suddenly in mid-April, demonstrators released their demands:

  4. Report truthfully all the events from the death of Hu Yaobang to the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

Ten days later, students and workers began massive demonstrations in Beijing and Shanghai, denouncing Deng, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, so long as the cat resigns”.

Part 2, What About the Workers? will be released soon.

 

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience. 

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