It’s
a hell of a struggle for a guy like me, who for years has been reading the outpourings
of dissent about their own country from intelligent American observers, most of
them academics, journalists, or rabble-rousers, to avoid coming to the
conclusion that the United States is a nation that is irrevocably coiled in
massive corruption, arising from its nature as an oligarchic seat of inequality,
combined with a heartless lack of compassion towards anyone who has stumbled
along the way.
To tell the truth, I came to
something like that conclusion in 1956, following my first visit to that
wonderful land, and I’ve never really learned anything to justify changing that
opinion. But there has always been a little voice inside my head urging
caution: after all, whenever the greatest educational institutions of the world
are graded, American universities --- Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and so on --- are always among the top half-dozen. So,
if that is true, could the host country of these great establishments really be
so bad?
Every seeker after the truth about the
United States must have had the experience of finding himself up against one
shattering fact after another. Even in the area supporting my residual hope, for
example, the incorruptible universities,
recent studies --- carefully hidden from the populace for years --- have
thrown grave doubt on their probity. Presenting themselves to the world as
pinnacles of democratic virtue, as those “shining lights upon the hill,” the
great universities have been unexpectedly revealed to give prior entry to what
are called “legacy students”, by which are meant from families rich enough to
give generous grants, or students enrolled under athletic scholarships, the
academic qualifications for which are usually found to be almost nil, but that
bring in lots of money to the athletic programmes.
One investigator says that 40 per
cent of all student entries to Harvard
are covered by those two categories. Beyond which facts, the great American meritocracy --- “you can get there,
son, if only you work hard and use your innate talents” ---- seems to be just another American boast come
crashing into the dust.
Well, let’s try to forget the
picture, drawn by those investigators, of bright-eyed teenaged girls whose
places in the athletics team had been gained in spite of the fact they had
never thrown a ball across a room or run a race, but were simply looking
forward to university life as one big party. Their places were gained at a cost of several million dollars in
parental gifts. But I guess that’s America, so let’s just move on.
How about his one, revealed to me by
an article in The Guardian Weekly, a
British publication:
A new University of Farmington was
announced, located just outside Detroit. The university president sent out international emails, describing his
institution as “a nationally accredited institution authorized to enrol
international students.” Some 600
students were enrolled, most of them from India. When the place was raided by
agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who apparently suspected
that the students were trying to use their enrolment as an illegal way into the
United States, 120 of the students were
arrested, while eight other people were “charged with criminal violations, and
were accused of helping enrol the students in exchange for cash, kickbacks and
tuition credits,” reaching ahead for the next two years. When the government of
India inquired as to the whereabouts of the arrested students, their consular
officers discovered that they had been distributed around 36 different
detention centres in the U.S.
As a result of this activity, it was revealed that this was a fake university
that had been created and built, by the Department of Homeland Security, and
that all its staff, far from being academics, were in fact undercover
government agents who were trying to sniff out illegal entrants to the country.
In other words the whole scheme was run by an agency of the American
government: an absolutely mind-blowing
level of corruption at the level of the US government. Imagine how we would
feel if it were revealed our government had created a fake university with the
sole intention of attracting phony students who might be trying to enter the country
illegally! It turned out that this was not the first fake university created by
the Homeland Security department (which, you will remember, was established
after 9/11 as part of the “war on terror”, a war that has immensely increased
the amount of terrorism around the globe.) It really doesn’t bear thinking
about. Such shenanigans might be expected of private enterprise crooks, but of
government! I can’t help but think it
proves the corruption of the government to a really remarkable degree.
Okay, let’s turn the page. Another Guardian Weekly story touches on the
U.S. government’s bewildering trade relations with China, which the Americans
have turned into a war that appears to have the objective of destroying the
up-and-coming poorer nation as a possible competitor. I began the article eagerly, but it was not about
what I expected. Instead of learnedly discussing the trade war, it was about a
serious decision recently taken by China to no longer accept the mountains of
American waste that they have been dealing with in recent years. Of course I had always known that the Western
nations, by far the major creators of garbage, had long used impoverished and economically
backward countries as dumps for our
garbage. But I had not realized that
China had been taking 80 per cent of US recyclables, until 2018, when
U.S. exports of such stuff fell off 92 per cent.
Not to worry, simultaneously exports
of garbage to Thailand shot up 2000 per cent, as did exports of U.S. garbage to
Malaysia and Vietnam. We, in Canada, with garbage production levels higher per capita than any other country on earth,
including the U.S., are complicit in this level of corruption: we have for
several years been sending Toronto’s garbage to Michigan, where its handling is
cheaper and more efficient than in Canada.
It begins to seem that the whole
world will eventually be choking on the gazillions of tons of garbage --- in the US it is estimated at 250 million
tons a year --- from all countries, but with particular reference to Western
economies like ours in North America.
The Chief Sustainability Officer for the company that runs a huge incinerator
in Chester City, Pennsylvania, told The
Guardian Weekly: “In the United States, when people recycle, they think it
is taken care of, when it was largely taken care of by China. When that
stopped, it became clear that we just aren’t able to deal with it.”
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