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The Businessman's Dilemma

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The Businessman's Dilemma

Somewhere
around the First World War, military victors stopped
"officially" annexing conquered territories.
However, look at Japan, Germany and South Korea.
You'll find the heavy bootprint of the United States of America.

Like Count Dracula, once invited in,
the U.S. is loathe to leave.
We have almost a thousand military outposts
in over seventy-seven countries overseas.
These are not for the protection
of the aptly termed "host" countries,
but to secure stability for the expansion
of American Business's global hegemony.

We - dare I say it? -  RULE THE WORLD,
or very nearly,
for which the rest of the world justly hates us
and also pays for very dearly.
We make them "free" trade offers
that they literally can't refuse.
Just take a look around their countries
at the number of American boots.

If that doesn't slap some sense into them,
we unleash the Hounds of Wall Street
who undermine the value of their currency
in order to knock them to their economic knees
'til they beg for a loan from the World Bank
and the International Mother Fuckers,
known in some quarters of the gullible world
as the International Monetary Fund(ers).

As a condition of that "benevolent" loan,
they'll have to "open their markets", e.g. legs,
and prepare to be raped by America,
which is really what we wanted in the first place.
They'll have to sell off their national industries
to private American businesses
and slash their social programs to the bone
to repay the loan and its usurious interest.

And we know that we've done our job well,
when their economy starts to look like Haiti's.
We undercut their farmers with our subsidized grains,
so we can plunge them into engineered bankruptcy.
But the so-recently-penetrated market
is not allowed to subsidize their farmers,
nor slap tariffs on the products we sell them
to try and prop up their faltering economy.

You might ask, "How is this 'free' trade?"
The answer is that it isn't.
It's a one-sided bait and switch ticket
to poverty and abject submission.
The "free" trade agreement and loan conditions
force them to grow a single cash crop for export,
so they wind up unable to feed themselves
as they cut their own agricultural throat.
This is why mud cookies are high on the list
of Haiti's still affordable food products.

We did this to the rice farmers in Haiti,
and to the corn farmers in Mexico, who,
when they cross our border looking for work
are paid slave wages and criminalized, too,

while we blame them for our rape of their economy
as we export their country's wealth to America,
except for that of their elite one percent -
businessmen, politicians and wealthy collaborators.

Some countries will fight to keep us out.
Witness "insurgencies" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But like it or not, America's comin' in
for your resources, your labor and land.

We do this all over the world.
We're running out of exploitable places.
So for the last thirty years we've exported
and outsourced our industrial bases,

shipping whole industries and millions of jobs
to countries where people are most desperate
and have to work for what our businesses give them
to make junk or grow agricultural products

that these businesses sell cheaply to Americans
- on credit -
since we no longer have money to buy products
made by the desperate people to whom our jobs were outsourced
along with most of our productive economy.

And since some of us here have decided
to ease up going into debt to buy stuff,
somebody'll have to make up lost profits.
And guess who that would be. ------------ Us!!!

So even as we pay down our debt,
the fees and interest go up, up and up.
And for that thank Vice President Joe Biden,
the "Senator from MasterCard," the credit companies' puppet.

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Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).

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Poetic Justice by Michael Bonanno on Thursday, Jan 29, 2009 at 9:33:45 AM
Reply to Michael by Vi Ransel on Thursday, Jan 29, 2009 at 9:44:32 AM