FOR THOSE of us who own stock, it has been a fantastic autumn. Lockheed Martin's share prices are skyrocketing with a glut of weapons contracts, and Bechtel and Halliburton can look forward to four more years of corporate welfare while the oil companies can start writing Bush's next energy legislation. It is a great time to be affluent Americans, with the knowledge that our soldiers are securing oil for years to come while sweatshop laborers from Honduras to Indonesia are assembling our Christmas presents.
Reading the Wall Street Journal, it is easy for us to imagine that the world toils for America's benefit. Yet these feelings of triumphal self-satisfaction are misplaced, for the same economic forces that keep foreign sweatshop laborers impoverished and unemploy textile workers in Southside Virginia leave thousands of rural Americans in the most severe destitution imaginable.
In Coahoma, Miss., 55 percent of the population lives substantially below the poverty line. Infant mortality is 26 percent higher in the Mississippi Delta region than in the rest of the nation. Arkansas is so desperate for doctors that they are waiving visa requirements for doctors from Nigeria and India who come to work in the Delta. Regrettably, rural poverty is not isolated to the South. Nationwide, 20 percent of children in rural areas live in poverty. Of the 50 counties with the highest child poverty rates, 48 are rural.
Nearly 70 years ago, my grandmother's brothers got jobs with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps -- jobs that were previously nonexistent in the hills of northern Alabama. My grandmother's family was also hooked up to the electrical grid because of Roosevelt's creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Today, after working her entire life, she is retired in comfort because Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress had the foresight to pass the Social Security Act. From a background of utter destitution, my grandmother's family was able to pull itself out of poverty with the help of massive public works programs and investment in social services.
The impoverished citizens of Coahoma cannot hope for any such help. The infants who die in the Mississippi Delta because of a health care system that prioritizes profit over life will never have to see a world in which their families continue to lose social services and the nation continues to lose jobs that pay a living wage. Instead of working toward full employment, instead of providing nationalized health care, instead of providing affordable higher education (the Republican Congress, with Bush's approval, just voted to revoke 84,000 students' Pell Grants), we are investing in war machinery to colonize developing nations for the benefit of the corporate elite.
When Lockheed Martin builds another quarter-of-a-billion-dollar bomber, that is not only a tragedy for the Iraqi civilians who will be obliterated by its cargo, but also for the rural Mississippian whose social services are sacrificed for the expansion of the military industrial complex. Nor does the current plutocracy concentrate wealth through war alone. The creation of a neo-mercantilist world system designed to extract resources from and create markets of developing nations impairs the ability of average Americans to make a living. In providing corporate welfare to agricultural conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland, for example, we not only prevent rural Africans, but also rural Americans, from making a living on the farm.
When we recognize that average citizens in America have the same interests as average citizens in Honduras or Iraq, and that those interests conflict with the interests of the multinational corporations that will continue to control our government for at least two more years, then we can begin to pierce the false paradigms that dominate our foreign policy debate and distract us from the actual power relationships of which those working class citizens among us are the victims.
Zach Fields's column usually appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at zfields@cavalierdaily.com.
Read More
PATEL: Personal development courses support students beyond the gradebook
By Heer Patel | 3 days agoThe University must rethink its approach to education beyond traditional major-specific requirements and mandate personal development courses.
EDITORIAL: Commercialization threatens U.Va.’s educational mission
By Editorial Board | 4 days agoAfter all, measuring the University’s worth in terms of accrued capital, operational efficiency and numerical rankings molds this space into just another cookie-cutter institution.
YOUNIS: Why every U.Va. student should say yes to English
By Ayat Younis | January 9, 2025Every student at the University, regardless of their primary field of study, can professionally and academically benefit from engaging with the English department.
