Globalization:

"Imbecilities of American foreign policy"
	"Globalisation signifies that Americans not only get to own everything: they have the right to tell us how to live our lives, and also fix the price of everything."

by John Tenorio

WELCOME TO THE 21ST CENTURY.

Here we are again and it seems that most of us are still alive. The Three Kings have yet to distribute their loads of war toys, ray guns and light sabres, American style Putidolls and their male counterparts, GI. Joes. Apart from assorted cybermonsters, we also have the Nippon clipons, derivatives from the Dragon Ball comics and other creations of Akira Toriyama, but at least we can now say with confidence that reports of the End Of The World were greatly exaggerated, despite various important people’s efforts to the contrary.

	(May/June 1999, in an interview on '60 Minutes', Leslie Stahl asked Madeleine Albright: "I understand that 500,000 Iraqi children have died due to our sanctions...was it worth it?" Albright replied, "It was worth it."

"Now another failed trade agreement" spells NAFTA; the latest emanation of which, WTO, the World Trade Organisation, fell apart in disorder in fear of globalisation, a horrible American word, which few of us Eurotwits understand. Its meaning is personified by Bill Gates and is very simple. Globalisation signifies that Americans not only get to own everything: they have the right to tell us how to live our lives, and also fix the price of everything.

Our prepackaged, oven-ready society of consumers was designed for us in the US and we are running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to make enough money, not to live, but to keep on shopping.

The first and the last of the big spenders is, of course, the American State Department, which, apart from its declared budget for defence (weapons of mass destruction), has extra funding of $30 billion to $40 billion annually for the development of new secret weapons.

The public is not told about this and it is described as the "blackzone". According to experts, these black inventions are so secret that not even their designers know anything about them. If they fly, the world is encouraged to believe that they are of extra-terrestrial origin, so anyone enquiring about them can be labelled as a flutter. The serious UFO researchers are convinced that their existence accounts for the extraordinary number of unusual flying objects sighted in the USA.

The worrying part about all this is that Americans do not have the reputation of being the world’s greatest engineers, especially in space. Everyone must remember another tragic set of initials, NASA (Need Another Seven Astronauts). One of their space ships crashed due to a faulty 0-ring, in other words, a badly fitted gasket. One of these transatlantic mechanic’s recent attempts at constructing a space ship for the exploration of the planet Mars failed dramatically, because half the design team was using the metric system. Unfortunately, this information was classified, so the rest of the gang went on using feet and inches. The Spanish contingent was using arrobas and fanegas (*) but, as they had reliable conversion tables, this caused no problem.

The most likely reason for the long silence of Polar Lander is that it probably did not even start off in the right direction, as all the Galactic maps of the solar system (the only reliable ones), made available to Star Wars fans, have been recalled and also classified.

Some of the imbecilities of American foreign policy are clearly illustrated when these well-meaning idiots try to advise countries on anything, from drug abuse (you mustn’t take drugs for fun) through family planning (you should use American-made condoms, but abortions are strictly forbidden), to agriculture, where if you grow anything they disapprove of, from skunkweed to hemp, they send in troops with flame-throwers and they burn your crops.

A proverb coined by Javier Krahe, a Spanish minstrel, ‘To be drunk with nationalism turns people into idiots", was never more true than when applied to American do-gooders, because the real problem is their lack of any knowledge of how people outside the United States live, feel, or think.

When I contemplate American foreign policy, I am always reminded of a sweet lady, an American social worker, whom I met in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. She was preoccupied with the plight of the prisoners in the local jail, because many of them could not read or write and they were given nothing with which to occupy themselves. She visited the prison regularly and tried to set up an educational program for them, teaching handicrafts, among them card weaving, a simple craft requiring minimal equipment. One group of prisoners soon mastered the technique and they wove a 25-metre long belt and used it to escape over the wall.

(*) Arrobas and fanegas are old Spanish measurements of quality, like bushels. Fanega is a measurement of wheat grain, but also refers to the area of land required to grow this quantity of wheat. As not all the earth has the same degree of fertility, this area varies in different parts of Spain.

The above article appeared in THE REPORTER, Vol. 6, No 89, January 2000. It was submitted to us by Xavier Ortega (Madrid)