Re-response

Submitted by Kit (India), Jan 8, 2010 at 17:38

Dear Bob,

Sorry you took the opening remark as an insult. All I was trying to say was that people tend to subconciously uphold their homelands irrespective of the things that would have defined them otherwise. In this case, we were talking about your country and so you had every right to defend it as I would have done mine. That was the point, nothing more. It becomes easier to see things the way they are when you're a third party. Emotional ties and political belongings do not allow this. Its basic human psychology. As a third party I only wrote what I had seen and experienced. I had stayed in the US for 4 years by the way, had also stayed in France for 6 years and a few other Asian countries. So I would say I had a fair scale of estimation when it comes to the two countries in this discussion. I do admit that 4 years is a short time to make such "judgements" if you'd like to call it that, but I did travel extensively in that short period and got to see alot of things. I'm not imposing that France is flawless either but US's system has to be worked on alot more if it has to give you a true sense of living as the French system did. But then again, that's just my opinion.

Leaving aside the internal structure of US's system since you seemed to be quite content with it, which is a good thing, you did mentioned about market competition which brings us to another point. America is a capitalistic country and it introduced the official free enterprise system to the world which was a great market system or at least seemed so then. The problem is when marketshare and profit margins starts dictating terms of life. My cousin who was in Somerset county, Maine suffered from cancer and his insurance company found out that he had had not mentioned an aliment he had when he was 17. He had some pain on his back then which disappeared a few months later. Because of this, they refused to cover him. He could not afford the procedure so he made a few petitions to reinstore the insurance but nothing was done. He was new to the place too. He passed away on September 2006. I am dead sure the company refused because they saw a chance to save some money otherwise they wouldn't be making much profit had they covered everyone. I never saw that problem in France and for the years that I had been in that country, I had never seen the hospitals and clinics all congested at once such that you cannot get treatment in time nor had I come across anybody who had been denied treatment. You said healthcare in Canada and UK were congested, well people get sick all the time. If they are not congested in the US it must mean that something is wrong. It would be extremely adamant to think that fewer people in America fall sick. Either some people cannot afford to go to a hospital or they are simply refused by the health insurance companies and this probably reduced traffic. But that's just my deduction again. The fact is alot of the laws and policies(the foreign policies in particular) are very one sided, meant to sustain the selfinterests of the ruling elite. The corporates have alot of say in your government which you will find with some research. Businesses are booming in the US as it's laws are very favourable to them afterall such businesses do bring alot of money into the country and the few pockets that had supported them. Corruption is inherent with the free enterprise system. A classic example that took place a few years ago would be that of Bayer, a phamaceutical company that sold its HIV infected drugs to Europe and Africa after they were declared unfit in the US. The FDA actually allowed them to do that. The reason, you can take a guess!

Coming to the economy, would your economy affect the whole world if it failed? Yes, that is because a majority of the countries has some kind of trade with the US and uses its currency for trade. But this wouldn't necessarily mean the whole world would come crashing down one sunday afternoon. Your country and others that run on the credit system (like France), would take the worst hits as credits are not tangible nor are they readily redeemable. You cannot store them in a piggy bank for safe keeping and losing these credits takes the economy directly into the negative. This was the underlying cause of the current recession but I am not going to go into all that right now. In a country like India (where I am currently based) where the credit system is not utilised extensively, the economy was saved because people had alot of savings. I'm pretty sure you must have read or seen news about the US government urging Asian countries to spend more on western commodities, why? to increase monetary liquidity, to save your economy.

And the last point is that the German citation I gave earlier is an anology of what the US government is starting to reek of. It is difficult to believe or trust their policies when everything they are doing seems to be curbing other countries' functioning(apart from major allies) when they deemed it threatening to America and I'm not just talking about Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush even came to India last year to get us to sign the nuclear deal(nuclear non-proliferation treaty) which curbs all our nuclear weapon development programs. Currently, the US has about 10,000 nuclear weapons in its inventory. India on the other hand, has about 50 warheads ready for operation and 20 that still need delivery systems. Now, who's the threat and who's not? you do the math. What I'm trying to say is that your government is acting very suspiciously and you cannot blame me for thinking so. It seems to want the ultimate power and I don't think that is fair. It supports countries that contribute to it's economy and strategically traps countries that refuse. How can the world love a country like that, which in this case is the government's fault not the people's. Leaders do get corrupted but it has never been this obvious. What can we expect next? a corporate dictatorship government?? And as I mentioned in my last post, it has happened before in history and there's absolutely no reason to believe similar things won't happen again and it gets worst when the country in question is as powerful as yours. I may sound irresponsible but I have a right to speculate. I don't want to be the one caught with my pants down when hell breaks lose.

By the way, thanks for your sympathy.

Kit.

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