Last night the President spoke of investing in America's future. As an American I don't care. As a global citizen I am terrified. For politicians, investing in our future means that they are investing in the growth and consolidation of the giant corporations that have our elected leaders in their pockets. This means more foreign conflict, aggressive economic sanctions against third world people that do not comply with American privatization, and more unregulated destruction to the environment. That last one is caused by the industry that profited the most last year, big oil. I will address that in a moment, but first one thing Mr. Obama said really stood out to everyone was his sputnik reference. He stated:
"Half a century ago, the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik. We had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon. The science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs. This is our generation's Sputnik moment."
This is quite true. The Cold War brought tons of money to the universities in order to beat Soviet technology and create more advanced weapons. Our university’s and likewise our economy flourished. Investing in higher education and government projects like NASA certainly played a large role. My issue with the President's reference here is that this will not happen again. Not only because it is impossible to get any significant change through our inept political process, but also because using artless patterns in history for making important policies today is frustratingly short sighted. Indeed the Cold War competition motivated the government to invest in these programs, which in turn created jobs and a new class of intelligent Americans, but this is not 1957. This is 2011, and corporate America has its grip on every decision of the government especially in education and scientific innovation.
The most promising new industry that we should invest in is green energy. I cringe when I say “new” because green energy has been trying to make a revolution in America since the 1970s. To give you an idea of how much progress we have made take a look at this clip:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-june-16-2010/an-energy-independent-future
(Note: I know it's a comedy show and all that, but honestly who doesn't agree that the Daily Show is a better source of news than anything else on cable?)
The most striking point is at the end of the clip. Richard Nixon set a goal of getting America off foreign oil by 1980, and since then each administration has set more timid goals when it comes to energy. Why? Because the oil companies make more money than any other industry in the world (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/).
We can't invest in America in the same way we invested in the 1950s and 1960s when more and more money is thrown at our politicians by greedy companies seeking less rules and more profits by any means necessary. Those means include starving third world countries, assassinating foreign leaders that get in the way (see CIA assassinations in Latin America and overthrow of the Shah of Iran). They also include destroying the air, forests, and oceans.
The investment in education starting in 1957 was a major success at creating the critical thinkers and mass student movements of the 1960s and 70s. Since then, as colleges privatized and demanded more and more money from students and focused their resources in financial and business arenas, straying from social sciences, we have become an apathetic and politically unaware nation. My generation fails to question any of this treachery by corporate America, and our universities backed by our corporately owned government have played a major role. This is outlined wonderfully in an article by Terence Ball entitled The Politics of Social Science. He states:
“Survey researchers discovered that most Americans are politically ill informed, inactive, and apathetic. By “traditional” democratic lights, this was cause for considerable alarm. Yet, according to the newly emergent “elite theory” of democracy, it is widespread political participation that poses the greatest danger to democracy. Fortunately, an antidote is readily available. That antidote is apathy. Widespread apathy allows well educated and affluent “democratic elites” to have a disproportionate say in the shaping of political possibilities.”
In other words, a government controlled by corporate money (which many define as fascism) is not interested in critical thinkers capable of changing the world. It wants universities to produce obedient workers in the financial and service sectors, not innovators that will challenge the energy giants. They don't want critical thinkers that criticize the way our economic system works. The corporate owners that control the politicians (less than 1% of the population) are the ones that benefit enormously from that system, while the rest of us are given less education, lower paying jobs, pathetic benefits, and longer hours of work. Meanwhile, we are told by the mainstream media that we should feel bad for complaining, and that if we are not rich then we have no one to blame but ourselves. The president's sputnik reference was a nice poetic display, something Mr. Obama is great at, but it is nothing more than theater. It is the false idea that our government has our interests in mind and that it is not motivated by the pistols to their heads held by big oil, the banks, insurance companies, and all the rest.
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