{"id":104808,"date":"2018-01-15T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T12:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=104808"},"modified":"2018-01-13T15:56:14","modified_gmt":"2018-01-13T15:56:14","slug":"yesterdays-shithole-countries-can-become-classy-places-donald-and-vice-versa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/01\/yesterdays-shithole-countries-can-become-classy-places-donald-and-vice-versa\/","title":{"rendered":"Yesterday’s ‘Shithole Countries’ Can Become Classy Places, Donald, and Vice Versa"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Shit’s Everywhere <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

12 Jan 2018 – <\/em>When Donald Trump referred to countries like Nigeria and really, all of Africa, and the long-suffering island of Haiti in the Caribbean as \u201cshitholes\u201d to a bunch of stunned members of Congress yesterday, he was not just showing his deeply-rooted ugly racist self, but also his profound ignorance about the world \u2014 and his own country.<\/p>\n

The truth is that yesterday\u2019s \u201cshithole countries\u201d often become today\u2019s modern success stories. Norway is a case in point. As late as the early 1960s, Norway, as Paul Thornton, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times<\/em>, himself a descendant of Norwegian immigrants to the US, writes<\/a> [1], once was \u201cthe shithole of Scandinavia,\u201d its people viewed by more prosperous and modern Swedes and Danes as poor, ignorant farmers, Then the country struck oil in the North Sea, and since then, avoiding going the route of many oil-producing nations, has become one of the richest countries in the world on a per-capita basis, with a standard of living about 25% higher than ours here in the US, and with the wealth much more evenly and fairly distributed, too.<\/p>\n

Why can\u2019t the US get immigrants from Norway, instead of \u201cshithole\u201d countries in Africa and the Caribbean, the president asked? Well, because nobody in Norway, with its gold-plated free national health care system, excellent and well-funded retirement system and educational system, etc., would want to live here, duh. In fact, Thornton says many second and third-generation Norwegians living in the US are looking at whether they might have a chance of getting citizenship rights in Norway these days.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Shanghai workers commuting on bicycles in the 1990s and Shanghai 25 years later<\/p><\/div>\n

I know what I\u2019m talking about. Back in 1991 when my I got a Fulbright professorship to China and moved for a year with my family to Shanghai, which at the time was one of China\u2019s wealthier cities, the place was, frankly, what you\u2019d call a \u201cshithole.\u201d Most people, including professors at Fudan University, a leading institution of higher education where I was placed to teach journalism, were living in one or two-room concrete flats with no heat and only cold water, often without even a private bathroom or kitchen. (Our daughter\u2019s local elementary school had no heat either, so in the winter, they left the windows open to warm the classrooms up during the daytime, while the kids wore gloves with the tips cut off so they could use their pencils.) As for working class people, many were living in far worse accommodations. The air in winter was filled with soot as people tried to keep warm with charcoal stoves in their apartments, which caused everyone to suffer wracking coughs, myself included.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the streets were clogged with millions of bicycles every day because there was only minimal public transportation in the form of rickety buses that were packed as tightly as canned sardines and that had to crawl their way through rivers of people pedaling their bikes slowly to and from work, often for hours each way.<\/p>\n

And Shanghai was about as good as it got. If you went into the countryside, peasants were living in hovels. For bathrooms, they used cramped stone public outhouses where the stench of urine and yes, shit, was so overpowering one had to take long deep breaths before entering, and then hope to be able to hold it until one was done and could escape into the open air.<\/p>\n

There are still plenty of places in China, a huge country of 1.4 billion people, that might qualify, in the president\u2019s colorful language, as \u201cshitholes,\u201d but most are much better. Shanghai, meanwhile, in the intervening 25 years since I left, is a modern metropolis. Most of the bikes have vanished, replaced not just by cars and motor-scooters, but by a modern 400-mile subway system as large as New York City\u2019s, and even a mag-lev train from the city\u2019s center to a gleaming new international airport, which whisks passengers at a speed of 225 mph so smoothly you don\u2019t know you\u2019re moving unless you look at the blurred landscape out the windows.<\/p>\n

High-speed rail lines whisk people from Shanghai to other similarly modern cities like Beijing and Guangzhou at speeds in excess of 150 mph, making it faster to go by rail from city center to city center than to take a plane.<\/p>\n

The truth is, Mr. President, viewed from Shanghai today, America really looks a lot like a \u201cshithole country.\u201d It certianly looks that way from the perspective of a lot of places I\u2019ve been: Germany, Austria, Finland, Japan and even little Taiwan for example. And despite all your talk about a huge infrastructure program, you haven\u2019t done squat to improve things.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

American urban and rural ‘shitholes’ in Trump’s America, victims of disinvestment and neglect by governments at all levels. Detroit.<\/p><\/div>\n

This is a country that has ignored its cities, allowing them to sink into decay and squalor. It has also forgotten its rural regions. And that\u2019s not the fault of the people who live there. It\u2019s because a corrupt political system at all levels \u2014 federal, state and local \u2014 has defunded them, leaving them jobless, homeless, and with decrepit infrastructure. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ll blame the local people, but truth to tell, those are in many cases the very (white) people you call \u201cthe forgotten Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

You told them you were going to ride to their assistance as president, but you\u2019ve done the opposite. Most of them are so poor they depend on our crappy Medicaid program for their health care and you and your Republican enablers in Congress are cutting that drastically, which will leave them without health care. Meanwhile, their towns are going bust trying to come up with funds to repair aging water systems, worn-out roads and underfunded, overcrowded schools. You\u2019re doing nothing about that. Their homes are often trailers because they can\u2019t afford a real house.<\/p>\n

A whole generation of Americans is entering adulthood a collective $1.3 trillion in debt because there\u2019s no system of true public higher education. Instead so-called public colleges and universities today cost almost as much to attend as private institutions. Why? Because rich jerks like you don\u2019t think that educating Americans is the government\u2019s job, and having an educated public is not in the national interest.<\/p>\n

America isn\u2019t entirely a \u201cshithole,\u201d because our wealthy, like you, and even the upper middle class, can hide from all the shit around them caused by government tax and spending policies that favor them over the broader mass of the population by staying safely in their gated housing communities built in economically segregated jurisdictions. But that leaves the rest of the country going to the dogs while those in the gated and segregated communities like you don\u2019t give a shit.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Ruins of Detroit: Amazon.co.uk: Yves Marchand, Romain Meffre<\/p><\/div>\n

Eventually, the way things are going, you\u2019ll be presiding over a \u201cshithole country\u201d yourself.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re pretty close to being there now, in my opinion, with more than half of each year\u2019s entire federal tax take going to fund a bloated military that it looks like you want to keep sending off to the far corners of the earth to make shitholes out of other already struggling lands.<\/p>\n

Matter of fact, a number of the places you consider to be \u201cshitholes,\u201d like Haiti, Angola, the Congo, and probably Yemen and Libya, are suffering from grinding poverty in large part because of the actions of this country. Look it up. The US actually ran \u2014 and stole blind \u2014 the country of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and has treated it as a colonial possession since then.<\/p>\n

As for Libya, everyone knows the US simply destroyed the country and left it a failed state, mired in internal conflict and virtually ungovernable.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re continuing the same process (begun by President Obama) in Syria today, and are doing it by proxy by arming the Saudi Arabian military in its vicious war on Yemen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Abandoned ~ Los Angeles | Pinterest<\/p><\/div>\n

Actually you’re doing your best to make a “shithole” out of the American colony of Puerto Rico too, by denying effective and massive aid to that island that has been destroyed by two epic hurricanes in the space of two weeks. Basically you just offered them rolls of paper towels. Nice.<\/p>\n

How are such places supposed to rise up and modernize themselves? They need our help, not our condescension and mockery. which is all you’ve got on offer.<\/p>\n

In fact, maybe your administration\u2019s motto should be \u201cMake the world shittier, and America too.\u201d You\u2019re already well on the way to succeeding at it. Hey, you\u2019ve already made it okay for the Washington Post<\/em> and the NY Times<\/em> to write \u201cshithole\u201d in their main news articles and even their headlines.<\/p>\n

NOTES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1] http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/opinion\/opinion-la\/la-ol-norway-trump-immigration-20180111-story.html<\/a><\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Dave Lindorff, fluent and literate in Chinese, spent five years living in Hong Kong as a correspondent for <\/em>Business Week, and two years living and working in China. He did not go to an Ivy undergraduate school, but did attend the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Over the years in his profession he has adhered to fundamental principles of journalism, like basing articles on facts, on being fair, and on following that old Joseph Pulitzer axiom the good journalism means “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thiscantbehappening.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

12 Jan 2018 – The Shit’s Everywhere – Donald Trump referred to countries of Africa and the long-suffering island of Haiti as \u201cshitholes.\u201d The truth is that yesterday\u2019s \u201cshithole countries\u201d often become today\u2019s modern success stories. Norway is a case in point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":104813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}