While I mostly agree with Keith's (and that of most of the other folks) larger points on this thread (e.g.,
1. US STEM firms (esp in IT) are destroying themselves and US STEM infrastructure by offshoring jobs and onshoring cheap young labor.
2. US STEM firms benefit tremendously from the investment of the US taxpayer and therefore should be forced to hire and train citizens first.
), some of his points are too false to ignore:
Keith Smith[1] (rearranged, heavily excerpted)
> 1) Our country gives money to almost every other country in the world.
With the exception of Israel, US foreign aid is goods and services--not money--and is almost entirely corporate welfare. US food aid is the poster child: when people are starving in country X, instead of "giving money" to the starving with which to buy food, or even buying food where most closely available (sometimes in a different part of X), the US buys food from US farmers at subsidized prices, then pays US shippers to transport it (typically vast distances, and at significant markup from prevailing rates), then pays US personnel to distribute it or at least supervise (and pays for their travel). Rightwingers should love that, but they're too busy hating foreigners (esp dark ones) to notice that--much less that US foreign aid is a tiny fraction of the Federal budget, and has been for all of US history excepting the Marshall Plan.
> 2) Our men and women die while being the world police.
US military contractors (and their pals in the US corporate-funded media) are *demanding* to be the world's police, because they get paid to do it! You may also not have noticed the distinct *lack* of non-elite people--both Americans and foreigners--demanding to have US military forces in the many places to which US elites have committed them[2]. And spare me the tired bullshit about "it's better to fight them there than to fight them here": how many (e.g.) Somalis, Syrians, and Yemenis have *invaded* the US recently? And what did the US do to the one nation (Saudi Arabia) whose citizens *actually* attacked "the homeland" in 2001? We sold them billions of dollars of weapons :-)
This "world police" shtick is a racket, and has been for over a century[3].
> As an American I spent 4 years on active duty in the USMC. I was part of that global police force
... for which you got paid, and continue to get paid. Face it: the US military is not an "all-volunteer" force, in any usual sense of the word--to offer one's services without pay. When one "volunteers" to help with some event at a local school, does one expect a salary, and education benefits, and healthcare for life, and a defined-benefit pension? No, but US veterans do.
Another fact rightwingers just won't face: the US military is composed of Federal employees and (increasingly) contractors, just like the EPA, the IRS, and all the other parts of the civil service that rightwingers love to hate.
> 3) We have some of the best universities in the world and we export our knowledge by allowing foreigners to come to our country to study.
> 4) 17 years ago I learned that the University of Arizona was charging foreign students 95% of the cost of their education. The tax payers paid the other 5%.
You may not have noticed, but tuition, esp for foreign students, has gone up since 1999 :-) The facts in 2016 are, we have a higher-education bubble in the US, brought on by the largely-correct belief that one must have a college degree to get a decent-paying job. (It does not however follow that there are decent-paying jobs for everyone with a college degree.) This bubble is currently being sustained only by importing millions of foreign students, whose tuition is multiples of that of in-state students. Esp for graduate STEM programs: look at any Ass End of Nowhere U. (and even many higher-quality and -reputation large public institutions) and you will see very few citizen students. This allows PIs and departments to fund themselves on the minimal grants available to programs that really should have been terminated for lack of quality (esp the for-profit ones) long ago.
> It was the American spirit that created all this.
Not quite. Don't forget, e.g., the European spirit--and taxpayers--that paid Tim Berners-Lee's tuition and funded his job @ CERN[4]. (If I was a PHP coder, or anyone else dependent on the Web ecosystem, I'd have a shrine to his memory in my home, and genuflect in his general direction daily :-)
HTH, Tom Roche <
Tom_Roche@pobox.com>
[1]:
http://lists.phxlinux.org/lurker/message/20161111.173600.4ac7e260.en.html
[2]: a year old, but still informative:
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-many-wars-is-the-us-really-fighting/
[3]: from your fellow Marine Smedley Butler:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
[4]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#1980.E2.80.931991:_Invention_and_implementation_of_the_Web
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