James L Bradley Kanook February 8th, 2012 There are some of you that have spent your early

years walking across a few Red Squares chasing knowledge, knowledge that in some cases you and I believed was truth and had a line of demarcation between it and power. So be it! A well know fact is that when it comes right down to it, we deny that money and politics strongly influence knowledge although such a view forgets that it takes power to produce knowledge in the first place. Take the simple role of History how many accounts of a loosing battle have you read composed by the looser? Okay, I realize to some of you History is only a record of an event, and what has that got to do with knowledge. Institutions involved in producing knowledge, whether they are Universities, publishing houses, news media, think tanks, and so on require power to do their job. Naturally they also require money, and a legal and political framework that will permit them to operate. Even an individual blogger needs an Internet Connection, something to access it, and a shelter that will hold out the elements and something that will hold his cup of coffee/teas/soft-drink, as he or she pounds out their opinions. Consider this, all the knowledge we have, or all the ideas that run rampant between our two ears, has a material base of this kind, where knowledge is a product of power and the reverse being power is productive of knowledge. This doesnt make any given set of ideas right or wrong (that is a matter of individual judgment), but it does point to the condition that knowledge at any given time is power/knowledge so Im learning! Wasnt it but a few years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that protecting the rights of the corporations and individuals to speak freely when they anonymously

donated millions of dollars that flowed into political campaigns for the Super PACs, whereas allowing somewhat of a shade between politics and the power behind the money. As a result a great deal of the ideas being debated in the Republican primaries have been created have been given a presence in public life by the material base of undisclosed donations, rich or poor it makes no never mind, whereas we know that the amount of the donation will normally dictate the agenda. This is more than influencing politics in the United States, and as it would naturally turn it has created a certain kind of politics, where the focus is on what is dictated by the issues of the major donations. Not all links between Power and Knowledge can be viewed as being on the downside, where the Universities are linked hand-in-hand with industry that includes a strong technical input and subsequent scientific research. Granted there are some shadow areas, especially when it comes to law, business and public policy schools, which have morphed into dominating much of the higher-educational institutions outside of its sciences. Many of these schools train the staff/students to meld into private corporations and for the local, state and federal governmenst nothing wrong with this, whereas the faculty and students are profoundly informed by the values and interests of those clients. Universities in their quest for operating funds have developed a robust and transparent scheme that allows them to walk a fine line with power and money, whereas private donors can fund academic posts or even entire new facilities and their programs, but in most cased they cannot directly influence academic appointments. In truth they do, as if they dont particularly like the academic chief cheer leader, they simply cut off funding for the program. So throw that idea of independent judgment relevant scholars out the window. So although it is informal decisions that drive the selection it really isnt where if the funding organization doesnt cotton to the subject matter picked by the department head, he simply finds his program broke in short order. Just the other day I read that the PRC (China) is the 2 nd largest economy in GDP evaluations, and that the word on the street is that the West has got to learn to live within their means in other words analysts from the Asian Nations are pointing at the mediocre standard of living the present economy is forcing on the West holding their sides in mirth telling us that we need to reenergize our way of manufacturing. They point to the

fact that the Asia model shows a steady, consistent policy and sustained growth while the West and Japan are mired in debt and are advancing very painfully slow, if at all. The pound their bully-pulpits pointing a stern-stiff finger at the West and say it must face up to the new economic reality one particular individual on a recent BBC interview said, Europehas lost a lot of money and therefore you must be poor now, relative to the past and in Asia we live within our means. So when we are poor, we live as poor people. I think this is a lesson that Europe can learn from Asia. Now I really take offense to that kind of rhetoric, be as it may, the part of Asia the individual was referring to was China and Malaysia, which if history serves me correctly the last thing the Chinese can really claim as a strong contribution to our society was spicing noodles and firecrackers, as for Malaysia the book is still open for something that has moved our society forward. The wealth these two countries are flaunting in front our noses has been accumulated with the help of inventions and products that came directly from the West, via private-equity firms looking to increase their bottom line for the stockholders. Secondly the working people of those nations performed machine like assembly of those products for upwards to a dollar-a-day or a little bit more, where the products being made for $10 max were selling for $200 or $300 a piece at the least. The export tax in China is horrendous; where a $200 product making its way across the Pacific or west across the Indian Ocean had a 25% or more tax on it, do the math. 400 million phones or tennis shoes made at $10 a crack (or less) selling for $200 with a $25 export tax sucked out of it. 4,000,000 x $10 = $40,000,000 total production cost, 4,000,000 x 200 = $800,000,000 and 4,000,000 x $25 = $100,000,000 back into the coffers of the Chinese Government. Broke down: Labor Sale Price Export Tax Profit $ 40,000,000 $800,000,000 $100,000,000 $660,000,000

The $100,000,000 is just the very tip of the iceberg, whereas at $660 million the officials in the treasury houses in Asia have made it very difficult to do business, whereas deducting still another $100 to $200 million from the profit pile was and is easy to justify to the stockholders of those Western corporations. The West went through this exercise with Japan and its cheap labor, and it wasnt until Japan hired a couple of

superwhiz kids from the West who sat down one weekend and whipped out a design for the Datsun 240Z that they began to climb on the bandwagon in the auto-industryeven then they marketed the 240Z far under market value to gain a respective share of the Americans middle class pocketbook. China and Malaysia might be on top of the global economic pile today, and yet the labor division in their countries is changing, and because of the Internet or the superdooper connectivity we all enjoy today it will change at a more rapid pace than it did with Japan. We see housing prices in parts of Asia going through the roof along with the common everyday supply of foodstuffs. The individual in Malaysia brags about how he and his group helped turn Malaysia into an economic powerhouse in two decades, with his tongue in cheek he pounds his chest neglecting to say that most of his population is living on less than $1.00 per day per family. They are poor and always will be poor while the leaders bask in the money rolling in provided by the cheap labor and high export taxes. Today the American dollar is worth 6.298 Chinese Yen, while the same dollar is worth 2,165 Malaysian Ariary pay a worker in China 100 yen per day and it works out to be $1.59 per hour for a ten-hour day. By the way at 100 yen a day the worker is more than likely at the top of his or her pay scale, oh wait they provide the uniforms and feed than a fancy bowl of spicy noodles for a 30 minute lunch (no 15-minute breaks) breakfast and dinner youre on your own. Malaysia which you probably know less about than China has a population of 28.73 million, with a total estimated workforce of 11.9 million with over 4.2 million employed in manufacturing sector, there is a unemployment rate of 3.1% (estimated) with a per capital income (based on GDP) or around $8,624, which if you think anyone in the workforce is even making 50% of the 17.9 million Ariary think again. In a nut shell for the Western Media to sit on their comfortable butts and let the captains of our shift the jobs overseas tell them to ignore the real world of Asian manufacturing is criminal as they sit there these countries rolling in the big bucks on the backs of their workers and the rampant greed of our manufacturing leaders are smiling and patting us on the back as those big bucks come back to us on the train track of well help you out by purchasing your bonds that have a very high-rate of return.

The captains of industry with their solution print more money, seem to miss the snapshot that just printing more money will not solve our economic problems, we are unable to back those furious printing presses with a good economy. Critics tell us we must restructure our economies and reduce our dependence on our financial sector, in particular take the walk back to where we have what is called real businessI agree. Number one is producing goods that we can market, at one time Made in America was a global standard to be looked up to, today our method seems to be moving money, you know currency trading keep in mind that money is NOT a commodity, unlike coffee that can be ground and produce a hot cup of java. Take currency, if you grind it up what can you make, other than confetti for a parade down 5 th Avenue in NYCcurrency is just figures in the ledgers of the banks and you can trade these figures in the books of the banks only! In other words there has to be something solid to trade, than you can legitimately make money. Will the road back to legitimacy be easy, no, and it will take some tough decisions by our (I hate to say this) government officials, which by the way even Obama realizes this as he and his boy Timmy have made numerous requests and trips to China to get them to balance out the value of the yen a waste of time in that our own captains of industry are piling up the dollars because the yen is devaluated. Regulations need to be in-place that allows the workers in the West to once again compete with the rest of the world yet again the captains of industry not only enjoying the cheap labor but tax loopholes give them huge tax breaks for investing overseas. Yet when the American Flag is needed they run for shelter behind the military of the very same country that rewards them for investing outside of its borders. As a matter of record, the Asian leaders point to the West and say we pay our workers too much money for much less work. Let me see, in Asia the worker spends at least 10.5-hours at work for approximately $1.75 per hour (at the top of their pay-grade), they never complain or strike (that is unless you want to get a piece of lead in your body), so yes paying the workers in the West more than $1.75 an hour would be consider too much they continue their rant laughing over their shoulder unless you start producing anything that is marketable, youre in trouble.

In addition they sit around their massive tables chuckling at the state of our highereducation system yet the students from their countries flock to our institutions for a quality education some never go back home. Why, in there country (for instance) if they are caught discussing or if an instructor their political establishment, such as the issue of Tibet in China bingo! youre either dragged out behind the noodle shed and had some sense pounded into you or become fertilizer in some rice paddy. Is there an answer? Yes there is and in reality it does not involve isolationism, but taking back what rightfully belongs to the West jobs, until the West shakes its boody and realizes the consequences of corporations moving their operations overseas, it will never happen. And if you think someone who has made millions of this type of action will turn it around take a sit down and think again. By the way, the latest news flash Nokia is cutting 4,000 jobs in Komaron, Hungary (2,300 jobs), Reynosa, Mexico (700 jobs) and Salo, Finland (1000 jobs), and moving the positions to where? You got it Asia!