Letter to the secretary of Labor, Robert Reich


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Are the United States of America introducing slavery again?

Huizen, 25th of May 1996

To the Secretary of Labor
in the United States of America,
Mr. Robert Reich
The White House Washington D.C.
United States of America


Sir,

On CNN, I watched your worry about the effects of the Immigration Act that George Bush signed in 1990. I learned that at least 65.000 Philippino's and workers from India are 'imported' into the United States each year. Those people generally replace American workers because they are a lot cheaper than native Americans.

With reference to my letter to you of April 4th 1994, when you warned for this development already, you showed at CNN rather powerless because the law allows this. It appears that Congress is dominated by interest groups and is influenced by a lobby of the exporting industries. They asked the conservative administration for cheap labor - next to a cheaper dollar - to become and stay competitive in the global market place. Your worry in 1994 was realistic and turned out to be a real threat for the average American worker. The average purchasing power of American workers has declined today to the level of 1983.

I learned that the average pay for labor is about 15 dollars per hour, while workers from abroad are paid only 4,5 dollars per hour. This development must become a disaster for your country, because purchasing power of the average American will decline further, resulting in a collapse of the American economy with a predictable crash on Wall Street in the near future. The preying on and exploitation of the poor, the middle class workers and nature by the elite, has its limits. After the coming crash, the United States will not have the same opportunity as Japan after the war - and western Europe of course - to get economic help from abroad, with the fortunate possibility of full employment by rebuilding their countries, and limitless possibilities of exports - mainly to the United States.

Today things are different, and I presume that Keynes' vision on the recovery of the economy is still underestimated. What Keynes could not know, was that the structure of money itself is changing. Even today few economists are aware of the fact that the instrument they work with - money - is no longer the same thing it ever was; apart from the monetary value. Their theories however, are still based on the premises of a means of exchange, which is no longer true. If you want to hear more about this, you can reach me on the Internet.

The best thing to do is, to try and get a large number of people in motion to disclose the disrupting forces of limitless capitalism and do a lot of research about the structure of money and the exponential forces of growth of interest rates. This exponential force is the really dangerous thing. Capital has its beneficial aspects, but negative ones as well. The negative sides however are dominant to the positive ones, because human nature mostly covers the characteristics of capitalism better than the altruistic. So there is no hope, unless the Internet is used as a force to neutralize the speculative capital gain blah-blah, like in TV-programs as 'Money Line' on CNN.

Once again I point to the prediction of Mr. Ross Perot - who warned for the NAFTA agreement and the same danger - that the position of the workers would deteriorate by the creation of low, and lower paid jobs. The so called growth of employment will be temporarily, because of the momentum. But when the critical level of degradation of wide spread purchasing power has been reached, Wall Street will collapse again. The economic crisis that occurred in 1929 will be peanuts compared to what is coming, because a huge amount of flashy capital is a substantial asset in the banking system today. As you may know, the real economy relates to the flow of money only for two percent. And that is very dangerous.

The emerging markets in the Pacific Rim are emerging now, because of foreign investment - from the US, Europe and Japan - and cheap labor. They can only be successful because of the purchasing power in countries like yours and mine. So the most dangerous thing to do is to break down the market at home by decreasing wages. Maybe groups like the Freemen and de drama of Waco are signs of the growing instability of the political structure in the US.

Up to now, we are talking about economics, and not about social coherence and social stability. In economics these aspects are not weighed. One cannot express well-being in figures, which - in my opinion - results in a very high level of crime. You have over a million people behind bars now, which costs a lot of taxpayers money, and is a fivefold of the level in the Netherlands.

So, I hope for you and me, that you will succeed to get the message across.

Awaiting your reply with respect,


Robert M. Brockhus
Westkade 227
1273 RJ Huizen
The Netherlands
Phone: 00-31-35-5244141
C.c.: Internet