Exploring Chicago Communities: Hyde Park (IX)

Hyde Park is located seven miles south of the Chicago loop along Lake Michigan. It is known to many as the home of the prestigious University of Chicago, and former home of the current President of the United States, Barrack Obama. Hyde Park has also been home to other famous figures such as Minister Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, and former Chicago mayor, Harold Washington. The community is also the home of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, and the DuSable Museum of African-American History. Hyde Park was independent of Chicago until the year 1889, where it was finally annexed into the city's limits. As one of the 77 Chicago communities, Hyde Park was founded by Paul Cornell in the 1850's. He is known as a successful businessman, abolitionist, and real estate developer. He bought 300 acres of the current area, with the hopes of attracting other successful businessmen to the land. Some of these men, who he considered associates, used their houses as stops on the Underground Railroad for African slaves, escaping from the south.

ref:

About.com: Hyde Park

Wikipedia: Hyde Park, Chicago

The Way Lakeoff Sees Things (VII)

In George Lakeoff's Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, he states that the Conservatives in the United States have a much better understanding of their politics than liberals do. He draws support for this notion through the explanations of two concepts he calls, the "Strict Father" model, and the "Nurturant Parent" model. He thinks that conservatives seem to have a "unified origin" from which their policies derive, and liberals are split into several interest groups that seem to be scattered amongst a large array of socio-political issues.

Conservatives are represented with the Strict Father Model, as Lakeoff thinks that the conservatives are structured in a way a family should be (according to Western culture).  The father is the leader of the pack, and makes decisions that are often supported by the mother. The mother takes care of the house, and sees after the children, while the father provides security, protecting the family from both internal and external evils. The father determines what is right and what is wrong, and rewards or punishes accordingly. From his restrained, strong and self-disciplined behavior, he teaches his children to be the same through methods of tough love, promoting a sense of self-reliance as the children gain age.

Liberalism in the model of the Nurturant Parent deals with the pursuit of self-interest, but simultaneously calls for being realized by an outside source, for example, interactions, connections and affiliations with a larger community. Here lies an intrinsic value in the ways people/children emotionally connect to others. Communion is key in this model, but it is not always limited to the immediate family.

Lakeoff seems to use these models to illustrate his perception of the structures of both, the liberal and conservative communities.

The Irony of Immigration (VIII)

A discussion in regards to the positive or negative framing of immigration seems rather silly to me as an American. I always understood the United States to be a melting pot of various races and cultures due to it's founding principles and claims. The land on which the United States exists was acquired from the pre-existing Native American and Mexican populations through murderous and corrupt methods by European immigrants who are held responsible for the United States' establishment. It seems that now, in 2011, the children and successors of these founding Europeans, have developed ways in the media to condemn new immigrants for having entered "illegally". These recent immigrants have only come into the United States for similar reasons the European came into the territory over 500 years ago. This type of framing involves a sense of oblivion to the history of this nation, as the "illegal" entrance and theft of this land allowed for the United States to come into existence in the first place. In the eyes of wealthy republicans, conservatives and business leaders, immigrants are only seen as cheap labor to further promote their own wealth and business ventures. People who are undocumented are linguistically framed a certain way depending on the political position and agenda of the persons denoting them, and this is what George Lakeoff explains in his video, Moral Politics. 

"I'm Afraid We're On Two Different Pages..." (VI)

The High Cost of Corruption by Jack and Suzy Welch, published by Businessweek (Bloomberg) seems to suggest that there is no major corruption in the United States, and thus it is a more successful nation economically. It suggests that the occurrences of corruption in the United States are rare. 

The joint authors of this article made reference to a trip to Latin America that they had taken where they heard endless stories of corruption along the lines of loose law enforcement and mass tax evasion in Brazil and Argentina. They also draw from stories of how bribery was once legal in Germany, throughout the 90's. The authors point fingers at developing nations, and up and coming superpowers like China and India. In the article, they state, " It remains one of the main reasons that capitalism cannot take root in Africa. Corruption can make it just too expensive to start a business, or in many cases, to keep a small one running." 

These authors repeatedly state how easy it is to start a business in the United States due to the low level of corruption because business leaders have less of it to worry about, along with many forms of venture capital to start off with. This article extremely differs from my perspective of corruption in the United States in a discussion about how much it exists. 

I think that this article may make sense for many Americans that are very patriotic about the country, and have a sort of neo-conservatist approach to the way they view the U.S. in comparison to other nations on the world stage. Most of these people are ignorant to statistics, and the fact that a lot of the things the U.S. blames other nations for, takes place right on it's own soil. Jack and Suzy state, "Yes, the U.S. has its share of corruption in public works projects. And we did have a spate of corporate scandals—Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco, to name the most notorious. But those were mainly cases of individual fraud and malfeasance, not systemic corruption. We really don't have that." This article is slightly aged, but I cannot help but to make notice of the current protests and occupancies of federal reserve banks in some of the United States' largest cities, like New York, and Los Angeles. These protests are called the "99%" protests, which are against the Wall Street apparatus, as well as the supposed one percent of U.S. citizens who own 40% of the nations wealth, which is poorly distributed. 

Corruption of the United States economy has been and is being used to centralize wealth using the power and influence of the United States governmental apparatus. Jack and Suzy fail to mention the unprecedented Ponzi and privatization schemes on Wall Street that have caused negative returns on public and private U.S. investments, which have also diminished the balance sheets of other powerful nations, such as those of the European Union during the international real estate bubble. The U.S. budget, credit and regulation has been used to centralize global bank deposits, purchases and investments to create political and economic hegemony by transferring U.S. government assets to private investors significantly below market prices, as stated in books like John Perkin's Confessions of an Economic Hitman, and Frank Partnoy's Infectious Greed. There has been mass privatization by government agencies (funded by tax-payer dollars) that have refused to produce audited financial statements under G.A.A.P., or any other kind of rules. This prevents for any transparency to the American public, those who exist in a so-called, liberal representative democracy. Americans tax dollars have been used to fund bail outs for the same private corporations who are to blame for the level of corruption on Wall Street, as well as the theft of community assets via falsely established foreclosures in many communities, leaving thousands among thousands homeless. The Federal Reserve, which is privately owned,  constantly creates illusive and deceiving monetary policy that is not often clarified before the public, and very hard for the masses to understand.  

The narrative of Jack and Suzy's article seems to ignore these happenings in the U.S., and it is media like these that cause many Americans and readers to believe that corruption in America is rare. Articles like these can arguably be seen as a representative archetype for much of the media in the U.S., owned by private entities, who also belong to the country's elite one percent, that make sure America has a near-perfect image both at home and abroad. The American education systems could also be the cause of such ignorance, as concepts like corruption and greed, are often ignored in various Economics, Finance and Business Administration university programs. In my opinion, in the rare cases where these concepts are discussed, a finger is normally pointed elsewhere in the world, and the corruption and falsehoods that take place in the United States are smoke-screened. Normally, the countries that are constantly blamed for having high corruption rates are under-developed, partially, and sometimes completely due to European colonization and American imperialism at various points in history. It is an international stereotype of America that claims that its people are less informed of the happenings and cultures of other parts of the world, and because there is a kernel of truth in every stereotype, it can be concluded that many of the American people are oblivious to how corrupt their own country is, because the media rarely shines light on America's own faults in its economic and foreign policies. Further protests sweeping across the U.S.'s larger cities pose as evidence that the masses are awaking from a long slumber in the sheets of biased media and news sources, and disproportionate qualities of education designed to eliminate the middle classes, and to keep distance between the higher and lower socio-economic strata.  

ref: The High Cost of Corruption by Jack and Suzy Welch