Dear People of the World (formerly Dear Americans)

Mr. Colin Powell endorsed Mr. Barak Obama for the president of the United States of America.

Well, after all, he was good man although he joined President Bush's team.

He grew up from poverty and is Black, that is common with Obama. That means he and Obama knows the pain and reality of the world.

White conservatives like Bush don't know the reality and they are basically fundamentalists, very idiot and break out unnecessary wars for the fake causes.

Powell is not only good man but also very shrewed realist. He is a military man but do things just necessary for the interest of his country.

There should have been things he, himself disagreed but got along with because those things were necessary to implement to make things better. He agreed to bomb Afghan but tried to convince Bush not invading Iraq.

I believe Obama's policy should be similar to Powell's.

Powell sometimes made very warm-hearted comments to the weak people because he did experience that position.

In 2004, 3 Japanese citizens were kidnapped in Iraq and held captive for 8 days. After they were released, they've been criticized for what they have done, which was trying to rescue abondoned children and find out truth. Japanese society did not get along with their objective and continued bashing them as to how selfish their act was because they ignored the government's warning of not going to Iraq. Read this post if you want to know more about this incident.

Powell said "Japanese citizens should be proud of them who were trying to do good things." That helped stop bashing them.

This time Powell endorsed Obama, at the same time he made very interesting comment to the U.S. citizens.

"Republicans say Obama is Muslim. It is not true, he is Christian but even if he is Muslim, what is wrong with it? Can't Muslim child dream of being a President of the U.S.? In Arlington cemetry, there is a grave for Muslim soldier who fought in Iraq."

Well, we want to have a leader who knows the pain of others. "Warm but Cool" is what politicians should be.

That is the title of a book written by Mika Tsutsumi, who wrote this book, which I wrote the review of.

She has lived in New York as college student and office worker but since she experienced 911 turmoil, she started to learn what went wrong in the U.S.

In this book, she paid attention to poverty issue. Some of the things mentioned overlap in her previous book.

The book became best-selling non-fiction book in Japan. It was sold at the price of 700 yen (US$7).

At first she talked about subprime loan crisis. The real estate business took mean advantage of poor people who have dreams of having their own houses, which they could never afford by their cheap salaries. They ended up losing  houses and dreams and then being poorer than before.

50 million people don't have medical insurance. 60 million live by the wage under $7 per day. 35 million people are in hunger. That was a result of free economy. The poor gets poorer, the rich gets richer.

Although so many are in hunger, but at the same time so many of them are suffering from obesity. The poverty and the obesity are linked. Poor people cannot afford healthy food. They had to buy cheap junk food which is filled with oil and contain less nutrition. They get fat but lack nutrition that result in sickness but they have no medical insurance to cure. The medical insurance issue she mentioned is similar to Micheal Moore's "Sicko."

Americans favour free competition, smaller government, and privatization. Hurricane Katrina was a catastrophie caused by privatization. FEMA was privatized and disaster prevention budget was cut-off.

In the last chapter, she described working poor became new type of military drafting system. A truck driver was offered high-paying job in Iraq by a military contractor. After months of labor in Iraq, he got leukemia because he drunk highly radioactive water. He had no insurance coverage to take care of his illness. Even though he got a big money for that job, he had to use all of it to cure the illness and ended up being poorer and getting heavy illness.

The poor people had no choice but to work for the military which offers only very hard and dangerous tasks.

That is the true figure of America, now. The popularity of Obama seems to be supported by those who experience such hard situations.

Today the U.S. marked very historical moment, Afro-American was nominated for presidential candidate of major political party. Some might hope because he is Black, he should know how the oppressed feel.

Can Ob(s)ama-Bi(nla)den change things better for the U.S. rather than fighting against terrorists outside their country? No more war and poverty, please! 

Last month, I mentioned the below ad was racist using monkey as OBAMA in presidential election campaign.

The company that uses the ad, EMOBILE admitted the commercial was offensive to Afro-Americans considering the historical fact that monkey character had been used to portray Blacks as inferior creature to other people. Then early this month, they announced they would not air the commercial on TV and pulled the ad. However, they said they never meant to insult Black people by this ad because monkeys has been their maskots in their company's products.

I've mentioned this issue last month on this blog, see this article posted on June 21. I also mentioned on Japan's well-known internet newspaper, JANJAN. This is the article (in Japanese.) Some people object my view because I seem to make extreme interpretation of the ad concept. There are a lot of commercials that use animals to portray human characters.

But as a result, I was right. EMOBILE received so many complaints from Americans living in Japan. CNN covered this story. I knew that would happen because I used to live in the U.S. and learned so much about history of racism. I took Black Studies course.

Well, that helped. Most Japanese are ignorant about this issue because our society is much less diverse than the U.S. in terms of race and ethncity.  

EMOBILE wasted so much ad budget but they learned good lesson. So did many Japanese citizens.

I found such an ad in Tokyo train.

It says "CHANGE to Emobile phone." This monkey might look like one of US presidential candidates.

I think it is racist. They couldn't post the same postar in the U.S.

I don't like it. They could use human actor (Japanese or Afro-American guy) instead of a monkey.