“Love to eat turkey cause it’s good. Love to eat turkey like a good boy should. Turkey, Thanksgiving, so good. Eat that turkey all night long, Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong. Love to eat the turkey with the cranberries. Can’t believe the Mets traded Darryl Strawberry.

” … Thanksgiving is a special night.

“Jimmy Walker used to say ‘dynamite.'”

There’s a little of Adam Sandler’s “Thanksgiving Song.” I can’t help it. I’m all giddy. Thanksgiving is less than a week away and most Iowa Staters get a much deserved week off.

Is it just me or is everyone just swamped with papers and what not? I mean, I’ve got more projects than the city of Chicago. A lot of us have assignments due today.

So hey you! What are you doing reading this column? You’d better get that paper done pronto!

Isn’t next week going to be great? You get a chance to catch up on those papers and projects that are due after the break. I hope you all get a chance to see some friends and family that you haven’t seen in awhile. Always remember those who’ve been there for you.

As the House of Pain lyric goes, “You don’t know where you’re goin’ if ya don’t look back. What’s the use of havin’ ends if ya lose all your friends?”

My brother, who lives in Sioux City, will be coming home next week. I can’t wait to show him who’s boss on Sega football.

Come on, admit it. You know you’ll be breakin’ out the Sega or the Nintendo or God forbid, the ATARI for a little video game fun. I’m 22, my brother is 26, and we’re still hooked on “Bill Walsh’s College Football.” Talk about the decline of western civilization as we know it.

I wonder if people my age will still be playing Sega when we’re old and gray. Do you think we’ll be hosting Sega tournaments in 2045 rather than bingo? It could happen. Triple-options, blitzes and rollout passes beat I-47 and B-34 any day.

On a serious note, on Monday of this week sixty people were arrested in a prayerful protest at Fort Benning, GA, demanding the closing of the U.S. Army’s “School of the Americas” (SOA). Over 400 people gathered to remember the seventh anniversary of the massacre of six Jesuit priests and two women co-workers at the hands of SOA graduates at the University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador.

Last Friday some of us here at Iowa State protested the SOA on the lawn in front of Parks Library. I wrote about a small sample of the atrocities committed by SOA graduates in my column on November 8.

To summarize: The SOA uses U.S. tax dollars to train Latin American military officers to torture and murder religious people, community activists, teachers, unionists and others.

The use of rape, torture, and murder against non-combatants is referred to by former CIA Director Stansfield Turner as “state-supported terrorism.” By that definition, that’s exactly what SOA graduates such as Manuel Noriega and Robert D’ Aubuisson have done against people in Latin America.

You might say, “well this seems irrational. U.S. government leaders say they are for democracy and human rights throughout the world. Why would the United States government support police state terrorism and torture?”

It may seem irrational on the surface, but it’s actually quite rational for the elites who plan state policy. Just because some of the liberal critics don’t know what they’re doing doesn’t mean the power elites don’t know what they’re doing.

The central principle of U.S. foreign policy is to make the world safe for the multinational corporations and the free-market-capital-accumulation system. There are other principles, but this is the major one.

As human rights conditions get worse, factors affecting the “climate of investment,” like the tax laws and labor repression, improve from the viewpoint of multinational corporations.

Military dictatorships often improve this investment climate, so the U.S. officials and corporate lawyers who influence policy are sensitive to this.

Military dictators in El Salvador, Indonesia, or wherever, essentially enter into a joint venture agreement with the leaders of the “free world.” They keep the masses quiet, maintain an “open door” to multinational investment, and provide military bases and otherwise serve as loyal clients. In exchange, these dictators get military and economic aid to keep the masses of the people in line.

So our tax dollars pay for repression while some corporations make off like bandits. These corporations escape paying billions of dollars due to overseas shelters, so our taxes go up to make up for this loss.

Our taxes are also used in foreign-aid programs to governments that maintain the cheap labor markets that lure away American jobs. This foreign aid also builds roads, plants and ports for the companies to use.

So most American workers and taxpayers get a raw deal out of this. But surely we get cheaper goods as consumers right? Not really.

Usually big companies sell goods made abroad at as high a price as possible to American markets. Corporations go to Central America and Asia to increase profits, not to produce lower-priced goods to save money for American consumers. They pay low wages abroad but charge as much as they can when they sell goods here in the U.S.

If this is news to you I wouldn’t be surprised. The corporate-owned media and the corporate-dominated universities tend to give short thrift to serious critiques of U.S. foreign policy. Hmm … I wonder why.

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Drew Chebuhar is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Muscatine.