Als Afghanistan iets duidelijk maakt, is het juist dat Europa militair gezien totaal op de Amerikanen aangewezen is: zij vertrekken, dus moeten wij ook weg. Bovendien grijpen Rusland en China tegenwoordig alles aan om anti-Amerikaanse allianties te smeden. Daarom hebben Amerikanen en Europeanen elkaar en de NAVO harder nodig dan ooit. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/08/27/europa-moet-zijn-eigen-boontjes-gaan-doppen-a4056289
Lachwekkend is de stelling dat ‘Als Afghanistan iets duidelijk maakt, is het juist dat Europa militair gezien totaal op de Amerikanen aangewezen is,’ want precies het omgekeerde is het geval. De 'Amerikanen' zijn er juist nietin geslaagd om de oorlog daar te winnen. De NAVO is alleen op de VS aangewezen zodra het weer eens een oorlog verliest, een oorlog waarin Washington en Wall Street hun satllietlanden hebben meegesleept. Sinds de Tweede Wereldoorlog is ‘Amerika’ er niet in geslaagd de Korea-oorlog te winnen, ook niet de Vietnam oorlog, de oorlog in Irak, in Libië, de oorlog in Syrië. Met andere woorden: ‘Als Afghanistan iets duidelijk maakt, is het juist dat Europa militair gezien totaal’ niet ‘op de Amerikanen aangewezen is.’ Alleen het oorlogje in 1983 tegen het Caraïbisch eilandje Grenada, met een bevolking van 89.000 inwoners van wie 32 procent onder de armoedegrens leeft, werd door de VS gewonnen. De bevolking van Grenada stamt grotendeels af van Afrikaanse slaven, nadat de oorspronkelijke Indiaanse bevolking volledig uitgeroeid werd na de Franse invasie in 1649. ‘Grenada heeft, net als veel Caraïbische eilanden, te maken met emigratie naar andere landen. Jongeren emigreren vaak naar Westerse of andere delen van het Caraïbisch gebied. Dit heeft tot gevolg dat twee derde van de bevolking van Grenada buiten Grenada leeft.’
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenada
Ook De Gruyter’s bewering dat ‘Rusland en China tegenwoordig alles aan[grijpen] om anti-Amerikaanse allianties te smeden,’ is even potsierlijk, want het is gebruikelijk dat grootmachten trachten ‘allianties te smeden’ met landen met aanzienlijke voorraden tamelijk zeldzame grondstoffen zoals Afghanistan. Bovendien is het normaal dat landen die grenzen aan dezelfde regio als Afghanistan, dus Rusland en China, bondgenootschappen aangaan. De Europese Unie en de Noord-Amerikaanse Vrijhandelsovereenkomst ((NAFTA) zijn hiervan slechts twee saillante voorbeelden. ‘Anti-Amerikaanse allianties’? Met veel meer recht kan gesteld worden dat de Europese Unie, onder druk van de Verenigde Staten, zich heeft ontwikkeld tot een anti-Russische alliantie. En als het aan de NRC-propagandiste De Gruyter ligt dan zou de NAVO al een oorlog met de Russische Federatie zijn begonnen. Godzijdank worden deze opinies door westerse beleidsbepalers buiten Nederland tot nu toe niet serieus genomen. Sterker nog: zij hebben nog nooit van deze opgewonden mevrouw gehoord. Goed ingevoerde buitenlandse waarnemers nemen eveneens de door haar opgevoerde bewering niet serieus dat: ‘Joe Biden de derde Amerikaanse president op rij [is] die aangeeft dat hij geen zin heeft om ’s werelds politieman te blijven spelen.’ De VS ‘’s werelds politieman’? Deze voorstelling van zaken doet sterk denken aan Joseph Goebbels’ adagium dat ‘als u een leugen maar vaak genoeg herhaalt, de mensen haar zullen geloven, en zelfs ook u zult haar gaan geloven,’ of de nazi-leerstelling dat 'Wij spreken niet om wat te zeggen, maar om een bepaald effect te bereiken.’ Daarom even de werkelijkheid: op 19 november 2013 publiceerde ik de volgende feiten op mijn weblog, zoals beschreven door de Amerikaanse freelance auteur Bill Berkowitz:
Torture of prisoners began in earnest in late 2001, when those detained ‘at detention facilities at Bagram Air Base and in Kandahar, [were subject] to beatings, exposure to extreme cold, physical suspensions by chains, slamming into walls, sleep deprivation, constant light, and forced nakedness and others forms of humiliating and degrading treatment.’
What started as trial by torture — a little of this and a little of that — soon developed into ‘a theory of interrogation… that was based on inducing fear, anxiety, depression, cognitive dislocation, and personality disintegration in detainees to break their resistance against yielding information.’
While torture methods were being experimented with and developed, Bush Administration officials began laying ‘the legal groundwork for a policy that would abandon restrictions on torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment imposed by treaty obligations and U.S. criminal law.’ By early 2002, in a monumental decision, ‘the White House counsel declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees at Guantánamo.’
The limited role for health professionals during CIA-run torture sessions grew. By 2005, the initial set of 10 ‘enhanced’ methods grew to 14. Time for sleep deprivation increased from no more than 48 hours to 180 hours: ‘Detainees were kept awake by being shackled in a standing position, hands to the ceiling and feet to the floor, fed by detention personnel and diapered so that nothing interfered with the standing position.’
The detainees were nude; cold water-dousing of nude prisoners, not included in the 2002 memo, was now allowed; and waterboarding ‘described only briefly in 2002, [as aiming] … to induce the feeling and threat of imminent death,’ was described in 2005 ‘as causing the sensation of drowning and carrying risks of aspiration, airway blockage, and death from asphyxiation.’
From the early round up of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq to the establishment of Guantanamo, medical care, particularly mental health care was woefully inadequate: In Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence shows that clinical medical personnel were not isolated from interrogations as at Guantánamo; they engaged in various aspects of interrogation as well as other security functions. Physicians reportedly monitored interrogations and psychiatrists signed off on interrogation plans involving sleep deprivation.
Prisoner abuse went routinely unreported by medical personnel. The report points out that ‘Even as the use of torture by the military began to decline in 2005 and 2006 when a new DoD (Amerikaans ministerie van Defense. svh) interrogation field manual was issued that prohibited the use of many (but not all) highly coercive methods, physicians and nurses became involved in unethical force-feeding and use of restraint chairs in breaking hunger strikes.’
The Department of Defense instituted three ‘changes in ethical standards and policies to rationalize and facilitate medical and psychological professionals’ participation in interrogation.’ Do no harm descended into avoid or minimize harm. Another DoD change ‘involved conflating ethical standards for health professionals involved in interrogation with general legal standards.’
As hunger strikes — defined as total fasting with only water ingested for more than 72 hours by a mentally competent, non-suicidal person for the purpose of obtaining an administrative or political goal rather than self-harm — became a weapon of the detainees, more health professional became involved in force-feeding sessions.
Ethics Abandoned points out that ‘International ethical standards and guidelines for treatment established by the World Medical Association and U.S. national medical practice standards guide both physicians and detention facilities responses to hunger strikes. Physicians have the ethical responsibility to determine if a prisoner’s action is indeed a hunger strike; ensure the hunger striking individual’s well-being; determine the individual’s competence to make informed decisions; counsel the individual regarding the consequences and risks of extended food refusal and the options he or she has; determine whether the individual’s decisions are made freely and without coercion; and see to the medical care of the individual during the hunger strike.’
Instead of advocating for the hunger strikers, many of the health providers became involved with force-feeding in restraint chairs, an often violent and painful method. According to the report’s authors, ‘the force-feeding policies undercut necessary, ongoing physician-patient relationships and independent medical judgment,’ and as of the writing of the report, they had not been able to ascertain current policy of hunger strikes, which are continuing.
‘We now know that medical personnel were co-opted in ways that undermined their professionalism,’ said Open Society Foundations President Emeritus Aryeh Neier. ‘By shining a light on misconduct, we hope to remind physicians of their ethical responsibilities.’
Garrisoning the globe: The United States has an estimated 800 or so military bases or garrisons, ranging from the size of American small towns to tiny outposts, across the planet. They exist almost everywhere—Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America — except in countries that are considered American foes (and given the infamous Guantánamo Bay Detention Center in Cuba, there’s even an exception to that). At the moment, Great Britain and France still have small numbers of bases, largely left over from their imperial pasts; that rising great-power rival China officially has one global garrison, a naval base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa (near an American base there, one of its growing collection of outposts on that continent), which much worries American war planners, and a naval base, in the process of being built, in Gwadar, Pakistan; that other great-power rival, Russia, still has several bases in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, and a single naval base in Syria (which similarly disturbs American military planners). The United States, as I said, has at least 800 of them, a number that puts in the shade the global garrisons of any other great power in history, and to go with them, more than 450,000 military personnel stationed outside its borders. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that, like no other power in history, it has divided the world — every bit of it — as if slicing a pie, into six military commands; that’s six commands for every inch of the globe (and another two for space and cyberspace). Might all of this not be considered just a tad extreme?
Funding the military: The US puts approximately a trillion dollars annually in taxpayer funds into its military, its 17 intelligence agencies, and what’s now called 'homeland security.' Its national-security budget is larger than those of the next eight countries combined and still rising yearly, though most politicians agree and many regularly insist that the US military has been badly underfunded in these years, left in a state of disrepair, and needs to be 'rebuilt.' Now, honestly, don’t you think that qualifies as both exceptional in the most literal sense and kind of extreme?
Fighting wars: The United States has been fighting wars nonstop since its military invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. That’s almost 17 years of invasions, occupations, air campaigns, drone strikes, special-operations raids, naval air and missile attacks, and so much else, from the Philippines to Pakistan, Afghanistan to Syria, Libya to Niger. And in none of those places is such war-making truly over. It goes without saying that there’s no other country on the planet making war in such a fashion or over anything like such a period of time. Americans were, for instance, deeply disturbed and ready to condemn Russia for sending its troops into neighboring Ukraine and occupying Crimea. That was considered an extreme act worthy of denunciations of the strongest sort. In this country, though, American-style war, despite invasions of countries thousands of miles away and the presidentially directed targeting of individuals across the globe for assassination by drone with next to no regard for national sovereignty, is not considered extreme. Most of the time, in fact, it’s seldom thought about at all or even seriously debated. And yet, isn’t fighting unending wars across thousands of miles of the planet for almost 17 years without end, while making the president into a global assassin, just a tad extreme?
Destroying cities: Can there be any question that, in the American mind, the most extreme act of this century was the destruction of those towers in New York City and part of the Pentagon near Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, with the deaths of almost 3,000 unsuspecting, innocent civilians? That became the definition of an extreme act by a set of extremists. Consider, however, the American response. Across significant parts of the Middle East in the years since, the US has had a major hand in destroying not just tower after tower, but city after city — Falluja, Ramadi, and Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa in Syria, Sirte in Libya. One after another, parts or all of them were turned into literal rubble. A reported 20,000 munitions were dropped on Raqqa, the 'capital' of the brief Islamic State, by US and allied air power, leaving at least 1,400 civilians dead and barely a building untouched or even standing (with the Trump administration intent on not providing funds for any kind of reconstruction). In these years, in response to the destruction in whole or part of a handful of buildings, the US has destroyed (often with a helping hand from the Islamic State) whole cities, while filling the equivalent of tower after tower with dead and wounded civilians. Is there nothing extreme about that?
Displacing people: In the course of its wars, the US has helped displace a record number of human beings since the last days of World War II. In Iraq alone, from the years of conflict that Washington set off with its invasion and occupation of 2003, vast numbers of people have been displaced, including, in the ISIS era, 1.3 million children. In response to that reality, in 'the homeland,' the man who became president in 2017 and the officials he appointed went to work to transform the very refugees we had such a hand in creating into terrifying bogeymen, potentially the most dangerous and extreme people on the planet, and then turned to the task of ensuring that none of them would ever arrive in this country. Doesn’t that seem like an extreme set of acts and responses?
And that’s only to begin to plunge into the topic of American extremity. After all, we now have a president whose administration considers it perfectly normal, in fact a form of 'deterrence policy,' to separate parents from even tiny children crossing our southern border or to cut food aid and raise the rent on poor Americans. We’re talking about a president with a cultlike following whose government is ideologically committed to wiping out environmental protections of every sort and pushing the further fossil-fuelization of the country and the planet, even if it means the long-term destruction of the very environment that has nurtured humanity these last thousands of years.
Think of this perhaps as a new kind of death cult, which means that Donald Trump might be considered the superpower version of an Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. As with all such things, this particular cult did not come from nowhere, but from a land of growing extremity, a country that now, it seems, may be willing to preside over not just cities in ruin but a planet in ruin, too. Doesn’t that seem just a little extreme to you?
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-united-states-is-the-real-extremist-country/
Op 29 augustus 2021 belichtte de in Delhi gestationeerde journalist Ajaz Ashraf de volgende realiteit:
The Taliban and the United States of America share an enduring passion for war and mayhem. There is, though, a difference between them — the Taliban mostly kill people of their own country, America’s victims are largely citizens of other countries.
Some will likely say the US, unlike the Taliban, goes to war to promote democracy and freedom. What they ignore is the chequered record of America’s interference in elections of other countries. It has done so as many 81 times between 1946 and 2000, according to the database of political scientist Dov Lenin. In 59% of these cases, America’s favoured party was voted to power.
America’s interventions have not always been as benign as influencing elections. It has staged coups, assassinated leaders, fought proxy wars and brutalised societies. It would require a book to list them all.
It, therefore, makes sense to limit the survey of America’s depredations only in Muslim countries, given the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan and the ensuing fears of Islamic militancy re-emerging.
For an overview, turn to military historian Andrew Bacevich’s piece in The Washington Post, penned after American President Barack Obama ordered the bombing of Syria in 2014. Bacevich wrote, 'Syria has become at least the 14th country in the Islamic world that US forces have invaded or occupied or bombed… And that’s just since 1980.'
Bacevich provided a check-list: “Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew.”
Bacevich’s list is likely to grow in case the Taliban fail to stabilize Afghanistan. This week’s bombing of Kabul airport, in which 13 American marines died, had American President Joe Bidendeclare that he would hunt down its perpetrators. The hunt will necessarily involve Americans bombing Afghanistan.
https://www.newsclick.in/history-shows-us-extremist-taliban
One of the unique talents of American capitalism has been its mastery of salesmanship. This should not be surprising given that marketing has been an indispensable and pervasive feature of the economy since at least the Civil War.
Still, selling a deeply flawed economic system to the people with the same enthusiasm and success devoted to advertising a bar of soap is a challenging assignment. Just as dentifrices (tandpasta. svh) and deodorants are extolled as matchless and wondrous, capitalism receives equally rapturous (opgetogen. svh) promotion, beginning in children’s primers and continuing through succeeding educational and cultural channels across the social order.
One of the tricks of effective advertising is to identify the product with a highly desirable quality that has widespread appeal. A certain toothpaste, for instance, claims to offer a feeling of freshness. In selling the private ownership system to the public, this first principle of hucksterism (gesjacher. svh) has been applied with remarkable effectiveness.
In a nation whose origins began with an anti-colonial revolution, freedom and liberty are powerful words. Fully aware of this, generations of systemic hucksters have appropriated these words on behalf of profits and class-dominated governance. This has been the national experience since the First World War.
This cataclysmic event, along with its profound effects on the distribution of world power, has transformed and exponentially increased American propaganda — salesmanship for political goals — domestically and globally.
It ushered in an era of far-reaching American power — economically, politically, and culturally — which produced a giant global shift in influence from the old, worn-out European empires, to the new financial-cultural domain being created by American capital.
To make the emerging American system of domination palatable at home and acceptable abroad to nations which had struggled for centuries against colonialism, a new dimension of propaganda was a necessity.
As Dr. Snow perceptively points out in her text, two overriding objectives comprised the agenda for US propaganda in the postwar period: the defense of the existing capitalist world against threatened social change — socialism in Western Europe and elsewhere — and the capture of the ex-colonial world for private enterprise and foreign capital.
Anti-communism was the instrument that served both objectives as well as the means of gaining domestic support, or at least toleration, for American global interventions and takeovers. Anti-communism turned attention away from pressing problems at home and abroad by focusing hysterically on fabricated external threats. At the same time, it enabled a continually expanding US world presence to be explained as offering protection against communism.
For nearly half a century, the United States Information Agency (USIA) waged ideological war against communism in its worldwide broadcasts. Using the rhetoric of freedom and liberty — the CIA-operated stations in Europe were named Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty — American propaganda dwelled on the ominous and imminent threat of communism, while US corporations moved into one global space after another.
The influence of the USIA in this period cannot be over-exaggerated. Certainly, the commercial flood of US cultural products that engulfed the world in the last fifty years — movies, TV programs, recordings, publications, student exchanges, theme parks, data bases et al — was, by far, the most important means in transmitting ideology, anti-communism, and American socio-economic institutions. Yet the USIA did its bit to target those government bureaucrats, intellectuals, local managers, etcetera, who may have disdained US popular culture.
Once the Soviet system collapsed, however, the propaganda war took a new turn. Again, Dr. Snow is right on target as she charts the shift in the USIA’s efforts, away from anti-communism to full devotion to US corporate corporate initiatives, to extend the latter’s influence in what Wall Street designated as ‘emerging market’ states, mostly former colonial territories.
Snow makes amply clear that, in this latest propaganda campaign, the use of student and academic exchange programs, and the Agency’s mandate to work for mutual understanding between nations, have been perverted into crass missions to assist American companies in finding profitable business overseas.
Yet propaganda has its limits. Reality, at some point, always intrudes. As this is written, people in many Southeast Asian countries are discovering that the bitter truths about the much touted capitalism and its far-flung network of control, cannot indefinitely be made acceptable by propaganda. Despite the powerful transmitters at the disposal of capital, the harsh features of a market organized society, and its inherent connection to inequality sooner or later will be recognized and resisted.
For Generations, a fundamental function of US foreign policy has been to make certain that the natural resources, markets, labor, and capital of other nations were accessible to US corporate investors on the most favorable terms possible. In 1907, Woodrow Wilson offered this candid observation:
‘Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process.’
In his 1953 State of the Union message, President Dwight Eisenhower observed, ‘A serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy [is] the encouragement of a hospitable climate for investment in foreign nations.’ What no U.S. president has ever explained is: What gives the United States the right to dictate the destinies of other nations, mold their development, and intervene forcibly against them when they dare to mark an independent course?
With unfailing consistency, US intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, US leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries — from Chile to Guatemala to Indonesia to Mozambique — whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate investors.
While claiming that such interventions are needed to safeguard democracy in the world, US leaders have given aid and comfort to dozens of tyrannical regimes that have overthrown reformist democratic governments (as in Chile and Guatemala, for instance) and shown themselves to be faithful acolytes of the transnational corporate investors. In 1993, before the United Nations, President Bill Clinton proclaimed, ‘Our overriding purpose is to expand and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies.’ In truth, as Nancy Snow shows in this cogent and revealing pamphlet, the emphasis has been more on the ‘market-based’ and less on the ‘democracy.’
To the American public and to the world, however, as Snow notes, US policy has been represented in the most glowing — and most deceptive — terms. Peace, prosperity, and democracy have become coded propaganda terms. ‘Peace’ means US global military domination, a kind of Pax Americana. ‘Prosperity’ means subsidizing the expansion of US corporate interests abroad, at the expense of the US taxpayer and the millions of people in other nations who might be better served by loyal and independent development. And ‘democracy,’ Nancy Snow notes, means a system in which political decisions are made by the transnational and publicly unaccountable corporate interests and their government allies, ‘not based on a populist or participatory ideal of politics but one in which the public’s role is minimized.’
Global capitalist hegemony is attained by two means. First, there is the global military apparatus. The U.S. defense budget is at least five times larger than any other country’s defense expenditures. US naval, air, and ground forces maintain a police presence around the globe, using hundreds of military bases throughout various regions. U.S. advisors train, equip, and finance military and paramilitary forces in countries on every continent. All this to make the world safe for the transnationals.
The other instrument of U.S. intervention might be called ‘cultural imperialism,’ the systematic penetration and dominance of other nations’ communication and informational systems, educational institutions, arts, religious organizations, labor unions, elections, consumer habits, and lifestyles. Drawing upon both her personal experience and her scholarly investigation, Nancy Snow offers us a critical picture of one of the key instruments of cultural imperialism, the United States Information Agency (USIA). A benign-sounding unit of government supposedly dedicated to informational and cultural goals, USIA is actually in the business of waging disinformation wars on behalf of the Fortune 500.
Operating as a propaganda unit of a corporate-dominated U.S. foreign policy, USIA ran interference for NAFTA, in Snow’s words, ‘doing nothing to advance the more noble goals of mutual understanding and education,’ while leaving a trail of broken promises about jobs and prosperity. USIA’s efforts on behalf of NAFTA and other such undertakings have brought fantastic jumps in profits for big business, at great cost to the environment, democratic sovereignty, and worker and consumer well-being.
Nancy Snow also deals with the larger issues that go beyond the USIA, especially the way the US political system is dominated and distorted by moneyed interests, transforming democracy into plutocracy, and making a more democratic U.S. foreign policy improbable.
Still, as Snow reminds us, victories can be won when broad-based democratic forces unite and fight back vigorously. A recent example would be the defeat of fast-track legislation in Congress in 1997 in the face of a massive blitz launched by powerful business associations, the White House, and the major media. Snow concludes with a useful and instructive seven-point agenda for a citizen-based diplomacy, pointing out how readers can and should get involved… Nancy Snow shows herself to be a discerning, fair-minded investigator, a skilled writer and researcher, and a socially conscious citizen. No wonder she found herself unable to function within the U.S. propaganda machine. She’s too good for corporate America.
THE WORLD’S RICHEST 1% HAVE MORE THAN TWICE AS MUCH WEALTH AS 6.9 BILLION PEOPLE.
ALMOST HALF OF HUMANITY IS LIVING ON LESS THAN $5.50 A DAY.
1. Lining the pockets of the world’s billionaires. The very top of the economic pyramid sees trillions of dollars of wealth in the hands of a very small group of people, predominantly men, whose fortune and power grow exponentially. Billionaires have now more wealth than the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population. Meanwhile, around 735 million people are still living in extreme poverty. Many others are just one hospital bill or failed harvest away from slipping into it.
ONLY 4 CENTS IN EVERY DOLLAR OF TAX REVENUE COMES FROM TAXES ON WEALTH.
THE SUPER-RICH AVOID AS MUCH AS 30 PERCENT OF THEIR TAX LIABILITY.
2. Wealth undertaxed. While the richest continue to enjoy booming fortunes, they are also enjoying some of the lowest levels of tax in decades — as are the corporations that they own. Instead taxes are falling disproportionately on working people. When governments undertax the rich, there's less money for vital services like healthcare and education, increasing the amount of care work that falls on the shoulders of women and girls.
TODAY 258 MILLION CHILDREN – 1 OUT OF EVERY 5 – WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO GO TO SCHOOL.
FOR EVERY 100 BOYS OF PRIMARY SCHOOL AGE WHO ARE OUT OF SCHOOL, 121 GIRLS ARE DENIED THE RIGHT TO EDUCATION.
3. Underfunded public services. At the same time, public services are suffering from chronic underfunding or being outsourced to private companies that exclude the poorest people. In many countries a decent education or quality healthcare has become a luxury only the rich can afford. It has profound implications for the future of our children and the opportunities they will have to live a better and longer life.
EVERY DAY 10,000 PEOPLE DIE BECAUSE THEY LACK ACCESS TO AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE.
EACH YEAR, 100 MILLION PEOPLE ARE FORCED INTO EXTREME POVERTY DUE TO HEALTHCARE COSTS.
4. Denied a longer life. In most countries having money is a passport to better health and a longer life, while being poor all too often means more sickness and an earlier grave. People from poor communities can expect to die ten or twenty years earlier than people in wealthy areas. In developing countries, a child from a poor family is twice as likely to die before the age of five than a child from a rich family.
MEN OWN 50% MORE OF THE WORLD'S WEALTH THAN WOMEN, AND THE 22 RICHEST MEN HAVE MORE WEALTH THAN ALL THE WOMEN IN AFRICA.
THE UNPAID CARE WORK DONE BY WOMEN IS ESTIMATED $10.8 TRILLION A YEAR - THREE TIMES THE SIZE OF THE TECH INDUSTRY.
5. Inequality is sexist. With less income and fewer assets than men, women make up the greatest proportion of the world’s poorest households, and that proportion is growing. They are more likely to be found in poorly paid and precarious employment, supporting the market economy with cheap or free labor. They are also supporting the state through billions of hours of unpaid or underpaid care work, a huge but unrecognized contribution to our societies and economic prosperity.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/5-shocking-facts-about-extreme-global-inequality-and-how-even-it
In hetzelfde jaar werd bovendien het volgende bekend:
Oxfam said the wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.
As a result, the report concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. In 2016 the number was 61.
Among the findings of the report were:
In the 10 years since the financial crisis, the number of billionaires has nearly doubled.
Between 2017 and 2018 a new billionaire was created every two days.
The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, saw his fortune increase to $112bn. Just 1% of his fortune is equivalent to the whole health budget for Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people.
The poorest 10% of Britons are paying a higher effective tax rate than the richest 10% (49% compared with 34%) once taxes on consumption such as VAT are taken into account.
Uitgaande van het feit dat armoede dagelijks geweld betekent, en daarnaast geweld oproept, is het geenszins overdreven te stellen dat de ‘corporate press' een uiterst gewelddadige neoliberale chaos steunt, die de wereld naar de afgrond voert. Ruim zes decennia geleden al wees de prominente Amerikaanse socioloog C. Wright Mills in zijn essay ‘De massamedia en de publieke opinie’ erop dat de rol van de moderne westerse massamens gereduceerd is tot het uitvoeren van opdrachten. In een geavanceerde technocratie kan dit domweg ook niet anders. Mills concludeerde:
dat de publieke opinie niet meer is dan een afdruk van of een reactie — van ‘response’ kunnen we niet spreken — op de inhoud van de massamedia. In deze opvatting is het publiek niet meer dan de som van een groot aantal individuen: ieder individu ondergaat passief de massamedia en is het nogal hulpeloze slachtoffer van de suggesties en manipulates waarmee die media hem overstromen. Die manipulatie vanuit gecentraliseerde controlepunten ontneemt de mensen als het ware iedere mogelijkheid om informatie te vergaren en om wijzigingen van hun opinies tot stand te brengen — wat alleen weggelegd schijnt te zijn voor het publiek van weleer, dat bestond uit kleine opinieproducenten en opinieconsumenten die een vrije, harmonieuze markt tot hun beschikking hadden.
Beslissingen worden door de machthebbers genomen. Deze beslissingen worden vervolgens via de massacommunicatiemedia bekend gemaakt. Zij bereiken mensen die nummers op mediamarkten zijn,
en ‘worden uitgevoerd door de officiële functionarissen van het gezag,’ met als gevolg dat de:
publieke opinie bestaat uit reacties op wat via de media gebracht wordt. Persoonlijke discussie speelt geen rol in het proces opinievorming; ieder mens is een geïsoleerd wezen dat alleen maar reageert op de bevelen en suggesties van de gemonopoliseerde massamedia.
Onder gecentraliseerd gezag monopoliseren de opinie-manipulatoren eerst de formele communicatiemiddelen, vervolgens proberen ze ook dwingend op te leggen wat gelezen en waarnaar geluisterd mag worden Zij proberen de mediamarkten en de gemonopoliseerde media te verenigen om op die manier zeker te zijn van een gedisciplineerde response van de mensen in de mediamarkten.
En dit is precies wat Caroline de Gruyter en alle andere gecorrumpeerde mainstream-opiniemakers doen. Meer daarover de volgend keer.
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