Why does the US media lie so much?

A good opinion piece on how American media blatantly lies to its own people, & the world. However, they always thought, & still think, that there would be no adverse consequences from this lying. Well, there are consequences for every action.

The lying & false statements about Afghanistan war, Iraq war, & in general, war on terror, for instance, have made our world a lot less safe. Those wars brought hell to innocent people in those regions where those wars are taking place, & at the same time, American soldiers, their families, & the whole American economy, also suffered, & in fact, is still suffering. Imagine the world now, if that same American media would have reported the news as it should have been reported in the first place, instead of saying, “the news is what we say it is.”

War on terror is just one example out of many. The opinion piece gives an example of how chemicals injected into cows to force them to give more milk harms the Americans, themselves, who drink that milk. We can easily extend that example to meat, fruits & vegetables, & many other kinds of foods American public is eating & suffering from multiple health problems.

Media, & by extension, journalism, are supposed to be vanguard of the public, against the wrongdoers; be that wrongdoers be the governments or anyone else. But when the media falsifies & lies about what is going on in the country, then the consequences are horrifying. Now, that lying of media has brought on Trump & its supporters labelling each & everything coming out of MSM (mainstream media) as false, lies, & "fake news." It's not that Trump is not lying, either, but the public becomes completely confused as to who to believe, when both parties are saying that what they are reporting or saying is true & the other is lying.

On top of that, this opinion piece also shows the hypocrisy of Americans. We in the developing world think that the developed world got to where it is by being honest, truthful, & transparent. No. Their development has got nothing to do with these noble traits of a society & people. The developed world got to where it is now by lying, cheating, & defrauding the other party.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/337424-us-media-lie-mckinney/

Either by omission or by commission, the US media actively misinforms the public on crucial issues that matter. The reason they do this is because they legally can.

My mentor and dissertation committee member, Dr. Peter Dale Scott, recently wrote on his Facebook page: “Inadequate decently priced housing is one of America's most urgent domestic problems, with developers vacating neighborhoods to build third and fourth homes for the one percent. It is a symptom of what's wrong that Cynthia McKinney, one of the relatively few former members of Congress with a Ph.D., has to go to RT to discuss a crisis that is so under-reported in the US media.”

And therein lies the problem with US media: The news is so filtered and in some cases propagandized that it bears little resemblance to the day-to-day intellectual needs of the average US citizen. It fails to provide solutions, let alone information that allows US citizens to cast informed votes. Either by omission or by commission, the US media actively under-, ill-, or misinforms the public on crucial issues that matter! The reason they do this is because they legally can. Media in the US has at least one court ruling that allows them to knowingly lie to the public.

Let’s start with the First Amendment to the US Constitution that protects freedom of speech. Courts in the US have ruled on many occasions that freedom of speech also includes the freedom to lie. The rationale is that such rulings give space for unpopular statements of fact. For example, in 2012, the US Supreme Court voted 6-3 to affirm a lower court decision to overturn a conviction for lying about one’s credentials.

The lower court judge in that case wrote, “How can you develop a reputation as a straight shooter if lying is not an option?”

Washington State Supreme Court even ruled that lying to get votes, distinguishing between fact and opinion, was not something that the state should negotiate. It wrote that people and not the government should be the final arbiter of truth in a political debate.

Now, the First Amendment does not protect some types of lying: like, for instance, lying while under oath, lying to a government official, lying to sell a product. Even in defamation cases, the plaintiff has a firm threshold to overcome, especially if the person targeted is a “public person.” However, the Supreme Court has emphatically ruled that individuals have a right to lie: what about corporations and media outlets? In 2012, the Supreme Court extended First Amendment rights to organizations and corporations in its Citizens United decision.

My local newspaper, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (AJC), ran a headline against me just days before my election that read: “McKinney Indicted.” One had to pore over the article to learn that the McKinney referred to was neither me nor my father, nor anyone related to me. But the AJC never stated that fact. It was a dirty trick carried out by the US press. And sadly, it happens all the time. I filed a lawsuit against the AJC, but had to withdraw it because of a lack of money to finance the lawsuit and, worse, the hostile environment regarding the media and anybody's efforts to make them tell the truth. I remained powerless before the media monolith and wondered why and how they could get away with such blatant and outright lies.

Then, in 2010, 'Project Censored' ran a story that caught my eye: “The Media Can Legally Lie.” After having had my series of run-ins with my local media as they always failed to report the truth about me, I was drawn to this story. Project Censored is a media watchdog based at Sonoma State University in California. Its goal is to end the junk food news diet of misinformation and disinformation fed to the US public by the corporate media. It is a project of students and faculty to shine a light on underreported or unreported stories that should be of great interest to the public. The Project Censored movie tells a part of its important story.

The 2010 story centers on two journalists, hired by FOX News as investigative journalists, who became whistleblowers when they were instructed to report “news” that they knew was not true.

According to Project Censored, in February 2003, FOX News argued that there was no prohibition on media outlets distorting or falsifying the news in the United States. And skipping ahead, FOX News won on that claim! But to backtrack to provide some context, the issue was the placement of Bovine Growth Hormone, BGH, manufactured by Monsanto, into the milk stream without labeling it.

A husband and wife reporting team produced a four-part series revealing the health risks for humans in drinking milk from cows treated with BGH to boost milk production. FOX News wanted the reporters to add statements from Monsanto that the couple knew were not factual. When they refused to make the suggested edits, the couple was fired. They sued and a Florida jury decided the couple was wrongfully fired. FOX News appealed the case. Basically, the Florida Appeals Court ruled that there is no law, rule, or even regulation against distorting the news and that the decision to report honestly resides with the news outlet.

FOX News was joined in its court action by other news outlets, notably Cox Television, Inc., a sister organization to the Cox-owned Atlanta Journal and Constitution. In an incredible and chilling turnabout, the two truth-telling journalists were ordered to pay FOX News millions of dollars to cover the company’s attorney fees. The reporters were told by FOX News executives, “The news is what we say it is.”

And there we have it. Now, this Court action immediately affected the right of people in the US to know what is in the food they buy. Media consolidation in the US is such that six corporations control 90% of the junk food news and entertainment fed to the people of the US and around the world. And US Courts not only say that this is OK, but also decided that it’s OK for them to knowingly lie to the public. That, in a nutshell, is why the US media lie: Because they can. And that, in a nutshell, is why the people of the US are increasingly turning to RT and alternative news outlets for information: Because they must.

Does the West really care about development?

A great opinion piece. People of the developing world always forget that the developed Global North didn't "develop" without hampering the development of the Global South. Large & intelligent populations of the Global South were seen as dangerous for the Global North's ambitions of developing themselves & keep ruling the world.

As I have blogged earlier, Global North developed by mass murdering, looting, & effectively disabling the development of the Global South by constant interference through military & political means. They wanted an easy & cheap access to human & mineral resources of the Global South, which could only be achieved by effectively controlling the region through any means, necessary.

Those means included interfering in political matters to install their own strongmen, abuse human rights at their own will, create such conditions of non-development & violence in the Global South, just so people of those countries have to move out of those countries, & their human labour is used in the development of the Global North, instead of developing their own countries in the Global South.

Corruption & human rights abuses in the Global South were done with the full consent & acknowledgement of the leaders of the Global North. But, as we should already know that Global North is a hypocritical world; they cry the crocodile tears, decrying the corruption & human rights abuses in the Global South, but then turn around & approve those activities as long as they are helping them achieve their own objectives of looting their resources of the Global South.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/mar/05/does-west-care-development

When it comes to international affairs, western politicians love to celebrate their devotion to development. In her flagship speech on development as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton offered stories about US aid transforming the lives of poor people in Indonesia, Nicaragua and South Africa. Laurent Fabius, the minister of foreign affairs for France, recently hailed his country’s commitment to development in the former colonies of west Africa. And at last year’s UN sustainable development goals summit, David Cameron spoke proudly about Britain’s record of providing “stability and security” to poor countries.

But this narrative of western benevolence only works by relying on our collective amnesia. For a slightly less fairytale-like version of the west’s relationship with development, we need to rewind to the decades following the second world war.

After the end of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and with the brief cessation of US intervention in Latin America, developing countries were growing incomes and reducing poverty at a rapid pace. Beginning in the 1950s, countries like Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran drew on the Keynesian model of mixed economy that had been working so well in the west. They made strategic use of land reforms to help peasant farmers, labour laws to boost workers’ wages, tariffs to protect local businesses, and resource nationalisation to help fund public housing, healthcare, and education.

This approach – known as “developmentalism” – was built on the twin values of economic independence and social justice. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked quite well. According to economist Robert Pollin, developmentalist policies sustained high per capita income growth rates of 3.2% for at least 20 years – higher than at any other time during the whole 20th century. As a result, the gap between the west and the rest began to narrow for the first time in history. It was nothing short of a miracle.

One might think western states would be thrilled at this success, but they were not amused. The new policies meant that multinational companies no longer had the easy access to the cheap labour, raw materials and consumer markets to which they had become accustomed during the colonial era.

Western powers – specifically the US, Britain and France – were not willing to let this continue. Instead of supporting the developmentalist movement, they set out on a decades-long campaign to topple the elected governments that were leading it and to install strongmen friendly to their interests – a long and bloody history that has been almost entirely erased from our collective memory.

It began with Iran in 1953. The democratically-elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was rolling out a wide range of pro-poor reforms, part of which included wresting control of the country’s oil reserves from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). Britain rejected this move, and responded swiftly. With the help of the CIA, Churchill deposed Mosaddegh in a coup d’etat and replaced him with an absolute monarch, Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, who reversed Mosaddegh’s reforms and went on to rule Iran with western support for 26 years.

The following year, the US did the very same thing in Guatemala. Jacobo Arbenz – the country’s second democratically-elected president – was redistributing unused portions of large private estates to landless Mayan peasants, with full compensation for the owners. But the American-based United Fruit Company took issue with this policy, and pushed Eisenhower to topple Arbenz. After the coup, Guatemala was ruled by US-backed dictatorships for 42 years, which presided over the massacre of more than 200,000 Mayans and one of the highest poverty rates in Latin America.

Brazil, too, was hit by a US-backed coup; they deposed President Goulart for his land reforms, corporate taxes, and other pro-poor policies that western companies disliked, and replaced him with a military dictatorship that lasted 21 years. President Sukarno of Indonesia was ousted for similar policies and replaced by a dictator, who – with British and US support – killed more than one million peasants, workers, and activists in one of the worst mass murders of the century, and went on to rule for 31 years. And then of course there was Chile: the US helped depose President Allende, the soft-spoken doctor who promised better wages, fairer rents, and social services for the poor, and replaced him with a dictator whose economic policies plunged some 45% of Chileans into poverty.

Some regions never even got a shot at developmentalism, western intervention was so swift. In Uganda, Britain raised the murderous Idi Amin to power, who crushed the progressive Common Man’s Charter before it could be implemented. In the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first elected leader, was assassinated by Belgium and the CIA when it became clear he would restrict foreign control over resource-rich Katanga province. Western powers installed Mobutu Sese Seko in his place, a cartoonishly corrupt dictator who commanded the country for nearly forty years with billions of dollars in US aid. Under Mobutu’s reign, per capita income collapsed by 2.2% each year; ordinary Congolese suffered poverty worse than that which they had known under Belgian colonial rule.

In west Africa, France refused to cede control over the region’s resources after the end of colonialism. Working through the secretive Françafrique network, they rigged the first elections in Cameroon and handpicked the president after poisoning his main opponent. In Gabon, they installed the dictatorship of Omar Bongo and kept him in power for 41 years in exchange for access to the country’s oil.

We could rehearse many, many more examples, all the way up to the recent western-backed coups in Haiti. It is tempting to see this as nothing but a list of crimes – albeit one that casts serious doubts on the west’s claims to promoting democracy and human rights abroad. But it is more than that. It reflects an organised effort on the part of western powers to destroy the developmentalist movement that flowered in the global south after colonialism. They simply would not tolerate development if it restricted their access to resources and markets.

The legacy of this history is that there is now greater inequality between the west and the rest than there was at the end of colonialism. And a soul-scorching 4.2 billion people remain in poverty today. No one has been brought to justice for the coups and assassinations that destroyed the global south’s most promising attempt at development and crushed popular dreams of independence. Probably no one ever will. But we need to acknowledge that they happened, and stop pretending that the US, France and Britain are benevolent champions of the poor.

How Prisons Ripoff and Exploit the Incarcerated (1/2)

Just astonishing to see the depravity of people; exploit anyone anywhere. As I always say in my blogs, that slavery has not been abolished from Western societies, it's been transformed in another format, & the world thinks that Western countries & the "White man" is so fair & honest.

This exploitation of prisoners is one of the major reasons that American governments keep harping that crime is increasing because they need to be tough on crime. They want so many restrictions on the general public that the general public needs to, eventually, get permission to even move an inch. The American government officials, who are in bed with people who are profiteering from this prison-industrial complex, want to pack prisons with latinos & African-Americans, just so, those people can be used, & abused, by the prison system, to help make obscene profits for the shareholders of the private prison owners. Of course, a country's GDP will increase & it will develop when the labour costs are virtually nil for producing products.

Prisons are supposed to be places where an individual, who has committed a crime, & needs to be punished, or sort of given a time-out from society, just so that person can think what he / she has done wrong to the society, & how he / she can become a better person. Instead of rehabilitating that criminal, the prison system of America is actually making those criminals even more hardened criminals. Prisons of third-world countries are in much more abysmal conditions, but, at least, the world knows about it & even the developing countries are transparent about it. Ironically, Americans tout their human rights record a little too much, considering how they treat their own citizens during their incarceration.

A decent person won't even treat an animal this bad in a "developed" country, but these actions are taking place, with official knowledge & assent, in the most powerful, & supposedly, "democratic" & "developed" country of the world. Wouldn't this be called corruption of the mind & body of the general public & their elected leaders? Wouldn't this be called injustice when a person is not given decent food & clothes when that person is wholly dependent on you, since he / she cannot earn a dime by himself / herself, due to the restrictions placed on him / her by society? Wouldn't this be called exploitation of the poor & needy when these people are put into prison system, & then taken advantage by being charged to call family, receive things from family, or never allowed to visit family at the time of their death?

Where's that so-called humanity of the "white man" or good, honest, Americans? As I always say, that the biggest lie the "white man" told to the world that he is fair, honest, & hardworking.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p62BF1apkyY

EDDIE CONWAY, FMR. BLACK PANTHER, BALTIMORE CHAPTER: Welcome to The Real News. I’m Eddie Conway from Baltimore.

Today in the studio with me I have a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Please join me in welcoming Chris Hedges.

CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST, SENIOR FELLOW AT THE NATION INSTITUTE: Thank you, Eddie.

CONWAY: Okay. I have been talking to you earlier about the business of the prison-industrial complex and how it’s impacting the lives of prisoners and their families. And you shared that you had some experience. Can you share a little bit of that with me now?

HEDGES: Yeah. Well, I’ve been teaching in prisons in New Jersey for a long time, almost ten years. And what I’ve watched over the last decade–and it’s probably something you saw when you were incarcerated–is how they increasingly prey on the prisoners and their families to make money. And that occurs by turning commissaries over to private corporations. And because it’s a captive market, they can charge anything they want. So, for instance, we got commissary prices from 1996. We compared them with prices today. And we’re talking about basic staples–toothpaste. We were talking earlier about noodles. What people don’t know is most prisoners live on those noodles that they have to heat up. Price increases as high as over 100 percent, almost everything at least over 50 percent, and yet what they earned has remained the same. So the minimum wage–I’m talking for eight hours of work. And in many of these prisons we have for-profit corporations exploiting prison labor, the neo-slavery under the 13th Amendment, which permits prisoners to work for far below reasonable wages. So their minimum wage is $1.30 for eight hours of work, which is roughly $28 a month. But their commissary prices–and we’re talking about things that they need–deodorant, toothpaste–have risen by over 100 percent.

The other way that they exploit the people under the system of mass incarceration is turning phones over to private corporations. So in New Jersey it’s $0.15 a minute, plus the premium that you have to pay in order to put the money on your account, the surcharge tax that the state puts on all commissary items of 10 percent. So if you have a $0.05 comb–this is an actual example–it costs you $0.06. And then the removal of items that people who, when they were incarcerated, used to get–jackets, blankets–they used to give you two blankets; now they give you one. They don’t give you thermals anymore; you have to buy them from the commissary. And, most importantly, shoes.

CONWAY: Well, I’m just–you know, because I personally have experienced that myself in terms of seeing young guys in the population that are just arriving in the last two, three years no longer get the things that we used to get when we came in the prison. So I see guys walking around in the dead of the winter without coats and without, actually, boots. They’re running around in summer tennis shoes and stuff. Why? What’s this cutback? I thought that the prison-industrial complex was making a lot of money. Why is this happening?

HEDGES: Well, because it forces those who are incarcerated to go to the commissary and buy the item. So let’s talk about shoes. And I don’t know what your experience was, but this is how it is in New Jersey. You’re not issued shoes anymore. You have to buy them. You pay $45. Now, remember, these people are making $28 a month. And we haven’t even spoken about the fines. So a lot of those people get into the system and they owe thousands of dollars of fines, which are chipped out of their monthly salary. So, for instance, one of the students that I teach, who was incarcerated when he was 14–he’s now 39–still owes $6,000 of fines. So if they want to buy a pair of Reeboks, it costs–if they don’t have the $45–and most people don’t get–80-plus percent do not get money from the outside on a monthly basis. They may get over the holidays or something, but they’re kind of on their own. If they can’t afford the $45 Reeboks or the boots, they sell these sneakers with cardboard soles. It’s like something out of Dickens that as soon as you got out into the yard, they’re shredded. Because many of these prisons are quite old, they need the thermals.

And then we haven’t even spoken about bereavement, so that if you want to visit with a dying member of your immediate family, a mother or father or whatever, you can do so for 15 minutes, either a deathbed visit or you can go for viewing, but you have to pay for the guards to accompany you, which is $800. And that immediately–. So what I have seen over the last few years–.

CONWAY: Woah. Woah. Let me just [incompr.] this. That’s happening in New Jersey. In Maryland, they don’t even allow you to do that anymore. They actually cut that out completely.

HEDGES: You mean the bereavement visits?

CONWAY: Yeah, the bereavement visits. And that’s very harmful to the prisoner, because you don’t get a chance to kind of, like, make your peace with that person that you love who’s departed. So you end up suffering that loss and no way of figuring out how to grieve, right? But go ahead. I’m just curious.

HEDGES: Well, it’s just all the ways they have found mechanisms to economically exploit prisoners and their families. It used to be that you could send up to 50 pounds, I think it was, a year of goods like sneakers and stuff, which they’ve now abolished. And that, of course, makes it harder, because now the prisoner has to buy the items from this kind of in-house Walmart. And it also hurts the families, who are unable to feel, in a way, that they can care for their sons or their daughters or their husbands or wives or whatever.

But what I find most disturbing is there seems to be every year some new mechanism to squeeze more money out of the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. And I think that probably is something you saw within the system as well.

CONWAY: Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things that they turned–the state, the state of Maryland, actually was responsible for supplying all the items in the commissary. So toothpaste, deodorant, food, something to drink, that kind of stuff, they turned all of that commercial stuff over to a company that–it’s out of Ohio, I believe, called Keefe. And that company operates commissaries in several states, including Florida. And they were up, in fact, for a class-action suit because of the way they changed the prices.

And one example is the envelopes. We used to get a pack of 50 envelopes for $0.99. They would come in a box. If you want to write, you would buy a box of envelopes, and it would last you for 50 letters. What Keefe took over, you could only get single envelopes, and they cost $0.10 apiece, so that the price of that 50 envelopes turned into $5 just automatically and you did not have a choice. You either buy from them or you didn’t send out any mail. And they did that time and time again with the basic foodstuff that they knew we needed to eat. They upped the price 200, 300 percent. You know. So yeah, that, and the state of Maryland in turn gets a fee for that.

HEDGES: Right.

CONWAY: You know. So just like they get a fee from the phone company that, as you were saying, exploits the families and the prisoners because if a prisoner calls home and the person accepts the phone call, it’s extra money for accepting that phone call above and beyond what it would be if it was [incompr.]

HEDGES: Well, and they have to put money on the account, and they have to pay a fee. So if you’re putting–I can’t remember the exact figure, but if you’re putting $10 on the account, you’re paying $3 or $4 just for the privilege of putting the $10 on.

And then we get the whole issue of privatizing the way money is sent into the prison. So it used to be that you could send a money order or something in and you could put it on a prisoner’s account. Now it is all done through a company in Florida, where, again, if you want to put $20 on the account, you’re charged quite a draconian fee. And, again, I don’t have figures right in front of me, but again, I think it’s up to $5. And that $5 evaporates, at least from your pocket, into the pocket of the for-profit company that’s handling this. So this has been a kind of momentum that we’ve seen internally within the prison system. I think it reflects the kind of predatory nature of unregulated capitalism throughout the society, because those corporations, which are in essence kind of squeezing all of us, will squeeze the defenseless. And that’s what prisoners are, in essence, a captive society. They will squeeze the defenseless in ways that are just inhuman, because they can.

CONWAY: And let’s look at it from the other side, because while I was in the prison system, they made chairs, they made clothes, they trained dogs. There’s all kinds of industries or, obviously, the license tags. There’s–.

HEDGES: Military industries. Kevlar.

CONWAY: Yeah. Yeah. So while they’re squeezing the prisoners and fleecing the population for whatever pennies they can get, aren’t they making a tremendous amount of money by using that slave labor to produce stuff? I mean, what’s–.

HEDGES: It’s neo-slavery, which under the 13th Amendment is legal. You can force people under the 13th Amendment to work without adequate wages as part of your punishment, in essence. And so we have seen, along with this exploitation, a growth of for-profit industries, private companies that are going in there and exploiting the prison labor. So, on the one hand, they’re using the prison labor to make profit, and on the other hand they’re taking that underpaid–you know, I mean, we can’t even call it underpaid when you’re making $1.30 for an eight-hour day. They’re taking that. And they’re taking what little money they have. And that’s not a new phenomenon for African Americans. It replicates precisely what sharecroppers went through, where they had to borrow to buy the seed and often the farm implements and pay the rent. And by the end, especially if the crop didn’t do well, they can work a whole season and end up in debt. So now you’re seeing people released from the prison system and they owe money to the state. And if they can’t pay that money, they get picked up again.

CONWAY: Yeah. You know. And there’s something–even as you were talking, there was another aspect that I was thinking of. Early on, several decades ago, I can clearly remember that there was this huge campaign to stop prisons from being built in certain neighborhoods, in certain counties, and there was a desperation. The population was exploding in the prison system, and the state needed places in which to build prisons, and they went to different counties and whatnot, and they could not get authorization to build prisons. And so at some point they start de-industrializing America and jobs disappeared, not only just out of the black community, but jobs disappeared out of the rural communities. And then, all of a sudden, in all of these counties, there were requests like put a prison here. And when you talk about that economic slavery thing, just remind me of Hagerstown and it reminds me of Cumberland. And in Cumberland, Maryland, there’s a massive prison complex up there now, and it’s the source of jobs and economics in that region. And inside those prisons is population from the urban centers, a black–the population is mainly black, the guard forces mainly white, and it’s an economic arrangement similar to slavery that you were saying.

HEDGES: Right. Of course. Well, the students that I teach often refer to prison as being a plantation, having the dynamics of a plantation, including which is something writers like Richard Wright, Baldwin, and others talk about, understanding the demeanor by which you can comport yourself in front of the guards who are all-powerful. And when you get up to these communities–and Mumia Abu-Jamal is up in Frackville, Pennsylvania. And when you go into the prison, you will see on the list of the corrections officers who work in the prison three, four, maybe up to eight of the last names, because their brother’s in there, their cousin’s in there, maybe even their spouse is in there.

CONWAY: Their sons.

HEDGES: Their son’s in there. It’s–.

CONWAY: And daughters.

HEDGES: And daughters. It’s the only business going. And I think what’s so heartbreaking–I’ve driven up and see Mumia a couple of times–is those buses that leave at about midnight or one in the morning from places like Newark or wherever or Philly, you know, bringing the families and bringing the kids. And we haven’t even spoken about how visitors are treated.

From football to property and beyond, inequality is the mother of all crises

Inequality does indeed affect us all, both physically & mentally. It's foolish to say that the poor people are happier than wealthy people. No, poor people are not happy because they have to work that much more to earn just enough to fill theirs & their children's stomachs. Then, there are education costs, housing costs, utilities, healthcare costs, & now, even the clean, drinking water costs money. Add the social exclusivity of poor people & their families due to their poverty & the life of the poor person is just hellish.

To develop & provide sustainable resources to everyone equally, the wealthy & the poor, every country needs to invest in its infrastructure & economic policies. Although, the writer of this opinion post takes a simplistic view that if Netherlands can increase taxes, & also spread its tax net, to help out the vulnerable sections of its own populations, then everyone else can, it is pretty much impossible to do that without proper practice of faith & religion.

How will religion help in alleviating poverty & instituting equality among the populace? Netherlands is a small Scandinavian country with a much smaller population than many developing countries, like Pakistan, India, Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand etc. It is also a pretty much a homogeneous population, very much unlike many other developing countries around the world. Still, it's impossible to eradicate inequality because the rich control the political policy-making machine.

This eradication, or at least, alleviation of inequality, can only happen through ethical people in governments & policy-making area. Increasing taxes or spreading the tax net far & wide may help in increasing the government coffers but won't help much if that money is once again ends up in the pockets of rich executives & wealthy citizens of the country, or politicians loot that money. So, how does the general public ensure that government is full of good, ethical people? And even after identifying such honest people, can the general public act rationally enough to bring them to power & stick by them, while, they increase taxes on rich people, & use those taxes to upgrade the horrible situation the general public is living in? Remember, all this will take time, whereas, the general public will want to see substantial major changes as soon as possible.

Only ethics can help there, & ethics comes through religion. Ethical & religious people will need to become leaders & consider government coffers public money & hence, need to be spent on them.

Besides ethics & religion, huge changes in electoral policies need to be implemented. These kind of substantial changes to alleviate poverty & inequality need a good & long time frame, like a decade or more, easily. But, in most democracies, even when they are stable, a government & leader has about a few years, anywhere from 8 to 10 years to finish his / her work. Of course, that has to be done, if & when, opposition parties are silent & happy with what the government is doing (then, what's the point of the opposition party?). But, these fundamental economic & social changes can easily take couple of decades to meaningfully show any changes in the system.

So, inequality indeed adversely affects a major portion of the general populace, but alleviating or eradicating inequality requires a lot more work than simply changing the tax system (even that is huge work in itself).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/feb/08/football-property-prices-beyond-inequality-mother-of-all-crises-tax-lilianne-ploumen

Inequality affects all of us. I live in Amsterdam, where house prices are now rising so sharply that ordinary, hard-working people don’t get a look-in. In London, it’s been like that for years. Whole neighbourhoods are unaffordable. Century-old football clubs have become the playthings of billionaires.

And the trend continues. More and more of the world’s wealth is in the hands of fewer and fewer people. I believe that tolerating this growing inequality will go down in history as humanity’s biggest mistake since communism.

People are essentially social animals. They can inspire each other, but they can also frustrate and discourage each other. And that’s what gross inequality does. It unravels the very fabric of our societies. It robs people of decent jobs and decent pay. And it robs them of their sense of purpose and self-worth.

In developing countries, the gap between rich and poor is far bigger. And it isn’t merely a technical issue, it is the result of political choices. Inequality is truly the mother of all crises. Whether it is conflict, climate change, economic stagnation or migration flows, inequality is always a major underlying cause.

Last autumn, the UN adopted new global goals. One of the main targets is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. To achieve that, economic growth must stay at the level it had for the past 10 years and its benefits must be far bigger than average for the poorest 40%.

The challenge we face is summed up in the slogan: “Leave no one behind”. The smartest policy here is to invest in the poorest of the poor. If we don’t, there is no way we will defeat extreme poverty by 2030. Which means we won’t generate the economic growth needed to achieve the other global goals. And we won’t reach our climate goals either.

“Leave no one behind” is also a moral imperative. In the past 25 years, globalisation has helped the world make spectacular progress on poverty. But at the same time we’ve allowed large groups to lag behind, and an even larger group to fall by the wayside completely. One of the main causes is exclusion. Whether it is on the basis of gender, religion, disability or sexual orientation, entire groups are being left out.

The mantra that no one should be left behind offers hope of a much-needed correction. It means managing globalisation properly. It means ending the unbridled power of elites. If realised, it would mean everyone could finally benefit from – and participate in – global development.

We know how to make this happen. Last year, we analysed Dutch policy to see how we could contribute more to inclusive development. It resulted in a plan of action worth €350m (£269m) that we are now putting into practice.

The plan consists of 20 measures across two areas. The first involves generating work and income for African women and young people with poor future prospects. The second consists of 10 measures to prompt robust political dialogue with developing countries on inclusive growth and development.

That dialogue is crucial, because resistance to change is often strongest precisely where change is needed most. In many poor countries, elites cling stubbornly to wealth and power until conflict, death and destruction are inevitable.

But the most powerful weapon against inequality is tax. Governments have to fight tax avoidance and tax evasion. My country has initiated the renegotiation of 23 tax treaties. We’ve proposed anti-abuse provisions to ensure that the Netherlands is no longer an attractive option for companies that want to avoid taxes. And we now forgo tax exemptions on goods and services provided under official development assistance.

At the same time, we need to broaden the tax base in the developing countries, which often rely on consumption taxes that make the poor pay a higher proportion of their income in tax than the rich. These countries need a progressive tax regime. And for that they need assistance in administering and collecting more complex forms of taxation, such as income and wealth taxes.

Taxation is not a popular subject for politicians. But it deserves far more attention. A recent study, by Jan-Emmanuel De Neve and Nattavudh Powdthavee, brings further proof that higher taxation equals more happiness.

For many developing countries, the tax burden is still 10-15% of gross domestic product. According to the UN, they’ll have to raise collection to about 20% just to be able to finance their share of the global goals. In Scandinavia, the average tax burden is more than 45%. I wish the same for every country! Provided the money is spent well, of course.

So we have our work cut out. To the super rich, I say: trickle-down is dead. To the elites and the kleptocrats in poor countries, I say: there’s a limit to how high you can build the gates around your communities. The time has come to pay. Make sure the payment is in taxes.

World Bank & IMF Polices Behind the Inadequate Health Infrastructure to Quell Ebola

Another interview where it is being reiterated that IMF & World Bank, the international financial institutions, are essentially, tools of the developed countries to keep the developing countries from ever developing. I have blogged about this several times before this post.

IMF & the World Bank are the instruments of the West, to keep the development goal, out of reach, from developing countries in Latin America, Asia, & Africa. These institutions provide billions in loans to countries with known corrupt leaders & then impose harsh restrictions, like austerity measures, to recover those loans. The corruption of the political leaders are well known. Those austerity measures tie the hands of the successive governments, regardless of how much they are well-intentioned, behind their backs, & the developing countries fail to develop.

These countries are instructed to privatize everything, increase prices & taxes for the local citizenry, but decrease their taxes & royalties from natural wealth, & let the international corporations loot the developing countries of their natural wealth. Of course, then, is it any wonder that developed countries keep developing further & amassing huge wealth, whereas, the developing countries stay at the bottom of the pile. If, by any chance, the leaders of the developing countries resist following the demands of the IMF, World Bank, of the political leaders of the developed countries, then political assassinations & interference, & ultimately, war, is imposed on those developing countries.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nghGovphphw

SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: … do you think this is an adequate response on the part of the World Bank?

NII AKUETTEH, FMR. DIRECTOR AT AFRICA ACTION: I don't think so … the World Bank and the IMF have contributed to the weak health systems in Africa … . So, therefore, so to speak, they contributed to the problem; therefore they need to own up to their mistakes and they need to do more to help rescue these countries.

PERIES: What do you mean by that? What role has IMF and the World Bank played in West Africa in the past?

AKUETTEH: Oh, well, you know, two phrases. One is structural adjustment programs. Anybody who's been studying Africa since independence knows that especially since the '80s, when Ronald Reagan got into power in the United States and the World Bank and the IMF actually made themselves the economic stewards of economic policy in Africa, structural adjustment, otherwise called austerity measures, they have imposed these policies on the African countries regardless of what the people want, regardless of what the leaders wanted. So structural adjustment is one of those phrases. And the governments were told, were forced, that in order to get a good mark from the World Bank and the IMF, you have to keep government small, you have to slash government officials' pay; after you have slashed the number of government officials, you have to privatize everything and you have to force people to pay, and especially to pay for health care and to pay out of pocket for education.

So I think, though structural adjustment went on for decades and they devastated the African economies, the other phrase that I wanted to throw in is IMF riots. This actually came from Africa, where every time the IMF would impose economic conditions, ordinary people in the street were so hit hard that they would riot. And so it actually created a new phrase in the English language and in economic writing: IMF riots.

PERIES: So, Nii, explain more, in the sense that, yes, of course the IMF would have these horrendous austerity policies and neoliberal economic policies and force governments to shrink their bureaucratic and civil service, all these things in the past were set up in order to service their people. But why are they forced to come to these kinds of agreements with the World Bank and the IMF?

AKUETTEH: I think that's a great question, because on the surface of it, a government, a country can simply say, sorry, your conditions are too harsh, we don't have to deal with you. After all, the United States doesn't take the advice of the World Bank and the IMF. A number of big countries don't. But for African countries, number one, they are economically small and weak. Secondly, having just gotten out of colonialism--I know this is about 50 years ago, but when you are trying to restructure economic systems that was built over more than a century, it is not easy. And so they are tied into the global economy. They are tied into their former colonial masters. That is especially France and the U.K. And they are tied to the United States.

Now, those three countries, the United States, the U.K., and France, play a major role in the World Bank and the IMF. And therefore the World Bank and the IMF actually act as policeman and gatekeepers for the entire global economy if you are an African country, because the rest of the global economy says to you, we will deal with you only if the World Bank and the IMF says you are well behaved. And the World Bank and the IMF will say you are well behaved only if you agree to their conditions. And therefore it's almost impossible for an African country to say, listen, I don't want to do this anymore.

You know, everybody who reads the news, Africa news, and especially U.S.-Africa, will know that the West doesn't much care for Robert Mugabe. Usually you will be told that it's because he is internally repressive and other things. But I happen to think that one major factor also is that for about ten years after Zimbabwe became independent, Robert Mugabe followed the dictates of the World Bank and the IMF very closely. And after about ten years he said, no, this is not working no more. For instance, they made Zimbabwe sell its stock of maize, and say it's uneconomical to hold it; sell it, buy it when you need it. But that was bad economic advice, because when they wanted to buy it, they had to pay more. And so I am saying that countries that defy the IMF and the World Bank get punished by the larger global economy, and therefore it's not been very easy for those countries to reject what the World Bank and the IMF recommend, because they were doing it on behalf of the global economy.

PERIES: But these economies are very resource-rich. I mean, places like Sierra Leone have diamonds and gold, and West Africa is considered one of the natural resource rich regions of the world. The World Bank adopting these policies is really opening the doors and the gates to a flood of corporations coming in to do business in the region and reap the resources out of the region and leave very little behind. Can you sort of describe those complex relationships between the World Bank, the IMF, the local governments, the corporations that have left--the conditions that they have left in the region that is now unable to cope with … a grave epidemic of Ebola in the region?

AKUETTEH: I think that question is fantastic. I mean, because the reason that the World Bank and the IMF do what they do, the reason that they squeeze the African countries and say to them, you do what we tell you, never mind what your own people might want, never mind what your own leaders might want, the IMF and the World Bank, there's a method to their madness. And I believe said the method, the reason they do what they do, is actually to make it safe and hospitable for international corporations to go in and plunder Africa's wealth. It is as simple as that.

Now, it's been going on for years. The IMF and the World Bank are creatures created after the Second World War. They're Bretton Woods institutions. So, after the Second World War, with the U.K. and Western Europe being weakened, they were created to help stand up again in the global economy. So they took over what has been done, which is plundering Africa's wealth, leaving very little for the Africans … . That question goes to why this is done. The World Bank and the IMF would tell the African countries, keep governments small; you can't afford--. I mean, when I was in school, our governments were being told, listen--I'm from Ghana--you are a small country, the United States doesn't invest this much into education, so why should you? You shouldn't invest in education; let parents pay for it, when most parents are poor and when education is an investment. So they want to keep governments small. They want the people of the country to get as little as possible from the wealth--the bottom line is because they want the Western corporations to continue taking the wealth from out of Africa.

This is precisely why they do it. Even as recently as in Liberia, when Ms. Johnson Sirleaf--whom I know well because she was my boss at a certain point-- when she became president, she got a lot of kudos from the West because she is well known in the West and it was great that a woman had been in elected president in Africa. But behind the scenes, she was told that, listen, you will get a lot of corporations investing if you don't insist that they clean up the environment, if you don't push hard for labor protections, if you don't insist on high taxes, so all the things that the World Bank and the IMF says.

I'm saying your question is great because it goes to the heart of it: it's designed to make it easier for Western corporations to plunder Africa. It's as simple as that.