opinion

It's amazing how the US media so readily allow themselves to be manipulated
by Roy S. Carson --- VHeadline.com

Why am I not surprised by the complete and utter distortions in the mainstream North American media over President Barack Obama's proposal to introduce a form of National Health Service that's been a long time coming to the United States? It would be too easy to put it down simply to a reflection of Middle America's fear of the unknown or an imagined hype about socialism a/k/a reds-under-the-bed communism. Clearly it's a very calculated and deceptive psych-ops war orchestrated by those who have the most to lose if a system similar to Britain's NHS is to be implemented --- big business and the insurance companies, of course.

As a child of Britain's National Health Service (NHS) --- I was barely two years old when it came into being in 1947 --- and through the fifties and sixties, I can recall horror stories in the British newspapers from across the Atlantic about how ambulance crews would refuse to pick up traffic accident victims to take them to the hospital if they didn't have proof of medical insurance, how people were left to die because they couldn't afford to see a doctor or, even when they did, they couldn't afford to pay exorbitant prices for the medicines prescribed.

Forty years later in Venezuela --- just before the February 1989 'El Caracazo' riots --- I was there, I saw the same thing happening all around! During the riots I ferried dead and dying victims by car to disgusting public medical resources at the Vargas hospital. Emergency ambulances (private, of course!) would not enter the conflict zone and, anyway, their services were required to urgently ferry 'rich bitches' to the private clinics for face-lifts and nose job surgeries. I remember the Vargas excuse for ER as being something similar to horses' stables. A gurney in each over a hole in the floor, invariably blocked by body parts, excrement and gore. My colleague from the Daily Journal ran retching from the scene after realizing that the bundles stacked against the stable wall were, in fact, dead and mutilated bodies waiting for someone to cart them cross-town to the Bello Monte mortuary which was already overflowing.

Venezuela's public health service is somewhat like Britain's NHS in its extreme infancy. Very much different from before, there is primary health care free of charge for all (especially the poor since the rich prefer to have rich doctors treat them at equally rich facilities) and basic medicines are indeed supplied free of charge to those who cannot otherwise afford. Yes, the public health service is in its infancy and faces incalculable problems with funding and (of course) corruption --- but, as they say, Rome was not built in a day, and Venezuela's public health system certainly proves the adage.

Thankfully, publicly funded health services are what most Europeans have grown up with, and the majority of Europeans would be loathe to abolish their NHSs in favor of a United States system --- although, like anywhere else, the European system is over-laden with bureaucracy and top-down management.

It's a political problem that even the British Conservatives have seen to be a key election issue and only this weekend, Tory leader David Cameron has been at pains to highlight what his (right-wing) party would do if elected some time next year. Cameron is certainly not contemplating political suicide, even if the thought of abolishing Britain's NHS ever occurred to him in his wildest fantasies.

Hopefully, Middle America will soon see common sense and send the corrupt political wheeler-dealers, the excessively moneyed lobbyists and the profit-hungry pharmaceutical corporation and the profiteers in private insurance packing. Good riddance to them, I say, although the rats will simply swim to another vessel and continue their plundering. That's life!

But, while the above-mentioned leeches on the sick and dying will continue their charade to recoil in horror at the prospect of "socialized" medicine, it is even more shameful how the US media have allowed powerful interests to manipulate the truth about the varying forms of socialized medicine already to be found across the more enlightened world. For starters, Canada, then the USA's lapdog Britain, Germany, Holland, France, Spain, the Scandinavian countries and more --- it's quite amazing how the US media so readily allow themselves to be manipulated.

Of course, I understand that it takes a brave reporter in mainstream America to have the cojones to actually write something in favor of socialized medicine. Worse even that he should find him- or herself branded as a goddamn socialist (i.e. tantamount to being a goddamn commie). And it's a prerequisite at the likes of Fox News to be a rabid Republican, foaming at the mouth at even the slightest hint of a government taking responsibility for its sick, its poor, its disadvantaged.

Hell, they even attempt to brand Cambridge (UK) theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking as a citizen of the United States if it helps them perpetuate the lies!

It's all a clear illustration also of how the mainstream US media have allowed themselves to be manipulated by powerful interests in the US State Department, the Pentagon and the Republican Party against the specter of SOCIALISM in South America.

Where are the FOX News commentators to point out the obvious --- i.e. that the United States has formed a business partnership with the world's largest cocaine producing country?

Where is CNN when it comes to pointing out the horrors of the right-wing Colombian AUC killer-squads?

Sure they're ready, willing and able to highlight the misdeeds of the FARC against Álvaro Uribe Velez's unstable government in Bogota without recognizing that the FARC has controlled a sizable chunk of Colombian territory for many years and, without a doubt, the Colombians that live their lives there, do so more freely than under the oppression of drug cartels allied with Uribe and the right-wing paramilitaries.

Who benefits from the United States' alliance with Colombia? Well, of course, the cocaine cartels all the way through to the pushers on the streets of Anytown, USA! Then there are the big arms manufacturers in the United States --- never mind the various tentacles of the private security complex with cash filtering all the way down (or up!) to under the tables of the US House of Representatives and Senate.

Is there any wonder that these greedy individuals are foaming at the mouth for more as they see the proliferation of US military bases in Colombia and more profits to come? Do they really care if the purpose of the US military bases is to control the flow of cocaine? What, indeed, have they achieved with the $ billions they've poured into Colombia in recent years? Factually: ZILCH --- unless you reckon in the multi-$ million commission pay-offs to shadowy figures in Colombia and (all the more so) in the United States itself to allow officialdom to continue to screw hard-working United States taxpayers out of millions upon millions of deflating dollars more.

While the boys in the Colombian army, navy and air force will enjoy playing with their new toys, do you really imagine for a moment that the 'machos' won't hesitate a millisecond to use those self-same weapons and munitions to instigate a proxy war for the Pentagon while the top-brass rubs its hands in glee at the prospect of even more hardware sales and even more security-mercenary commissions to be creamed off contracts under the table to shadowy "intermediaries"?