Harry Pollard wrote: > > > >[CR:] > > > >On the contrary -- the WTO represents the fattest cats and is the most > > > >difficult 'target'. > > > > > > Such as? > > > >Such as representatives/puppets of the largest transnational corporations > >who "negotiate" behind closed doors and without any public accountability. > > Don't blather, Chris - name them.
For example, David de Pury, the Uruguay-Round negotiator for Switzerland, also was co-president of ABB, a large Swiss transnational corporation. Or take the GATS-proponents of the ERT (the "makers" of the EU), whose member list reads like a "Who's Who" of industrial fatcat representatives (see http://www.ert.be/pc/pcb/encb02.htm ). (Ironically, the chairman of their *environmental* working group is a *car-manufacturer* representative!) > >The US also came out of the war in good shape (even benefited from it), > >but has no good health services (for the majority of citizens, anyway). > >Germany suffered much worse destructions in the war than the UK (and had > >to pay billions of reparations unlike UK), but has better health services > >now. It seems that your lame excuse can't explain reality. > > The revolution in Germany after the war was the Erhart free market > revolution. While Britain was mired in the "wave of the future" - socialism > - Germany's free market policies were producing the real future I would have thought that decades of Thatcherism and TurdWay would have corrected the "mistakes" of "socialism"...? (instead they made it worse) As for what you call "the Erhart free market revolution": it was actually a program of wasting tax money into the pockets of fatcats: Lobbied by them, the state allowed to artificially drive up land prices to the 100-fold within few years during Erhart's rule (first as minister of economy and then as chancellor). As a result, the German state paid about DM 100 Billion (in today's value: more than US$ 250 Bn.!) to rich landowners for overpriced lands. E.g. the rich landowner Mr. Filser was paid DM 45 million (>US$ 100m today's value) of tax money for a small patch of land (1/3 square km!) for a new public building 30 km SE of Munich, and Filser even received the same area *back* in another place !!! (i.e. he actually didn't sell any land, he just moved his property to another place, and received $100 million in "compensation"!). The academic German journal of land surveyor engineers called Erhart's land-price policy "the largest finance scandal of the post-war era". Critically asked about this by a journalist on his 75th birthday, Erhart arrogantly dismissed the question, barking that "That's not a political question!!" So much about your "free market revolution", Harry. As with the WTO, you claim that it works *against* fatcats, but in fact it works *for* them. No wonder -- it's being implemented by them. > >Actually, the US spends more on health care and gets less for that money > >than any industrialized country that offers medical insurance for everyone: > >The US spends 74% more than France; 78% more than Germany, and 110% more > >than the Netherlands. However, the US rated worst in an international > >comparison of general healthcare quality, and 44 million Americans *lack* > >healthcare coverage. I've read that in the US, people die from appendicitis > >--a trivial complication in developed countries-- because they can't afford > >to go to hospital for appendectomy. > > Most people in the US do well with health care. However, we have problems > that Europe is, perhaps, only just beginning to have. The general figures > for the US are skewed by the inner cities, which areas I referred to in my > last post. > > These are mostly black, though particularly in the south-west and perhaps > New York City, brown is beginning to make itself felt. I believe that > browns are close to half the population of Los Angeles >[etc.] Here you're using racist excuses to "explain" the bad state of health-care in the US. But actually you admit the failure of neoliberal/"Free"Trade policies: It was these policies (which consider humans as commodities too) that brought millions of Black slaves to the U$ in the first place, and it was these policies that let them end up in to hopeless conditions of crime and misery that you describe. It's a good historic lesson about the non-sustainability of short-term greed. Chris _____________________________________________________________ "America is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich." -- Gore Vidal
