Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Mohammed Bazzi: People's Revolt in Lebanon

HR comment: The Nation is a source of information we normally never quote. This is on the other hand a good piece of 'alibi journalism' for the editors of The Nation. It concerns the protest in Beirut, something which should happen as soon as is possible in all US junta colonies. Those power hungry psychopaths must be stopped before they stop our world. Everywhere on the globe.


PEOPLE'S REVOLT IN LEBANON

by MOHAMAD BAZZI

[The Nation - from the January 8, 2007 issue]

Beirut - Ever since Hezbollah and its allies began an open-ended protest against the US-backed government on December 1, Beirut's gilded downtown--built for wealthy Lebanese and foreign tourists--has become more authentically Lebanese. Where Persian Gulf sheiks once ate sushi, families now sit in abandoned parking lots, having impromptu picnics, the smell of kebabs cooked over coals wafting through the air. Young men lounge on plastic chairs, smoking apple-scented water pipes, and occasionally break out into debke, the Lebanese national dance.

Most protesters are too poor to afford $4 caffe lattes, but men hawking shots of strong Arabic coffee for 30 cents apiece are doing a brisk trade. Nearly all businesses are shuttered, but a few enterprising store owners have figured out how to cater to the crowd. One hair salon converted itself into a sandwich shop, selling cheese on bread with a cup of tea for $1. The smiling cashier works behind a counter filled with L'Oréal hair products.

"IT'S WELL-KNOWN THAT THIS AREA WAS NOT BUILT FOR US."

"I never came to downtown before these protests. I can't afford to come here. If I ate a sandwich here, I'd be broke for a week," says Emad Matairek, a 35-year-old carpenter from the dahiyeh, the Shiite-dominated suburbs of Beirut. "It's well-known that this area was not built for us."

The protests are being portrayed in much of the Western media as a sectarian battle, or a coup attempt--engineered by Hezbollah's two main allies, Syria and Iran--against a US-backed Lebanese government. Those are indeed factors underlying the complex and dangerous political dance happening in Beirut. But the biggest motivator driving many of those camped out in downtown isn't Iran or Syria, or Sunni versus Shiite. It's the economic inequality that has haunted Lebanese Shiites for decades. It's a poor and working-class people's revolt.

In Riad Solh Square, amid dozens of white tents erected for Hezbollah supporters to sleep in, there is a stage with a huge TV screen and rows of loudspeakers mostly positioned toward the Grand Serail, the Ottoman-era palace where Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his Cabinet are hunkered down. Between the tents and the palace, behind eight-foot-high coils of barbed wire, there are hundreds of Lebanese soldiers toting M-16s and sitting atop armored vehicles. Every night thousands of people gather in front of the stage, within earshot of the Serail, demanding that Siniora either resign or accept a national unity government that gives Hezbollah and its allies greater power.

A major theme highlighted by the protesters is that Siniora is backed by the Bush Administration--and that alliance did little to help Lebanon during last summer's thirty-four-day war between Israel and Hezbollah. A few days into the sit-in, Hezbollah hung a large banner from a building showing Siniora embracing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, over a collage of dead Lebanese children Photoshopped onto his back. It reads, "Condy--Thanks," a reference to Siniora's meeting with Rice during the war, when US officials refused to endorse a quick cease-fire. "Thank you for your patience Condy, for some of our children are still alive," it reads.

SINIORA'S GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT

But in most conversations with people at the sit-in and protests, economic concerns quickly emerge: Siniora's government is corrupt, has failed to reduce Lebanon's crippling $41 billion public debt and has done little to improve people's lives. Shiites are especially forgotten in the country's economic planning. Many at the sit-in have been out of work for years, or lost their jobs after the recent war.

"Our country is getting poorer, and Siniora's government is not talking about it," says Hadi Mawla, a 22-year-old graphic design student who came from the dahiyeh on the protest's first day, which drew hundreds of thousands to downtown. "Our standard of living is falling, while other Arab countries are improving. We Lebanese used to make fun of other Arab countries. Now they have great big cities like Dubai. And we're going to end up like Egypt--with a very poor class, a very rich class and nothing in between."

The economic dimension to the protest can be seen everywhere. Around the square there are hand-drawn posters of Siniora sitting on a chair made of stacks of dollar bills. From the stage, a projector shines slogans highlighting economic demands onto a building that houses the ultra-chic Buddha Bar, with its two-story Buddha statue inside. The swirling projector makes its point: "No to the government of VAT" and "No to the government of seafront properties."

This class battle transcends sectarian boundaries. Hezbollah has formed an alliance with the Free Patriotic Movement, led by Maronite Christian politician and former army commander Michel Aoun. With this coalition Hezbollah is trying to prove that it's not a purely sectarian party, it's not seeking to impose an Islamic government and it's willing to ally not just with nationalist Sunnis but also with Christians. Because Aoun stresses honest government, accountability and economic equality, he and Hezbollah seemed like a natural fit. By playing up its alliance with Aoun--and downplaying its partnership with the notoriously corrupt Shiite Amal party--Hezbollah can reinforce the reputation for honesty shared by many Islamist movements in the Middle East.

"THEY WILL HEAR US IN ALL THE PALACES OF THE RULING COALITION" (+ Internet!)

Hezbollah's charismatic leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah--ever skillful at tapping into the Shiite tradition of empowering the dispossessed--often highlights the class dimension of his group's campaign. "They will hear us in all the palaces of the ruling coalition," Nasrallah thundered on December 7, in a speech via video-link to the protesters downtown. He was calling for a huge turnout at a rally three days later, where crowd estimates ranged as high as 1 million. "From the homes of the poor, from the shantytowns, from the tents, from the demolished buildings, from the neighborhoods of those displaced by war, we will make sure that they hear our voices."

There's a long tradition of the Lebanese state leaving Shiites to fend for themselves and waiting for religious or charitable groups to fill the vacuum. This happened over decades, long before Hezbollah emerged in the early 1980s. Hezbollah's "state within a state" was possible only because successive governments willfully left a void in the Shiite-dominated areas of south Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and the dahiyeh.

"The central government always liked outsourcing the problems of the south. First they gave it to the Palestinians, then they gave it to the Israelis, and they gave it to Hezbollah from 2000 to 2006," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anti-corruption watchdog group. "Hezbollah does what every political party does: They went and created a dependency network."

In the 1960s and '70s, when Shiites were first making the migration from the rural south and Bekaa to Beirut and other cities, the central government left their fate to the clans and feudal landlords who held sway in the agricultural hinterlands. By 1970, when the Palestine Liberation Organization began creating bases in southern Lebanon, the Shiites were on the front line of a conflict between the PLO and Israel. A Shiite cleric named Musa al-Sadr created Amal, the first Shiite political party, which later turned into a militia. To an extent, Amal supplanted the feudal lords as protector of the Shiites.

AFTER THE ISRAELI INVASION OF 1982, HEZBOLLAH EMERGED TO FIGHT THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION.

It was more disciplined and less corrupt than Amal, although Hezbollah was always dependent on Iranian funding and support. When Hezbollah's grinding guerrilla war forced Israel to end its occupation in May 2000, the militia was hailed throughout the Muslim world for achieving what no Arab army had done before: force Israel to relinquish land. With the Israeli withdrawal, Hezbollah moved into the vacuum in southern Lebanon, opening clinics and schools and providing small-business loans.

To many Shiites, Hezbollah's ascendance put them on the political map. There's a word Lebanese have used to put down a Shiite: mutawali, which roughly translates into "country bumpkin." It's a term freighted with meaning--of dispossession, prejudice, deprivation. But Shiites have appropriated it and now use it with pride. "During the civil war, we mutawalis were insulted and put down. Hezbollah gave us a new sense of dignity, and that's the most important right we can have," says Mawla, the graphic design student. "Hezbollah made it possible for us to stand, without fear, and shout from the rooftops that we are mutawalis."

In 1990, at the end of the fifteen-year civil war, Lebanon's political class chose to continue its sectarian system. The current crisis is rooted in that choice, which began with the 1989 Taif Accord, brokered by Saudi Arabia and Syria. The agreement called for all militias to disarm--with the exception of Hezbollah, whose militia was labeled a "national resistance" against the Israeli occupation. Leaving traditional warlords in place, Taif enshrined the political partition among the country's rival sects: Power must be shared between a Maronite Christian president, a Sunni prime minister and a Shiite speaker of Parliament. Each of the major players in the war seized a piece of the government and extended the sectarian system to the lowest rungs of the civil service. This arrangement was ripe for exploitation by outside powers, especially Syria, which dominated Lebanon from 1990 until last year.

One man had a chance to change the economic underpinnings of this system, and perhaps eventually cast aside its entire sectarian basis. He was Rafik Hariri, a billionaire construction tycoon who served as prime minister for most of the 1990s and until late 2004. But Hariri failed at building a healthy postwar economy. He rebuilt downtown Beirut at the expense of the hinterlands, and he focused on luxury sectors--banking and upscale tourism--instead of Lebanon's productive sectors, agriculture and small industry. Hariri was trying to return to the prewar economy, which was driven by Lebanon's role as a transit center for oil money from the Persian Gulf. But by the 1990s oil producers no longer needed the Lebanese banking system; they had Dubai.

AND THE LEBANESE ARMY WASN'T ABLE TO STOP IT?

"Everything that the government built around here means nothing to us," says Matairek, the carpenter at the downtown protests. "What they should have done was strengthen the Lebanese army. All the money they spent to fix this downtown--what's the use of it, if the Israeli warplanes were able to bomb us, and the Lebanese army wasn't able to stop it?"

The gleaming downtown became a symbol of Hariri's reign and his failed economic policies. By the time he left office Lebanon had a $36 billion public debt, or 170 percent of GDP--one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world (it's now 190 percent). For much of Hariri's term, he relied on Siniora, an old friend, as his finance minister.

Siniora's biggest triumph as finance minister was the 2002 Paris II Donors Conference, which netted Lebanon $4.4 billion in soft loan guarantees. In return Siniora promised a raft of neoliberal economic reforms: He would privatize state assets like cellphone contracts, reform the country's civil service sector and balance the budget by 2006. Nine months before the donors conference, Siniora imposed Lebanon's first value-added tax (VAT): a 10 percent surcharge on most goods except food and medicines. One of his main arguments for staying in office is to shepherd a Paris III conference scheduled for January, in which international donors are expected to contribute toward rebuilding the infrastructure devastated by last summer's Israeli offensive.

"Because of Siniora and his economic programs, we have a very flawed tax system, based on indirect taxes. Statistically, it has been shown that this system recycles money from the poor to the wealthy," says Fawwaz Traboulsi, a political science professor at the Lebanese American University. "We have a 10 percent flat income tax, but most state revenues come from indirect taxation: the VAT, fuel taxes, utility surcharges. Salaried people pay the bulk of these taxes."

Throughout his tenure, Hariri clashed with the Syrian-backed Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud. In February 2005 Hariri was assassinated in a massive bombing as his motorcade drove through Beirut's seaside corniche. Widely assumed to have been carried out by Syria or its agents, the killing shook Lebanon and cast a harsh light on Syrian hegemony over the political system. Under internal pressure and mass demonstrations, the Syrian-backed prime minister resigned and Damascus pulled its 14,000 troops out of Lebanon. After elections in June 2005, the new parliamentary majority--a coalition of Christian, Sunni and Druse parties--appointed Siniora as prime minister. For the first time, Hezbollah joined the Lebanese Cabinet, securing two seats in Siniora's administration.

DIVIDED DRASTICALLY BETWEEN HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS

Until last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war, Siniora continued with the economic policies he had begun under Hariri. Morality aside, there's one major problem with these soak-the-poor economics: They strengthen Hezbollah. In a country divided drastically between haves and have-nots, a large proportion of the have-nots happen to be Shiites, and they rely for social services not on the government but on Hezbollah. In their view, the government takes, while Hezbollah provides.

After the latest war, with Israeli bombs targeting Shiite-owned factories and businesses in the south and in the Beirut suburbs, the Shiite middle class was devastated. This has made Shiites even more dependent on Hezbollah, as evidenced by the group's handing out up to $12,000 in cash payments to everyone whose home was destroyed. The money--most likely provided by Iran--was intended to pay for a year's rent and new furniture while reconstruction begins.

Locked in a state of perpetual conflict, Lebanon today faces the same choice it had in 1990, when the civil war ended. It can replicate the political system that it had before--based on corrupt sectarian warlords dividing up the spoils of the war they perpetuated--or it can try to produce a stronger and more egalitarian system, one that isn't based on religious divisions and that won't consign its largest sect, the Shiites, to the care of an Iranian-funded religious party.

"How can we still accept this government that steals? This government that built this downtown and accumulated this huge debt?" asks Matairek, the Shiite carpenter. "Who's going to pay for it? I have to pay for it, and my son is going to pay for it after me."

[andend] - This article can be found on the web at Url.: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070108/bazzi


FPF - RELATED:

* FPF/HR Google conc. Lebanon - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/gqgzb

* "People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget: they also strike back." - 2005 Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9cyeq

* The Dutch author this far has lived and worked abroad - never in an English speaking country - for more than 4 decades for international media as an independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism!

* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/gpr4j
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl

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Gabriele Zamparini: The crows join the lynching

Tuesday, January 02, 2007 - There is a sinister caw in the air. Important journalists, liberal commentators, leftist activists, Middle East experts, influential intellectuals, professionals of the antiwar movement with their progressive think tanks and peace networks are now discussing the hanging of Saddam Hussein when nothing had written or said before this vile assassination and often contributed to the lynching through a campaign of misinformation and propaganda.

Who remembers now how all this started? The rotten lies of Tony Blair’s “45 minutes” and Condoleezza Rice’s “mushroom cloud” have been used to justify the supreme international crime, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a defenseless country that had never attacked the United States, that did not have any weapons of mass destruction, that did not have any ties to al-Qaida, that had no connection to the September 11 attacks...

ABOUT ONE MILLION IRAQIS HAVE BEEN SLAUGHTERED, MANY MORE MILLIONS DISPLACED AND A CIVIL WAR ORCHESTRATED. FINALLY SADDAM HUSSEIN, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ, WAS ASSASSINATED.

Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called the invasion of Iraq “an illegal act that contravened the UN charter”; the Nuremberg trials of major Nazi war criminals had already called this crime the “supreme international crime”. This supreme international crime started on 20 March 2003 and it’s still being committed. Iraq is an occupied country without sovereignty where terrorists and mass murderers compose its quisling sectarian government. Since 20 March 2003 everything happening in and around Iraq is outside international law and the effects of this persisting illegality is the apocalypse before our eyes.

NOW LET’S GO BACK TO THE ASSASSINATION OF THE LEGITIMATE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF IRAQ.

Instead of pointing out the barbarity of this umpteenth crime and calling for the restoration of international law and the punishment of its perpetrators, the crows add their caw to the hyenas and vultures of the lynching mob and discuss the alleged crimes of the victim. ZNet, the fleet admiral of the Imperial antiwar movement information network, published several pieces on the death of Saddam Hussein. All these pieces had the same point of view. In “TALKING POINTS ON THE EXECUTION OF SADDAM HUSSEIN”, Phyllis Bennis, one of the most prominent voices of the American anti-war movement, writes:

With U.S. officials still running the legal show in Baghdad, the U.S. military occupation still in control of the country, and the escalating war engulfing Iraq, no trial held under these conditions can be considered legitimate.

2) Some ask "if the trial had been fair, would the results have been different?" The conviction of Saddam Hussein for huge crimes against the Iraqi people would almost certainly be the same.
Bennis’ words [“The conviction of Saddam Hussein for huge crimes against the Iraqi people would almost certainly be the same”] simply repudiate several hundred years of civilization. The use of the word “execution” to describe what really happened, the lynching of the legitimate president of Iraq, together with focusing her essay on the alleged crimes of the victim instead of the ‘supreme international crime’ of the aggressors, deliberately blind the readers and move their attention to more comfortable and safe sites."


[end quote] - You can read the rest here at Url.: http://tinyurl.com/yku4n6


FPF - Related:

* Hussein Execution Enrages Some | Journalist Deaths - Url.: http://electronicIraq.net

* "Human Rights Watch" [http://tinyurl.com/ygpvxb] is like many others not what it seems to be but a lightning rod for the people trying to understand what the killers are up to.

* "Hanging Saddam is inhuman and illegal - Who's next?" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/ydvure

* HR this far has lived and worked abroad - never in an English speaking country - for more than 4 decades for international media as an independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism!

* FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/gpr4j
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl

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All these billions: where does all the money go?

FPF-fwd. Joan Brunwasser + MediaLens

Perkins "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" + Where does all the money go?*

JOAN BRUNWASSER, VOTING INTEGRITY EDITOR, OPEDNEWS

"This book is my every nightmare come true. When I speak about it, the first thing most people ask is, "It's fiction, right?" Wrong. And, I'm more sorry about that than I can say.

Here is a review of an important and disturbing book about what fuels our national foreign policy. It's an eye-opener. This article will give you a taste; I urge you to take the time to read the book, available in hardcopy, paperback and on CD." - Best wishes, Joan Brunwasser - Email: Joan@OpEdNews.com op rafijoan@comcast.net

Her story is at Url.: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_joan_bru_070101__22confessions_of_an_e.htm

HR: When reading Joan's article on Perkins, I thought about this article* by the excellent MediaLens:

KILLING HOPE - OF JACKALS AND ECONOMIC HIT MEN

In his book, Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man, John Perkins describes the role he played in the West’s devastation of the Third World for profit, Latin America very much included. Perkins compares himself to the slave traders of colonial times:

“I had been the heir of those slavers who had marched into African jungles and hauled men and women off to waiting ships. Mine had been a more modern approach, subtler - I never had to see the dying bodies, smell the rotting flesh, or hear the screams of agony.” (Perkins, Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man, Ebury Press, 2005, p.148; www.johnperkins.org)

In January 1971, Perkins was hired by American big business to forecast economic growth in Third World countries. These forecasts were used to justify massive international loans, which funded engineering and construction projects, so funnelling money back to US corporations while enriching a small Third World elite.

Perkins explains that his real task - rarely discussed but always understood in high government and business circles - was to deliberately exaggerate growth forecasts in countries like Peru, Ecuador, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. The goal was for these countries to +fail+ to achieve their inflated targets and so be unable to repay their loans. The point being, as Perkins writes, that Third World leaders would then “become ensnared in a web of debt that ensures their loyalty“. As a result, American interests “can draw on them whenever we desire — to satisfy our political, economic, or military needs. In turn, they bolster their political positions by bringing industrial parks, power plants, and airports to their people. The owners of US engineering and construction companies become fabulously wealthy”. (Ibid, p.xi)

THE “NEEDS” INCLUDE MILITARY BASES, VOTES AT THE UN, CHEAP ACCESS TO OIL AND OTHER HUMAN AND NATURAL RESOURCES. PERKINS DESCRIBES THIS AS A NON-MILITARY MEANS FOR ACHIEVING “THE MOST SUBTLE AND EFFECTIVE FORM OF IMPERIALISM THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN”. (IBID, P.139)

Bankrupt debtor countries have thus been forced to spend much of their national wealth simply on repaying these debts even as their people sicken and die from malnutrition and poverty. For example, international banks dominated by Washington loaned Ecuador billions of dollars from the 1970s onwards so that it could hire engineering and construction firms to improve life for the rich. In the space of thirty years, poverty grew from 50 to 60 per cent, under- or unemployment increased from 15 to 70 per cent, public debt increased from $240 million to $16 billion, and the share of national resources allocated to the poor fell from 20 per cent to 6 per cent.

Today, Ecuador is required to devote nearly 50 per cent of its national budget to debt repayment - leaving almost no resources for millions of citizens classified as “dangerously impoverished”. Out of every $100 worth of oil pumped from the Amazon, less than $3 goes to Ecuadorian people dying from lack of food and potable water.

Perkins is clear that, waiting in the wings should the economic hit men (EHMs) fail, are the real hit men - “the jackals”. He writes of Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama, who both died in plane crashes:

“THEIR DEATHS WERE NOT ACCIDENTAL. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We EHMs failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.” (Ibid, p.ix)

Perkins writes of Roldós‘s death in May 1981:

“It had all the markings of a CIA-orchestrated assassination. I understood that it had been executed so blatantly in order to send a message. The new Reagan administration, complete with its fast-draw Hollywood cowboy image, was the ideal vehicle for delivering such a message. The jackals were back, and they wanted Omar Torrijos and everyone else who might consider joining an anti-corporate crusade to know it.” (Ibid, p.158)

Torrijos was killed just two months later. This is the likely fate that awaits Chavez, Morales, and other Third World leaders currently being ridiculed by the British press.

The last fifty years have seen a vast bloodbath as Washington has funnelled money, weapons and supplies to client dictators and right-wing death squads battling independent nationalism across Latin America. Britain’s only left-wing daily newspaper, the Morning Star - with a tiny circulation of between 13,000-14,000 - is a lone voice describing some of these horrors. Dr Francisco Dominguez, head of the Centre for Brazilian and Latin American Studies at Middlesex University, writes:

“Military dictatorship, death squads, torture, assassination, economic blockade, economic genocide, military intervention, wanton repression, corruption and every other means intrinsic to capitalist and imperialist ‘management techniques’ has been utilised to secure the profits of primarily US multinationals and the wealth of the privileged few. Mass unemployment and mass poverty are just two extra means with which to obtain compliance with the economic and political pillage of the continent.” (Dominguez, ‘Latin America takes centre stage,’ Morning Star, November 22, 2005)

JOHN PILGER ADDS:

"In the US media in the 1980s, the ‘threat’ of tiny Nicaragua was seriously debated until it was crushed. Venezuela is clearly being ‘softened up’ for something similar. A US army publication, Doctrine for Asymmetric War against Venezuela, describes Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution as the ‘largest threat since the Soviet Union and Communism‘." (Pilger, op., cit)

WHO BENEFITS?

The answer is provided by Professor William Domhoff of the University of California at Santa Cruz in his study ‘Wealth, Income, and Power In the United States’. Domhoff reports that as of 2001, the top 1% of US households owned 33.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% had 51%, indicating that just 20% of the people owned 84%, leaving only 16% of the wealth for the bottom 80%. In terms of financial wealth, the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 39.7%.

In terms of types of financial wealth, the top 1 percent of households have 44.1% of all privately held stock, 58.0% of financial securities, and 57.3% of business equity. The top 10% have 85% to 90% of stock, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75% of non-home real estate. Domhoff comments:

“Since financial wealth is what counts as far as the control of income-producing assets, we can say that just 10% of the people own the United States of America.” (G. William Domhoff, ‘Wealth, Income, and Power In The United States,’ February 2006; http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html)

These fabulously wealthy elites own politics, they own the media, they control what the American people know, see and think. In Britain, the top 5% of the British population own 45% of the nation's wealth - they also run politics, the economy and the media in their own interests.

Naturally, then, elite journalists reflexively declare that the United States and Britain are passionately intent on bringing democracy to the world. A recent BBC radio talk show asked: “Are 100 British soldiers' lives too high a price to pay for democracy in Iraq?” (BBC Radio Five Live)

This, despite the fact that the income ratio of the one-fifth of the world’s population in the wealthiest countries to the one-fifth in the poorest countries went from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995.

Despite achieving bestseller status by word of mouth, Perkins’ account has been all but ignored by the mainstream British press since its publication last year, receiving mentions in just four articles. In one of these, a Sunday Times reviewer wrote:

“One measure of the success of an author is whether his book passes the ‘laugh out loud’ test. John Perkins’s had me in stitches. The problem is, it is not meant to.” (David Charters, ‘A miss not a hit,’ Sunday Times, March 5, 2006)

CYNICALLY IGNORING THE ISSUES AND EVIDENCE, CHARTERS DISMISSED THE BOOK AS “RIDICULOUS”: “IF IT WAS NOT SO LAUGHABLE, IT COULD BE DEPRESSING.” THE BOOK HAS RECEIVED SIMILAR TREATMENT IN THE US PRESS.

WE SHOULD BE UNDER NO ILLUSIONS.

The corporate media oppose Chavez because the corporate system is viscerally opposed to policies that are unleashing democratic hopes in Venezuela. It takes a moment’s thought to understand that greater democracy, equality, justice and popular empowerment are +not+ in the interests of a system built on exploitation. As John Perkins comments of the media:

“Things are not as they appear... Our media is part of the corporatocracy. The officers and directors who control nearly all our communications outlets know their places; they are taught throughout life that one of their most important jobs is to perpetuate, strengthen, and expand the system they have inherited. They are very efficient at doing so, and when opposed, they can be ruthless.” (Perkins, op. cit, p.221)

As long as we support this corporate media system - as long as we hand over our money for its product, for its phoney ’balance’ and subliminal smears - it will continue to subordinate the welfare of millions of human beings to corporate greed.

[andend] - Story at MediaLens - pls scroll down - Url.: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060518_ridiculing_chavez_the.php

This is a free service but please consider donating to Media Lens: www.medialens.org/donate.html

FPF - RELATED:

* 'Confessions of an economic hit man.' World Bank insider Perkins explains: "Jackals' are C.I.A. sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If it doesn't work, they perform assassinations, or try to." They steal billions for the World Bank, IMF, USAID, UNDP, AID etc. - It's your life too: Must watch Video Url.: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8171.htm

* And this is where the billions go, the 'BIS' - "The Bank for International Settlements" - Who controls global monetary affairs? The BIS! Based in Basle, Switzerland, the BIS is central bank to central banks. The BIS has greater immunity than a sovereign nation, is accountable to no one, runs global monetary affairs and is privately owned. This is a must-read report to understand the globalization process." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/y6xmed

* THROW OUT WAR PROPAGANDISTS LIKE THE BBC, FOX, CNN ETC.! - Url.: http://www.cemab.be/news/2006/07/1632.php

HR this far has lived and worked abroad - never in an English speaking country - for more than 4 decades for international media as an independent foreign correspondent, of which 10 years - also during Gulf War I - in the Arab World and the Middle East. Seeing worldwide that every bullet and every bomb breeds more terrorism!

FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/gpr4j
The Netherlands
fpf@chello.nl

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