Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
Bolivia\u2019s President Evo Morales has blamed U.S. President Barack Obama for the failure of the recent OAS (Organization of American States) Summit of the Americas to issue a final declaration, and he says that a major sticking point for Mr. Obama was Obama\u2019s opposition to a provision in the proposed declaration that would have said that health care is \u201ca human right.\u201d Mr. Obama insisted that it\u2019s instead a privilege, access to which must be based primarily upon an individual\u2019s ability-to-pay, as is the case in the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n Said Mr. Morales<\/a><\/span>: “One point (in the drafted declaration) was important: health as a human right, and the U.S. government did not accept that health\u00a0should be considered a human right \u2026 President Obama did not accept\u201d that concept.<\/span><\/p>\n The 8-point draft had resulted from four months of negotiations between the participating countries prior to the Summit in Panama, which was held on April 10-11. There was such strong sentiment for declaring health care to be a right, so that this provision was included in the draft despite Obama\u2019s opposition to it.<\/span><\/p>\n A\u00a0report<\/span><\/a>\u00a0from the Latin American television network Telesur (majority-owned by the Venezuelan government, which\u00a0Obama unsuccessfully tried to overthrow via an aborted February 2015 coup<\/span><\/a>, announced at the start of the conference, that, “The Seventh Summit of the Americas begins Friday in Panama without a final declaration because the US Government has expressed\u00a0its disagreement with some of the clauses, which blocked agreement.\u201d Furthermore, this was personally done by U.S. President Obama: “This information was confirmed by Foreign Minister of Argentina, Hector Timerman, who described the event as ‘a debate among\u00a0presidents<\/i>.\u2019” That\u2019s how personal, and top-level, the ideological disagreement here was.<\/span><\/p>\n On April 15th,\u00a0German Economic News<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0reported that Morales said in his speech at the conference:<\/span><\/p>\n “The United States has regarded Latin America and the Caribbean as their backyard, and the peoples of this region as their slaves.\u00a0That is the reason for the extreme poverty in the region.\u00a0I ask the United States: what we have done, to justify treating us as U.S.\u2019s slaves?\u00a0I tell you, President Obama, Latin America has changed forever.\u00a0We are no longer submissive.\u00a0It is no longer\u00a0possible to carry out in our countries coups.\u00a0We are determined to shape our own futures.\u00a0We are no longer in the\u00a0shadow of US imperialism.\u00a0For we say what we think.\u00a0And we do what we say.\u00a0We urge you to respect our democracy and our\u00a0sovereignty.\u00a0Latin America has been kidnapped by the United States.\u00a0We do not want this to continue.\u00a0We do not want any longer decrees by\u00a0the US President, in which we are declared as a threat to your country. [He was condemning Obama\u2019s having declared Venezuela to be a threat to U.S. national security.]\u00a0We do not want to be spied upon.\u00a0We want to live in peace.\u00a0We urge the\u00a0United States to end the destruction of entire civilizations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s the background to that: Latin America was originally colonized by European aristocracies, whose agents in the Americas treated the locals like dirt. According to the classic 1992 historical account, by David E. Stannard,\u00a0American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World<\/i><\/span><\/a>, nearly eight million native Americans or \u2018Indians\u2019 were killed by the European invaders (employees of Europe\u2019s aristocrats) within the first 21 years after Christopher Columbus\u2019s landing in the Americas. And that was just the start. In 1898, the American aristocracy grabbed Cuba from the Spanish aristocracy; and, ever since, all countries to the south of the U.S. have been the U.S.\u2019s “backyard.”<\/span><\/p>\n President Morales said that Cuba does not need \u201chelp\u201d from the U.S.:\u00a0“What you need to do is repair all the damages you have caused in that country!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Regarding the disagreements with Morales and other populist leaders in Latin America, the criticisms of Mr. Obama would be no different if any of the Republican or Democratic candidates replace Obama (except, perhaps, for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders). For example, Hillary Clinton was the Democratic Party bulwark of the coup that overthrew the democratic populist President of Honduras in 2009, Manuel Zelaya and replaced him with a far-right junta run by that country\u2019s fewer-than-twelve \u201coligarchs\u201d or, actually, aristocratic families<\/span><\/a>. And, she told The New York Times<\/i> in a 27 March 2008 interview<\/span><\/a>, when asked about a single-payer health insurance system \u2013 which necessarily entails the concept of health care as being a right instead of merely a privilege \u2013 “I have thought about this, as you might\u00a0guess, for 15 years and I never seriously considered a single payer system.\u201d A follow-up question asked her about whether she might find a single-payer system acceptable, and she said, “I think that, you know, there\u2019s too many\u00a0bells and whistles that Americans want that would not be available in kind of a\u00a0bare-bones\u00a0Medicare-like system.\u201d That\u2019s totally a rejection of the concept of health care being at all a basic human right. She wants greed to rule, even in the provisioning of healthcare. Then, in recent times, she has given $200,000 private \u2018speeches\u2019 to healthcare-industry groups (such as\u00a0this<\/span><\/a>) where she has received repeated standing ovations as a champion of for-profit health care, and those industries have been large financial backers<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of her political career. Her private email is being hidden from the public, but her communications with health care CEOs (outside even those closed-to-the-press $200,000-a-pop private \u2018speeches\u2019 with them) are among the chief concerns among Democrats who want to know what she is hiding. In her 2008 campaign,\u00a0her top donor-group were the Wall Street megabanks and their law firms.<\/span><\/a>\u00a0However, they will also be the top donors to many Republican candidates. Ms. Clinton\u2019s broader 2008 donor-sources<\/span><\/a> listed in the first two categories \u201cLawyers\u201d and Retired,\u201d but with no indication of the source of those people\u2019s money. Her #3 was \u201cSecurities & Investment,\u201d then, below that, in order: \u201cReal Estate,\u201d \u201cWomen\u2019s issues,\u201d \u201cEducation,\u201d \u201cBusiness Services\u201d; and, then, in eighth place, \u201cHealth Professionals.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n So, the concept of health care being a right, is not going to become a part of American politics, even if that concept is basic to lowering the cost and\u00a0increasing the accessibility<\/span><\/a>\u00a0to health services, and simultaneously to\u00a0increasing the quality<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of that healthcare \u2013 all of which is the case: benefits to everyone but the aristocracy, who own those healthcare services.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In healthcare, the evidence is clear that where capitalism (the profit-motive) predominates, waste and inferior health-care results \u2013 and costs a lot more to consumers. On things that should be a right instead of a privilege, capitalism produces waste, not efficiency. But if a country is extremely corrupt, capitalism will dominate even in those parts of the economy. So, Obama\u2019s, and virtually all other U.S. politicians\u2019, support of profit-making health care is understandable. However, for U.S. President Obama to insist that all other countries in the Americas be at least as corrupt as the U.S. is, won\u2019t be appreciated abroad. In any field \u2013 health care or any other \u2013 where other countries are less corrupt than America, the idea of their taking dictation from America won\u2019t be appreciated. In the present case, Obama has blocked an OAS declaration of a basic human right which even the aristocracies in other\u00a0<\/span>American nations believe to be a basic human right. The U.S. is now its own \u201cbanana republic,\u201d and won\u2019t likely win converts to this status. In the new Latin America, even much of the aristocracy has had more than enough of Milton Friedmanite thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n The best that can be said of Obama is that other successful U.S. politicians are no better than he is \u2013 in other words: that the U.S. is pervasively corrupt. This is not something that any American politician will admit (i.e.: that \u201cYou can\u2019t get where I am unless you\u2019re corrupt\u201d). Nor will the aristocratically controlled U.S. \u2018news\u2019 media permit it to be published. The same aristocracy that controls the U.S. Government, controls the U.S. \u2018press.\u2019 Thus, \u2018freedom of the press\u2019 has degenerated to merely freedom of the aristocracy to control the government \u2013 and to control what the public sees, and does not see, of that government. Consequently, Americans buy \u2018the free market\u2019 in everything.<\/span><\/p>\n The profit in the press depends mainly on the influence it can peddle. For example, when Donald Graham sold the Washington Post<\/i> to Jeff Bezos, holder of a $600 million ten-year contract to sell cloud computing services to the CIA<\/span><\/a>, the influence in Washington that Bezos was purchasing was, even alone, enough to make the investment a sure winner for him, even if it didn\u2019t let him also now receive the advertisements from Raytheon etc., to sell congressmen on weapons-systems \u2013 and to sell the benefits of expanding the CIA itself. So: just as corporations answer to the aristocracy, so does the government, now. And so does \u2018our free press.\u2019 It\u2019s not \u201cours\u201d; and it\u2019s not \u201cfree.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n And this is the reason why you probably didn\u2019t know, until<\/i> now, that (and why) Obama blocked a final declaration at the OAS Summit, and got treated with contempt at that conference, which took place on April 10th and 11th<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n ———-<\/span><\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of\u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse Bolivia\u2019s President Evo Morales has blamed U.S. President Barack Obama for the failure of the recent OAS (Organization of American States) Summit of the Americas to issue a final declaration, and he says that a major sticking point for Mr. Obama was Obama\u2019s opposition to a provision in the proposed declaration that would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":145867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[115,30,32,96,535,853,929,59,526,49,76,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-145866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-barack-obama","10":"tag-big-brother","11":"tag-cia","12":"tag-cover-up","13":"tag-global-news","14":"tag-health-care","15":"tag-human-rights","16":"tag-military","17":"tag-propaganda","18":"tag-usa-news","19":"tag-warfare","20":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}