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Another Great Idea from Thomas Friedman
"My Head Is Flat" author, billonaire spouse and NYT writer Thomas Friedman has another great idea:
I will not vote for any candidate who is not committed to dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans.
Consider:
The National Health System comprises a network of institutions that are easily accessible and provide coverage to 100% of the population.
[…]
Cuba’s health system is financed out of the state budget. The population receives free preventive, curative, and rehabilitation services, which range from primary care, routine medical attention, and dentistry to hospital care requiring the use of highly sophisticated medical technologies.
Health in the Americas – Cuba
How to call this? Elite illusions?
Friedman: 9/11 is over….time to fix those bridges and phones! To get our spirit back! To let the tourists and biz ppl in once more! (Stats on this point cherry picked and too low.)
What an idiotic article. A free hospital for poor Cubans? The ones who need free hospitals are US citizens. As for the poor imprisoned in Gitmo, they are bodies paid and bought, or randomly caught, to create a mini concentration camp that the world would shut up about.
They should be paid to appear shackled and crouching…just like extras in B movies, and for living in poor conditions, like on some survivalist TV shows.
Onwards. The US Gvmt. and elites used 9/11 to instill fear and render authoritarianism acceptable. Terrified citizens who pray and bow to arbitrary authority, say. But that goes contrary to the spirit of the US – freespeech, the famed liberty, freecommerce, open borders, empowered citizens and so on, all of which contributes to GDP or ‘growth’ big time. Bunkering in, shutting down, closing borders, those nasty jackboots, endless crappy computer terrarist lists, etc. affects the US economically directly, more seriously, I guess, than one can read in the stats.
A common pov is that the Gvmt/elites are toeing a fine line between keeping its citizenry afraid and thus submissive and supportive of war, deprivation, and keeping the US star bright on the world commercial scene, biz as usual, etc. Remember after 9/11 Bush said people should go shopping? Doomed to fail…
I think that the fear-hype was not, is not, a necessity for US foreign agression. The break up of Yugoslavia, the invasion of Afghanistan, did not require that. Without 9/11 Iraq would have been invaded anyway, it was on the cards, etc. Green-clawed slavering baby-murderer Saddam, or greedy nationalist, socialist, oil-hogger Saddam, would have been sufficient, 9/11 was not needed.
Once it happened, it was exploited in that way, almost as a lame excuse, a need to make hay, hyped up for the sheeples, but downplayed also – see the contradiction between fear and confident commerce, creative technology, fabulous movies, etc. Guilt turned the victims, the dead, into negligible ghosts; commemorations cut short, forbidden or jeered at, and the living victims, 9/11 responders, actually not only them, ignored and short-shifted (as are US vets.)
Move on, nothing to see here. (see Friedman)
The exploitation of 9/11 served to cover up its real origins, and aims, it was turned into a world stain, lead to the adoption of a victimized position that nobody could question, oppose, turning the US into a hysterical (legitimate!) sufferer – borrowing from the Israeli script – permitting it to defend itself at all costs. Therefore, to aggress others with impunity. When the powerful take on the victim position, it is, in French :
Game Oh-vver!
Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 30 2007 18:49 utc | 5
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