Don’t Fear the Truth

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Basically, stories about rice being rationed at Cosco are a joke, after you read that people in Haiti are eating MUD PIES. This is not a joke, they use a type of clay, add fat to it, and then eat it.

Here is where I get mad.

The US Defense budget is about $500 Billion a year. 2008 is estimated at over $600 Billion. These numbers are just planned budgets, not actual spending. We spend more than this.

The second highest defense budge in the world is China, at about $60 billion per year. Meanwhile “The United Nations estimates that the cost to end world hunger completely, along with diseases related to hunger and poverty, is about $195 billion a year.”

$195 billion a year would end world hunger completely?

So the US could cut its military spending by enough to wipe out world hunger, and still spend 6-7 times more than the number two military country in the world.

Actually, I am not a fan of just sending countries aid. Welfare only keeps people poor, and I don’t think the citizens of these countries just want hand outs - they want the tools and education to make it on their own. Contrary to popular belief not everyone in Africa welcomes the food we send them. To quote the article:

We can continue the endless cycle of need and dependency, or you can create jobs, develop indigenous capacity, and build a sustainable future.

Aid not only crowds out local entrepreneurship, it makes governments lazy and deprives countries of the incentive to build effective institutions. Public revenue derived from taxes makes governments directly responsible to their citizens. Free money builds white elephants and bloated bureaucracies, it being far easier to create new government jobs than implement policies to fight unemployment, especially when someone else is footing the bill.

Some Africans have even asked that the UN stop sending food to Africa.

Lets recap:

• Sending free food to poor nations only encourages corruption and laziness, and ensures the cycle of poverty and hunger continue.
• The US and other industrialized nations continue to send food to poor nations. These nations are still hungry though, people are still dying every day.
• The US alone could cut its military budget by 33% - think about this, just a 33% decrease - apply that money to distributing free food to poor nations, and end world hunger. Yet they do not, they send some food and aid, but continue to spend three times the money on its military than it would take to end world hunger. The US would still, after this decrease, be spending 6-7 times what China, the number two militarized nation in the world, spends on its military.
• “The World Bank wants developing countries to introduce market reforms, including the abolition of protective tariffs, a move that often causes massive damage to local agriculture.”

It would appear then, that if people in power really believed that free food would solve world hunger, that the US on its own could do so pretty easily. Yet we do not.

If the people in power know that sending $195 billion in free food per year would not really fix the problem, why do we continue to send smaller amounts of free food?

A case could be made that the industrialized world does not want too many of the poor countries to industrialize. Especially Africa. As noted above, the World Bank pushes reforms that cause huge problems for poor nations. This article in the NYTimes even shows how Malawi, a country in Africa started feeding its own people and even selling surplus food to other countries - they ignored the advice given to them by the World Bank, and US Economics ‘experts’. This article really proves that the US is purposely trying keep these nations poor, and starving. How? It states:

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers.

The US is planning on spending $288 billion on farm subsidies - yet we tell African nations not to subsidize their own farming. Malawi decides to go on its own and subsidize farming… and now they have so much food, they are exporting it.

Possibly this is not all planned. I would like to think so, actually. But the evidence is pretty strong. Sending free food is not helping, rich nations are counseling poor nations to use economic policies that they themselves do not use. The US could easily wipe out hunger if it truly felt that sending free food would help these countries.

In a time when oil is getting harder to find, maybe people in power understand that natural resources are limited, and the more countries become industrialized, the more we will have to share with the rest of the world. The US could not sustain its lifestyle if we did not import natural resources, and by keeping poor nations from industrializing, we can buy their natural resources and even claim that it helps their country - which it would, if many of the nations in Africa were not controlled by dictators, and overrun with corruption… which is coincidentally, promoted by the policy of sending them free food…

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Earlier this week, after reading the article stating Canada was going to stop the import of these bottles, I started looking online for glass versions of the bottles we have, called Dr Browns Bottles. These are unique bottles, and reduce baby gas immensely. I found out that you could now get glass versions of Dr Brown’s bottles, so I started checking online stores. Amazon had one seller - sold out. eBay had no one selling any of these bottles.

I spent an hour and a half looking at probably fifty online stores - none of them had these bottles. They were all sold out. It appeared that Dr Brown just released these bottles about a month ago, and with this article hitting yahoo.com, people had bought out every store on the net. Amazing.

I kept checking, started looking for other bottles that might be similar to ours. No local stores even carried glass bottles at all. Very frustrating. If you have kids, trying feeding them with a bottle and wondering if your baby is drinking something harmful to them.

This morning I went online to check again - and found some! Sellers on eBay had them! Hey wait a minute… what the hell is up with these prices?

eBay sellers, and one person on Amazon, are price gouging these bottles. Not just a little either. These bottles sell for $12.99 for a set of two. We use about 10 bottles total, including what we send to our daycare. So I expected to pay about $60 plus shipping for 10 bottles.

Here is the list of eBay sellers that have these bottles.

Six bottles = $109. Four bottles = $59. Two bottles = $34!

I am so, so tired of capitalism. Anything for a buck. Now, if someone gouges a Playstation when they are new, and someone wants to pay $1000 for one, fine. In my opinion, this is different. People are scared, and worried that their *babies* are in danger and these freaks decide not to just make a few dollars on the short supply… they triple the price? A few dollars more I could see, but this is no different, in my opinion, than the company that charged $8 for bottled water at the second Woodstock concert. Disgusting.

We got lucky. The Babies-R-Us store an HOUR away had 11 packages, so we now have the glass bottles. I had thought I would buy the remaining bottles and put them on eBay for the price I paid, just to piss off those scum bags making money off of fear, but then realized I was just taking bottles away from someone locally that might need them.

Is this the end of the world? No. But can we have a little humanity please? Nothing is more precious than a baby. At the right, take a look at my 9 month old daughter. Yes, there is nothing any better about my daughter than anyone else’s daughter, but sometimes I think people need to relate to things visually. There are a lot of people out there just like me, who have bundles of joy just like this little rascal here. We deserve to be safe, and that safety comes before profit. I don’t give a shit if your portfolio drops a little because some plastics company’s stock lost value now that they can’t produce cancer causing plastic. We all deserve to be safe, from the newborn baby up to the retired great-grandmother. Is it too much to ask that safety comes before profit?

And the question of the day is: do you think the corporations knew about dangers of BPA when they started using it? Because in case you didn’t know, the chemical companies do not have to prove something is safe to be put on the market - someone else has to prove that they cause problems in humans. Since you can’t test on humans, that is pretty hard to do until the chemical has been around for quite a few years, and you can start to look for trends, etc. Is it coincidental that after 30 years of use, there is growing evidence that Aspartame is dangerous… and lookie here, Splenda is on the market, ready to take over.

This is not the way it should be. Fuck profit, fuck corporatism, and fuck anyone involved in this shit. We can’t even make cigarettes illegal though when we know that they cause cancer, what are our chances of changing how chemicals are allowed into the market so that we can know our kids are safe with the stuff they come into contact every day?

About Zero. The European Union, Canada, and California are all making these chemicals illegal because they will put a ban on something without conclusive evidence. Is it not better to remove something that seems questionable, until it can be proven safe, than it is to say “well until you can prove that it causes cancer in humans, we will continue to make money.”

I’m moving to Canada. Screw this shit.

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Now it got submitted to Digg.com, and has 150 diggs over there. If it hits the front page on digg… well I know a few people who have said they had over 100K visitors from a story they submitted that got onto the digg front page….

The donations were at $1000 about an hour ago, they are now up to $1500. $57 was donated in the few minutes that I have been writing this.

Some people feel that most of the money should be donated to charity, and only a few flowers sent to Helen. I disagree. I feel that 20, 30, 50 dozen roses sent to Helen’s workplace not only would let her know that people appreciate what she is doing, it might also send a message throughout the journalistic community…

People are paying attention. Real journalism is important.

People are visual. One bouquet of flowers does not have the same impact on people that 30 bouquets would. What if people in neighboring offices/floors/buildings start to see the huge flow of bouquets doing into one office? People will start asking questions. Those people go home and tell their families the story.

Ideally, some news outlet picks up the story and runs it, and it makes national news. Journalists everywhere start to realize that people are unhappy, and are paying attention to the crap we are being force fed on TV and most newspapers. Journalists start to ask tougher questions, putting spin-meisters like Dana Perino on the spot. Bush, Cheney, and the other war criminals start to realize the tide is changing…

But hey, you might laugh, and say that I’m a dreamer…

But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one.

Here is the video of her asking about torture, if you missed the link at the beginning of the post.

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Since I am writing about this, you probably are assuming that there is a surprise here, and there is. He said that almost every student thinks that college educated people (note: this does not mean the people polled were attending college at the time they were polled, just that they had achieved that level of education.) would be more dovish. Since they are more educated, they would understand the ramifications of war, etc etc.

It is just the opposite. The people with college educations were more likely to be hawkish, and as people polled were less educated, they were more likely to be dovish. Interesting, isn’t it?

He states that people who are more educated are more ’socialized’, and points out that Mao Tse Tung, a ruthless dictator, immediately started schooling people after gaining power. And did you know that one of the ten steps to creating a Communist state in the Communist Manifesto is create free public schools? (Side note: another step in the Manifesto is to have a Central Bank, which the US and I think all industrialized nations have. Yet another is to have a graduated income tax - which we most definitely have.) Education does not always make people independent thinkers, it just gives them information. John Taylor Gatto, a teacher for 30 years, says in his book that the coal barons in the 1800s pushed public schooling as a form of ’social conditioning’, to educate people enough to do complex jobs, but not to question the status quo. Some of what Gatto says seems too far fetched to be believable, but in my opinion you should never discount anything until you have proof it is wrong. So I don’t see schools as the source of all evil… but I plan on telling my kids to remember that what they are taught in school can be wrong, and often is. (Do they still teach kids that Columbus thought the world was flat?) Question *everything*.

Higher educated people tend to lean Republican. Republicans are usually pro-war. Democrats are usually anti-war. Democrats are usually defined as the working class. Is it the education itself that sways people’s ideas and opinions?

As Loewen states, part of the answer is likely that more educated people tend to be more successful, and people succeeding in a system are less likely to think ill of it. Obviously a blue collar worker is more likely to question our system and government than Bill Gates would.

What is interesting is to think of what the world would be like if everyone were home schooled. Why, people might teach their kids that Socialism was good, or (gasp), even Communism! We all know Capitalism is the best right? That’s what they teach us in schools, and hey, things are always getting better here in the US-of-A, with more and more people requiring government assistance, not having health insurance, losing their homes due to deregulation of the banking system…

Sarcasm aside, the point is valid. When trouble arises, the automatic answer is that the system must be tweaked - but not tossed. Why? How ‘free thinking’ is that? Perhaps Socialism or Communism doesn’t work, but who is to say Capitalism is the best option? As John Lennon says in Working Class Hero:

And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

Are we really equal? Are we really free? Are we classless? When Cheney’s response to the statement that 66% of the population feels Iraq is not worth it is: “So?”

When was the last time someone from the working class became president? When is the last time you really felt a politician had your best interests in mind?

I’ll tell you one thing I have learned, the people in power don’t fear people who are against the war, or who dislike politicians, or those that march on Washington. They fear people who might think we should change the system. Those that point out that Capitalism is not classless, for instance. Communism in theory (flawed as it is) means that all people make the same amount of money, that people are equal not just in race, religion or sex - but in status, comfort, safety. Was Senator McCarthy scared of Communism because Russia might invade us, or was he afraid because in a Communist system, he would be living the same existence as everyone else, with no extra privileges…

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