Saturday, December 23, 2006
Johann Hari: The lies being told about Hugo Chavez
In his presidency, the proportion of Venezuela's GDP in the private sector has actually increased
Published: 11 December 2006
After the landslide victory comes the landslide of lies. Last week, Hugo Chavez was re-elected as President of Venezuela with 63 per cent of the vote - in an election declared "totally free and fair" by the international legal monitors, in a country where almost all of the media militantly opposes him.
I know the reason why. Her name is Maria Gonzalez. She is a lined, stooped 60 year-old grandmother I stumbled across last year in Barrio Neuva Tacagua, a fetid slum made of tin and mud in the high hills around Caracas. Maria grew up in a Venezuela that was dripping in oil wealth - but she never went to school and she never saw a doctor, because the country's petro-profits surged only into the bank accounts of the country's 25 richest families. Like the vast majority of Venezuelans, she was left to live and die in makeshift rust-and-cardboard shacks.
The day I met her, Maria wrote her name - in shaky handwriting, on a blackboard - for the first time in her life. Since Hugo Chavez was first elected, in another free and open election in 1998, Maria's world has begun to change. The new President began to use the country's oil wealth to build clinics where Maria could be treated free of charge, to subsidise food prices for the 70 per cent of Venezuelans who, like her, live in grinding, binding poverty, and to establish mass literacy programmes to teach his country - and a million Marias - how to read.
But somehow, somewhere in-between Maria's Venezuela and the newspapers and television screens of the US and Britain, Chavez undergoes a strange transformation. He ceases to be the most popular leader in the democratic world, and instead morphs into "a grotesque dictator", "like Hitler, Stalin or Mao".
Why is that? I know of only one persuasive explanation: these people reporting on Chavez are deeply ingrained in a political culture that views the rest of the world as a trough for corporate profit. When a developing-world regime funnels its profits to a handful of rich, they instinctively describe it as aiding "regional stability" and "democratic". But when a government uses its resource-riches for people who live in slums, they become suspect and "a threat to stability".
[Read more]
From The Guardian:
Religion does more harm than good - poll
82% say faith causes tension in country where two thirds are not religious
Julian Glover and Alexandra Topping
Saturday December 23, 2006
The Guardian
Girls from St Marylebone school in London attend a multi-faith assembly in church. Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian
More people in Britain think religion causes harm than believe it does good, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today. It shows that an overwhelming majority see religion as a cause of division and tension - greatly outnumbering the smaller majority who also believe that it can be a force for good.
The poll also reveals that non-believers outnumber believers in Britain by almost two to one. It paints a picture of a sceptical nation with massive doubts about the effect religion has on society: 82% of those questioned say they see religion as a cause of division and tension between people. Only 16% disagree. The findings are at odds with attempts by some religious leaders to define the country as one made up of many faith communities.
[read the whole article here]
COMMENT: It would be about time that pretentious, gowned or ungowned, ministers or pastors or priests or whatever, changed job and did something more useful than cocking about like self-designated god-sent prophets claiming to hold the absolute truth exclusively, to be entitled to tell people what to do and what not to do, and raising divisions, fanaticism, intolerance and passive obedience.
by Joe London
Subject to violence in all its numerous, metamorphic guises, not last the one that goes under the name of pedagogy (the science of blindly perpetuating the original sin of abuse with good conscience), people will be shaped by it, build up amounts of rage and acridness which, like a viscous leak building up within themselves unacknowledged, just wait for any opportunity to make others, self included, pay for that violence, no matter if innocent, thus perpetuating its cycle.
Almost as a result of a law of mechanics, or of fluids, violence and destructiveness are so spread out everywhere, might inform every act, hide behind the actions of entire nations, behind their righteous presumption of truth and justice, behind religions and self-celebrations.
Stop a single individual from being himself, quench his living need of expression and love, the unique sap of his being and he, even if he no longer retains the memory the crimes perpetrated on him, will make others pay for them one way or another, if only they are obscurely perceived as the appropriate, weak and harmless sacrificial goats. His own children, his wife or husband, the work colleague, the immigrant, the different, the fellow man or, if his position allows it, entire nations.
[On the same topic, read also this post, with interesting bibliography]
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Richest 2% own 'half the wealth'
By Andrew Walker
Economics correspondent, BBC World Service
The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth, according to a new study by a United Nations research institute.
The report, from the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the UN University, says that the poorer half of the world's population own barely 1% of global wealth. [read more]
