Alberta, February-febrero 2006
16
ALTERNATIVA Latinoamericana
ENGLISH SECTION
EDITORIAL:
By Nora Fernández
The only real surprise is that it took this long.
On Thursday, February 2, the U.S. government's senior hawk,
Donald Rumsfeld, stooped to the Hitler `analogy' in a show of his
administration's increasing desperation at the consolidation of the
Bolivarian Revolution and the rise of the Left in Latin America. The
Secretary of Defense delivered the clumsy slur against the
(repeatedly) democratically elected president of Venezuela, Hugo
Chavez:"We've got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money.
He's a person who was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was
elected legally, and then consolidated power, and now is, of course,
working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. [Evo] Morales and
others. It concerns me."
Not to be outdone, his even more irrational fellow right-wing
septuagenarian renewed his call for the United States to
assassinate Chavez. This time using Fox News as his pulpit,
Robertson added a half-hearted caveat to the death wish: "not now,
but one day". The evangelist closed his comments with a racist
boast, "until that [earlier] comment everybody thought Chavez was
a fellow having to do with table grapes in California". To close the
segment, co-host Sean Hannity concluded with this statement,
agreeing with the thrust of Robertson's inciteful remarks:
"I think one thing we could say is, the world would be better
off without him where he is, because he is a danger to the United
States." (See the full interview transcript to believe it at
MediaMatters.org
It would be gratuitous to dwell on the absurdity of Rumsfeld's
flailing and Robertson's fatwa. The more important point is to
highlight the real political developments underlying the hysteria.
There are a number of key aspects to Venezuela's political and
social revolution that are currently haunting not only that South
American country's economic elites, but their superiors in
Washington, D.C. as well.
First, the Bolivarian Revolution is more entrenched politically
and more strident ideologically than ever; Chavez has had his
mandate confirmed on a number of occasions since his initial 1998
election, and is all but guaranteed a huge victory in the December
2006 presidential elections. A great number of social programs and
investments, fuelled by high oil prices, are bringing tangible
improvements to the poor majority in the country. In addition to this
redistribution of wealth, increased political participation and
grassroots organizing is pushing forward for a more radical
transformation of society. And Chavez, especially in the past year,
has been every more urgently calling for this process to lead to the
development of `socialism for the 21st century'.
Another extremely threatening consequence of the
Bolivarian Revolution, from the point of view of imperial interests, is
the way that its message is resonating across Latin America. The
December 2005 landslide election of Evo Morales in Bolivia was
just the most spectacular example of the recent trend in the region.
Morales--also, by implication, ludicrously tarred with the Hitler
brush in Rumsfeld's remarks--came to power after years of revolt
by Bolivia's indigenous peoples and working class.
The Venezuelan experience stands as both an inspiration to
social movements across Latin America and as a standard to which
populist and Left leaders can be held accountable, as they
inevitably face pressure from national elites and the transnational
interests of capital.
Finally, Hugo Chavez has been hitting the United States
government hard of late on the home front. This might even be the
hardest pill to swallow for Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney et al. In
September, for instance, the Venezuelan government's offer of aid
was held up--and Cuba's offer of hundreds of doctors was ignored
outright -- while the U.S. government failed to help the victims of
Hurricane Katrina. In subsequent months, Venezuela announced
that CITGO--a wholly owned subsidiary of the country's PDVSA
national oil company--would begin providing discounted heating oil
to disadvantaged households in the United States. Last month, for
instance, Venezuela agreed to give upwards of $5 million worth of
heating oil to low-income, homeless and Native people in--of all
places--the state of Maine. In this and other initiatives, Chavez is
turning international solidarity on its head, and intervening on the
side of the `other America' within the United States. The new
internationalism of the Bolivarian Revolution is not the kind of
`globalization' that the progenitors of that euphemism for neo-liberal
capitalism had in mind.
As if providing all that essential energy and disaster relief to
so many citizens of the United States wasn't enough of a poke in the
eye to the government in Washington, last week Hugo Chavez
played host to the woman who has led the resurgence of the U.S.
anti-war movement. Cindy Sheehan was among the honoured
guests at the World Social Forum, held in Caracas January 24-29.
Along with over 60 000 participants, Sheehan resolved,
among other things, to build huge rallies on March 18 of this year,
the third anniversary of Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. The
Venezuelan president urged people in the United States and
around the world to bring down the U.S. Empire, even offering a
little career advice to Sheehan, the world's most famous activist
against the Iraq war: "He said, `why don't [you] run for president?'"
And that, as much as anything, explains the murderous fury
and ridiculous slander of Pat Robertson and Donald Rumsfeld alike.
Derrick O'Keefe (Seven Oaks)
Desperation Sets In
Rumsfeld's Hitler
Analogy
In Canada, medicare was
established in 1957. It was
introduced started in
Saskatchewan ten years earlier
by Tommy Douglas of the CCF,
predecessor of the NDP.
Canadian medicare had its
passionate defender in Douglas. At
the age of 10 Tommy Douglas
was hospitalized and, due to bone
infection, almost lost his leg
because his parents' lacked
money to pay for a specialist. He
was very fortunate that a visiting
surgeon offered to operate him for
free, provided his students were
allowed to attend. The surgery
saved Tommy Douglas' leg
maybe even his life and, most
importantly, it would inspire him on
his dream of universally
accessible medical care for all
Canadians. By 1961 agreements
favoring medicare had been
signed by all the provinces,
assuring that all Canadians had
free access to health care. It was a very basicservice that only
provided free access to hospital care and lab and radiological
diagnostic services; it took until 1966 formedicare to expand to
include free access to the services of physicians.
The Canada Health Act
may not be enough
The Canada Health Act was passed in 1984 to protect
medicare from the growing pressures of privatization. The Act
focuses on public administration of a not-for-profit plan ensuring
simplicity and efficiency as well as accountability and
transparency. Health care is a public good, as well as universal
and portable. Universal means that it is available to all people in
Canada and portable means that it will cover you if you move to
another province within Canada for a sufficient period tof time to
ensure you gain coverage in the new province of residence.
Since the Free Trade agreements were signed, increased
integration with the US has added pressure for Canada to
privatize medicare to become part of the North American health
care market. Health care corporations push for access to the
Canadian health-care system because they see the potential for
huge profits.
The concern about the future of Canadian medicare was
raised from the beginning of the free trade negotiations with the
US. It was anticipated by many that these agreements would
pressure the Canadian health system by enacting laws which
protected investors over basic government services.
Initially, we were told by the promoters of free trade that
medicare was safe, and if anything, our excellent universal health
system would favor improvements in the delivery of health in the
US. The cut back of our welfare state programs in the 1990's
undermined medicare; thus, our once touted "one of the best
medicare systems in the world" started to show weaknesses.
Still, Canadians overwhelmingly favoured publicly funded
improvements over privatization. In restrospect, we can see that
budget cuts to medicare were a strategy to begin dismantling it.
A poorly funded and lower quality public health service would
lead to pressure that opened opportunities for a private system
that, until recently, were generally rejected by Canadians.
Right wing think tanks and
for-profit health care
Right wing think tanks favored the end of "state monopoly
on health care" and today they talk about removing all barriers to
a parallel private health care system. They have been cautious,
however, because they understand that Canadians almost
universally prefer strengthening the public health system. They
argue that medicare is not working, that there are long waiting
lists for procedures like hip replacement and for tests like MRI. In
recent years the calls for privately owned hospitals, that allow
patients to pay for services, has increased under the name of
"public-private partnerships" or P3 Projects. These, P3 Projects
have been implemented in Ontario during the Progressive
Conservative government of Ernie Eves but where put on hold
when the liberals took power in that province. Still, there is
already a degree of privatization of medicare and it varies from
province to province.
There is much talk about medicare being "too expensive."
Few, however, have considered the inevitable personal financial
cost of a private system managed by the insurance industry.
Private health is expensive, much more so than medicare and
also far less effective despite the propaganda in its favor. In the
US 45 million Americans cannot afford to pay for health
insurance, and as a result have no health coverage. American
private health insurance takes up about 14 percent of the US
GDP, while the Canadian program medicare takes 9.4 percent of
GDP while being accessible to all Canadians.
Alberta First?
Alberta, BC and Ontario have been charging premiums for
medicare since the 80's . In Alberta paying premiums for
medicare seems particularly ironic in light of the province
economic growth and government surpluses. Despite this our
Premier continues to argue in favor of a parallel private system
for health services. Recently, Ralph Klein has contracted the
AON Corporation to design health care options for Albertans. This
is the same corporation whose parent company, AON American,
has recently paid 190 million dollars because of allegations of
fraud and anti-competitive practices. The Canada Health Act has,
in some measure, protected medicare but as Mr. Klein has
remarked "there are more than one way to skin a cat." Thus, it
seems, his efforts to privatize are not going to end any time soon.
But Alberta is not the only province pushing in favor of a
parallel private system, and similar initiatives are underway in BC
and in Quebec. In June 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada
overturned a Quebec law preventing people from buying private
health insurance (Chaoulli v Quebec) and since in November
2005 the Quebec government announced that it would allow
residents to purchase private medical insurance to comply with
the Supreme Court decision.
Prime Minister Harper
Before this last election, Stephen Harper assured
Canadians that he will defend medicare ensuring that the Canada
Health Act is respected. Prime Minister Harper recently repeated
this promise while speaking on the planned changes to health
care in Alberta. Still, when Mr. Harper developed Reform Party's
policy he was responsible for what was known as
"provincializing" health care, which was really about undermining
Canada Health Act. For 20 years, Mr. Harper has
enthusiastically supported the National Citizen Coalition (NCC), a
private organization funded by insurance millionaire Colin M.
Brown 35 years ago mainly to oppose universal medicare.
Mr. Harper was the vice president of the NCC in 1997; he
became its President in 1998 for four years. The chair and
members of the advisory council of the NCC mostly come from
powerful banks and corporations, including the Bank of Montreal,
the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Power Corporation,
Canadian Pacific, Brascan, Goodyear, and major insurance and
advertising companies. The NCC doesn't hide its agenda and
openly advocates against what it calls government "monopoly" on
health care services. Among other things the NCC wants to kill
the Kyoto accord, to privatize the CBC, to end with the Wheat
Board and to ensure the entrenchment of private property rights.
How then can we reconcile Stephen Harper the Prime
Minister who alleges loyalty to medicare, with Stephen Harper
the President of the NCC who advocates dismantling it? When
asked by CBC-TV in 1997 about his thoughts on a parallel private
health care system in Canada. Harper said: "Well, I think it would
be a good idea. I think we are headed in that direction anyway."
That Stephen Harper fully knows that Canadians favor
universal, not-for-profit medicare is no secret. Thus, Harper has
to be cautious. Still, there should be little doubt about where his
loyalties lie. He has recently named Tony Clement, also dubbed
"two tier Tony" when he was Ontario's minister of health, as
Canada's Minister of Health. It must, no doubt, say something that
our Prime Minister appointed someone ideologically committed to
privatization to protect the delivery of public health care.
The fox guarding the chicken coop