Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Salon Blames Free Market Capitalism for Ebola!

Robert Hennelly writes at Salon:
Missing from the wall-to-wall coverage of the global Ebola crisis is a root-cause analysis that shows how unfettered free market global capitalism and our obscene spending on the military both play a part in creating the environment for this latest outbreak and the ones that are sure to follow.

Annually the world spends more than $1.7 trillion on the military. According to the Wall Street Journal the world spends a whopping $27 billion on the world’s public health. Keep that obscene imbalance in your mind the next time you see pictures of Liberians bleeding out in the street.

No missile killed them, but our greed and global death-oriented spending priorities have left fingerprints on all these bodies.

Here in the U.S. we spend close to $700 billion on the military annually, roughly 20 percent of the federal budget, equivalent to just under $2,500 per capita. Contrast that with our foreign aid for things like public health where we part with just $19 billon, or .6 percent of the federal budget, just $61 per capita. Twenty other nations actually give a higher percentage of their gross national product in non-military aid to nations in need than we do.

Our military spending squeezes out so much that needs to be done both at home and abroad. And there are lost opportunity costs of not doing what needs to be done, like seeing to it that places like West Africa, the epicenter of the latest Ebola outbreak, have a basic public health infrastructure.
Hell of an analysis. Free market capitalism is the source for the development of ALL drugs that have currently extended the life and quality of life across much of the globe.If Ebola continues to be a threat it will be free market capitalism that will find an anti-dote. Or does Hennelly think it is going to come out of North Korea?

But further, Hennelly does not discuss the very likely possibility that the US military is responsible for the Ebola outbreak in the first place. SEE: THE PAPER TRAIL: The US Government Involvement in Developing Ebola as a BioWeapon

-RW

2 comments:

  1. Yeah, look at all that "free market capitalism" around here with a government that consumes 3 trillion dollars every year, borrows more than that, inflates away another 10-15% and, finally, destroys at least another 2 trillion per year with their "free market capitalism" regulations borne of an unconstitutional administrative state. Piss off, Salon.

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  2. "Unfettered free market capitalism" AND "obscene military spending"? At the same time? Talk about cognative dissonance.

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