It’s not rosy, looking either backward or forward
LIKE countless others, I am sure you are happy to have seen the last of 2009 — as tumultuous a year as we have seen. It began under a cloud, with the economies of the wealthy countries in serious trouble, and the poor ones suffering even more than usual. There was a bright spark at the beginning, though, with the unprecedented sight of a black man taking up residence in the White House.
Barack Obama opened the windows of that veritable institution and let fresh air in, but it was difficult to achieve the same effect a few kilometres down the road on Capitol Hill. Even as the new president unwrapped his package of reforms, the old forces of negativity and business-as-usual opened their bags of tricks and went to work to frustrate his attempts to drag many institutions and practices in his country into the present day.
The Neanderthal Republicans, cheered on by the braying band of neo-con cave-dwellers in the “news” media, did everything they could to stymie Obama’s objective of reforming the country’s archaic health system which relies on the profit-making insurance industry and Big Pharma, both of which own a large proportion of Senators and Representatives through their huge contributions to the campaigns of those legislators.
After months of turmoil, vast quantities of bile, hot air, misinformation, manipulation, obstructionism and bloody-mindedness, the elephant on Capitol Hill laboured mightily, and brought forth … a mouse! As people across the country turned on their Christmas lights, the Senate came out with a convoluted bill promising to allow millions of their countrymen to finally be able to achieve access to health insurance.
But the job isn’t done yet, as the Senate and the House have to get together and synchronise their bills before submitting it to the president for his signature, something many expect to happen this month.
Like many of their fellow citizens, the legislators are still spooked by the third rail of government-run insurance as most of the world’s wealthy nations have, and the US will still continue to have the most expensive health-care setup in the world, both in absolute and relative terms.
Even though the US population is suffering severe war fatigue, Obama beefed up the Afghanistan campaign while setting a time limit to get out. He served notice on the Afghan government to take on the task of fighting off the Taliban. But that well is poisoned, too, as a much-ballyhooed presidential and parliamentary election turned out to be rife with corruption and therefore totally suspect. The US went into Afghanistan after 9/11, but Bush the Second, consumed as he was by Iraq, forgot why he went there. Now, Osama Bin Laden and his forces as well as the Taliban are causing as much trouble in neighbouring Pakistan as in Afghanistan and there is no end in sight for that sordid mess.
While the unsettled state of affairs between Israel and the Palestinians continued bubbling away, things heated up in Iran, where a discredited election sent the megalomaniacal Mahmoud Ahmedinejad back to the president’s office and thousands of Iranians, mostly younger ones, into the street. They protested against the vote-rigging, against the behaviour of the entrenched politicians and the all-powerful clergy, and paid for it by gulping tear gas, sustaining broken heads and limbs from police batons, spending time in jail and in a few cases, dying.
In this hemisphere, the military in Honduras fell into old habits and deposed the president. The officers and the politicians who supported them claimed Manuel Zelaya wanted to change the constitution to allow presidents to succeed themselves, but what really bothered them was that although he was wealthy, he had begun sympathising with workers and the poor, and wanted to take measures to make their lives a little easier. Worst of all, he had become friendly with Venezuela’s motor-mouth president, Hugo Chávez.
In the end, the old oligarchy managed to keep him out of office while they ran an election as scheduled, and ended up with an old-line politician, Porfirio Lobo, who will be inaugurated next week.
The whole world was put on notice about a new, frightful type of influenza, originally dubbed the Mexican flu because that’s where it first came to our notice. It was also called swine flu because it originally affected only pigs. Finally, the decision-makers settled on the cumbersome but non-pejorative designation of H1N1. The fear-mongering machine went into high gear and swept all in its path, including the World Health Organisation, which issued all kinds of dire predictions. Vaccination campaigns were organised and people lined up in country after country to get their shots to prevent the pandemic many feared.
But so far this year, fewer than 12,000 people have died from H1N1, while the drug manufacturers have seen their stocks soar. Making vaccines used to be a losing proposition, with the drug companies relying on other medicines for their profits. But H1N1 has changed all that. For this quarter alone, sales of the flu vaccine have topped US$500 million. The biggest manufacturer is the Anglo-American conglomerate GlaxoSmithKline, which produces 22 per cent of the world’s supply and is doing very well, thank you.
As the months slipped by, the evidence that human activity is warming the earth at an unusual pace became even clearer, and governments were forced to address the subject although inertia prevents them from actually doing anything constructive. Some 20,000 people descended on Copenhagen as December rolled around. The political leaders of almost 200 countries along with bureaucrats, scientists, policy advisers, the media horde and the usual contingent of eco-demonstrators were there to reflect on the Kyoto Protocol. It was declared a dozen years ago in Japan and requires countries to cut their production of gases which warm up the atmosphere.
Since then everybody has talked a lot about Kyoto but nothing substantial has been done. We are pouring more carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than ever, as emerging economic powerhouses like China, India, Brazil and South Korea do the same things the old industrial nations have done for almost two centuries. Despite last-minute wrangling involving the world’s heavyweights, all they succeeded in producing was a slim document appealing to governments to “take notice” of it and try to do better. Business as usual.
We were treated to the now-standard exhibitionism of the North American entertainment industry with the death of Michael Jackson halfway through the year. On and on it went, speculation and insinuation about the death of the poor, benighted, 50-year-old man-child who hardly enjoyed a normal moment in his life and who continues to generate enormous interest.
And, as the last of the sands of the year trickled away, we were jolted back to the fragility of modern society. A young man from a wealthy Nigerian family, who couldn’t figure out what he should make of himself, fell under the influence of Al Qaeda and tried to make a splash by blowing up a plane full of people. As the aircraft approached the airport at Detroit on Christmas Day, he fired up the device he had attached to his body. But it didn’t explode, and some quick-thinking passengers and crew subdued him and handed him over to the police after the plane landed safely.
The result is that air travel is now a more unpleasant exercise than ever, with new, increasingly draconian rules about what you can and cannot carry on board as well as even more invasive searches of your baggage and your person. Welcome to the brave new world of terror, danger, and extreme discomfort caused by stupidity and severely misguided zealotry.
And a happy new year to you, too!
keeble.mack@sympatico.ca