Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 3 Marts 2010
/ Time Line March 3, 2010
Version 3.5
2. Mars 2010, 4. Mars 2010
03/03/2010
U.S. Congress Presses Marshall Islanders to Resettle Radioactive Home
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2010/2010-03-03-091.html
MAJURO, Marshall Islands, March 3, 2010 (ENS) - Fifty-six years after the first American hydrogen bomb blast in the Pacific exposed hundreds of people to radioactive fallout, U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman is pressing Marshall Islanders to return to their contaminated home island by next year.
The U.S. official position is that radiation is no longer a threat on the Marshalls atoll. But many islanders doubt that their radiation-exposed island of Rongelap is safe enough to live on.
Rongelap islanders say they fear for their health if they return home to the coral island that was exposed to the Bravo hydrogen bomb test that rained ashy fallout on their island 56 years ago.
03/03/2010
Who Rules America?
By Don Monkerud
Although some Americans worry about the growing power of the
government, few understand the real power that controls their
everyday lives.
Private monopolies determine the brand of breakfast cereal we eat,
the type of car we drive, where we bank, the medical treatment we
receive, the fashion of our clothes, and the kind of toothbrush we
use, in addition to the beer we drink, the health insurance we buy,
and what we feed our pets.
Under the guise of "the free market," conglomerates merged and
bought up smaller companies, until, today, they dominate their
respective markets in every commodity offered for sale in the
U.S.
In this race to consolidate, companies "rationalized" their
offerings, in many cases dropping up to 40 percent of what they
formerly produced. They buy from the same suppliers, use
interchangeable parts and common ingredients, and re-name similar
brands, essentially placing the same product in different packages.
For example, one company produces all of the pet food under 150
different brands.
"People say we have an uncontrolled free market but we have the
opposite," says Barry C. Lynn, senior fellow at the New American
Foundation. "What we have today is a laissez faire American version
of feudalism; a private government in the form of private
corporations run by private individuals who consolidated power to
govern entire activities within our political economy."
In a new book, "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and The
Economics of Destruction," Lynn describes the many past struggles
in America between small elite oligarchies and democratic
government. Throughout our history, Americans have beaten back the
attempts of monopolies to control various industries.
The Boston Tea Party fought to overturn monopolization of commerce
by the private British East India Company. Alexander Hamilton's
attempt to help his friends out with the whiskey tax, led to the
Whiskey Rebellion. People acting through government prevented a
small elite from controlling our railroads, steel mills, the oil
industry and other concentrations of power.
"In the case of railroads, people realized they could consolidate
power discriminating against some companies by charging them higher
rates and stripping them of cash," says Lynn. "The American people
then decided that if you had a monopoly hauling goods, you have to
charge everyone the same rate. We used our government to keep them
from consolidating political and economic power."
According to Lynn's research, early Americans made decisions to
balance power between farmers, consumers and the market itself.
This is why we created "open and public markets." Labor, managers,
engineers, shareholders, and local communities ran our
corporations, which are social institutions.
The ultimate function of a well-regulated open-market system is not
to ensure an 'efficient' distribution of resources, but "to reveal,
harness, and direct power within a society in order to ensure the
widest possible distribution of political freedom and the greatest
possible degree of political and economic stability," says
Lynn.
With the election of Ronald Reagan, Conservatives redefined "free
enterprise" to mean the unfettered power of an individual to amass
as much wealth as possible, while liberals sought to use planning
and efficiency to lower costs, even if it resulted in the loss of
some economic freedom. Using theories developed by Chicago School
of Economics leaders such as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan,
Reagan directed the Justice Department to base anti-trust decisions
on a vision of efficiency as measured solely by lowered costs.
"Before Ronald Reagan we accepted inefficiencies to protect a free
political system," says Lynn. "In 1981, we changed laws to a
consumer welfare test, measured by price and economies of scale;
hence, any consolidation can appear to promote the welfare of the
consumer. Unlimited growth was made acceptable. This was a
revolutionary overthrow of our antimonopoly laws."
Today libertarian think tanks such as the CATO Institute, serve as
"the vanguard of a neofeudalist movement" to attack democratic
government. They and other conservative propagandists have spent
$30 billion in the past 30 years to promote their agenda and
convince people that massive layoffs, foreign competition, and
higher prices are the result of "natural free-market forces."
Squeezed from all sides, some Americans react by becoming corporate
shock troops attacking their own government.
"Those who control our corporations managed an Orwellian
achievement to redefine the use of brute corporate force as 'market
forces,'" says Lynn. "We still believe in a consumer utopia, but we
have an illusion of choice. Corporate powers manipulate our
decision-making and direct us to buy certain goods at certain
prices."
Institutional power shifted to Wall Street and large financial
institutions. Today a small elite runs corporations to serve
themselves as they concentrate their power. Some Americans are
waking up to the reality of their situation, but Congress lacks the
will to regulate corporate power.
"If we choose to protect our republican way of government, which
depends on the separation of powers within our economy and our
political system-then we have only one choice, says Lynn. "We must
restore antitrust law to its central role in protecting our
economic rights and breaking up dangerous concentrations of
power."
03/03/2010
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