We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, January 24, 2016

The Gates Foundation, Ebola, and Global Health Imperialism

Click here to access article by Jacob Levich taken by the editors of The Wrong Kind of Green from a professional journal, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, as a PDF doc.

Although I only scanned most of the 39 pages of this journal article, I felt that it presented some valuable insights on how powerful foundations, as illustrated by the Gates Foundation and their associated NGOs, are collaborating with neoliberal capitalists to undermine nation-based health services particularly in poorer countries. 
ABSTRACT. Powerful institutions of Western capital, notably the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, viewed the African Ebola outbreak of 2014–2015 as an opportunity to advance an ambitious global agenda. Building on recent public health literature proposing “global health governance” (GHG) as the preferred model for international healthcare, Bill Gates publicly called for the creation of a worldwide, militarized, supranational authority capable of responding decisively to outbreaks of infectious disease—an authority governed by Western powers and targeting the underdeveloped world. This article examines the media-generated panic surrounding Ebola alongside the response and underlying motives of foundations, governments, and other institutions. It describes the evolution and goals of GHG, in particular its opposition to traditional notions of Westphalian sovereignty. It proposes a different concept—“global health imperialism”—as a more useful framework for understanding the current conditions and likely future of international healthcare.
This is another report on how multi-national corporations and their benefactors, the rich .01% located mostly in the US-led Empire, are attempting to destroy the autonomy of national governments to manage their public services in favor of global structures under the control of neoliberal-oriented transnational capitalists.

I wish to emphasize that unlike traditional conservatives such as Paul Craig Roberts and Ron Paul, I do not favor existing nation-based capitalist controlled policies. Nations today are mostly dominated by capitalist elites; and because they serve the narrow interests of their nation-based capitalists, they are by no means a progressive form of social policy control.

This current struggle between neoliberals and traditional capitalists (also known as "liberals" in the classic sense) is well covered in alternative media and is beginning to appear in mainstream media largely due to the adverse impact that neoliberalism is having on especially the US middle class. Thus much of alternative media acts to suppress genuine revolutionary thought that wants to overthrow both national and international capitalist control in favor of bottom-up socialist authority structures. In place of genuine revolutionary thought in alternative media, one often finds this critical form known as fake leftism.