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CounterPunch
December
31, 2002
What Fresh Hell
is This?
Bush's War on the World's Poor
by CHRIS FLOYD
Each day, one turns to the latest news from the
bowels of the Bush Regime with Dorothy Parker's immortal words
sounding in the mind like a tocsin: "What fresh hell is
this?"
Last week, the news was particularly
shameful--and the "hell," though fresh indeed, was
in no way metaphorical. For last week saw two new examples of
the Regime's most egregious ongoing crime against humanity--its
cold, calculated, covert war against the world's poor.
Although it's being waged with words
and policies--and not the flesh-devouring hardware now massing
on Iraq's borders--make no mistake: Bush's war on the poor is
a real war, with real casualties, and death tolls in the tens
of thousands. It's war on a global scale, on many fronts, but
it's being fought for two reasons only: personal political ambition
and financial profit.
Ever since he seized office, Bush has
taken every opportunity to derail or destroy UN efforts to provide
reproductive health services to the world's poorest women. He
has filled American delegations to policy-setting conferences
on these issues with religious extremists from his devoted "Christian
Right" political base. He has arbitrarily cut off funding
to the UN's family planning program for developing nations: money
that health experts say could have prevented 4,700 maternal deaths
and 77,000 infant and child deaths in the past year alone.
But this Herodian slaughter means nothing
to Bush; what's important is that he secures his "base"
for the 2004 election. And so last week he launched a fresh assault
on the poor and vulnerable. His fundamentalist minions sought
to kneecap a UN conference on family planning in Asia, standing
adamant--and alone--against the final resolution of a plan to
guide policy and determine funding for a range of international
health programs for women, <Salon.com> reports.
Not even the mullahs of Iran joined Bush
in this fundamentalist diatribe against the document. And what
was Bush's objection? The inclusion of the phrase "reproductive
health" in the proposal. This demonic language, saith the
Lord's Anointed, is just a codeword for "abortion."
And although abortion is of course legal in the United States--for
example, Bush's nubile daughters could freely and safely avail
themselves of the practice if need arose--it is obviously not
to be permitted for the lesser breeds who dwell in darkness.
But the Bush blockade was not just an
outburst of religious zealotry; it was something far more cynical,
far more wicked than that. For the objection was based on a lie--and
the Bush team knew it was a lie. The UN's 1994 Cairo Agreement
on family planning and health rights for women--which was the
foundational document of the Asia conference--clearly states:
"In no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family
planning." Therefore, phrases such as "reproductive
health" or "reproductive rights" could not possibly
refer to the promotion of abortion in UN family planning documents.
Bush knows this. The bogus abortion issue
is just a smokescreen; in fact, his funding cuts to UN programs
have actually led to far ***more*** abortions (an estimated 800,000,
the UN says), as poor women are left without contraception or
family planning advice. No, what his hard-right base ***really***
objects to is the overall aim of the UN programs: the emancipation
of women from ignorance, repression and poverty. A woman in charge
of her own reproductive health, outside the control of others,
poses a mortal danger to the fundamentalists' draconian mythology
of "The Family," where man rules as the vice-regent
of God and woman humbly submits.
Whether Bush personally believes this
or not is irrelevant. What matters is that he ***plays*** upon
this belief, for his own aggrandizement--and that thousands of
women and children die for it.
And the war goes on. Just a few days
after the Asian assault, Bush's own vice-regent, Dick Cheney,
torpedoed an international agreement that would have allowed
the world's poorest nations to import a wide range of life-saving
drugs at low cost. Cheney's intervention has thus consigned thousands
of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America to needless agony
and early death.
The 140 nations of the World Trade Organization
were on the brink of signing a deal that would have relaxed some
of the patent laws that protect the gargantuan profits of America's
politically-connected drug corporations, the Guardian reports.
Poor nations can't afford the medicines that the druglords develop
for the favored denizens of the West (those with insurance, that
is). The new WTO deal--part of a much broader package of development
aid agreed upon at last year's landmark Doha conference--would
have given developing countries affordable access to treatments
for such ravages as cancer, asthma, pneumonia and many others.
But the druglords called in their campaign
chips; they haven't stuffed Republican coffers for nothing. Cheney
got on the horn to American delegates at the Geneva conference
and lowered the boom: no deal--despite the fierce opposition
of every other country in the WTO. Negotiators say the entire
Doha agreement--with AIDs prevention as its centerpiece--may
now collapse. If so, the death toll in Africa alone could reach
millions.
These are acts of war by the Bush Regime,
the acts of despicable moral cretins--slithering, slathering
and lusting for power, willing to kill the weakest on earth to
maintain themselves and their loathsome kind in comfort, pomp
and privilege. With callous deliberation, sugared hypocrisy and
criminal indifference, they are creating a hell on earth.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
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