Los comentaristas realmente hacen la noticia

Los comentaristas realmente hacen la noticia

Los comentaristas realmente hacen la noticia
Por Alfredo Ascanio
Universidad Simón Bolívar
Caracas-Venezuela

Fue solamente unas cuantas semanas atrás cuando el Presidente Chávez visitó una importante librería española ubicada en la Gran Vía : La Casa del Libro, formando una algarabía y congestionando el tráfico de esa importante arteria vial. Pero lo curioso de esa visita fue que después que el Diario El Mundo de Madrid se dedicara a reseñar lo acontecido, de inmediato sus lectores se pusieron a redactar sus comentario que llegaron, en pocos minutos, a casi 500 escritos cortos sobre esa visita sorpresiva que había producido una tranca de tráfico, peor de la que podemos ver en la ciudad de Caracas.

Uno de esos españoles indignado dijo: “Me han tenido una hora parado en la Gran Vía. Se creen que esto también es una República Bananera como Venezuela, para aceptar los caprichos de Chávez aunque nos cueste a los ciudadanos españoles perder todo el tiempo del mundo con esta gran tranca de vehículos que la visita ha ocasionado”.

Otro Español con mucha ironía se indignaba y escribía: “¡¡¡Una vergüenza!!!, menudo atasco se ha montado en esta vía porque el Sr. Gorila Rojo quería comprar unos libritos. Si yo fuese el Jefe de Seguridad español, le quito toda la policía y además le exijo que se vuelva en metro a su hotel como un obrero más . ¡¡Ya sólo faltaría que Zapatero con Chávez se vayan en patineta¡¡

Y cuando otra persona que escribía su comentario señalaba que no entendía porque España tenía que “estar bailando el agua a este tipo”, para referirse con esa expresión muy madrileña que era vergonzoso que un dictador cortara todo el tráfico sólo para comprar 60 libros que seguramente después no leería sino algunos párrafos que le sirvan a él para hacer comentarios superfluos.

Es que los casi 500 comentarios se podían clasificar en varios tipos: a) los comentarios que censuraban el haber ocupado el carril de los buses de la Gran Vía con 12 coches durante una hora y sin pagar la multa que si nos toca a los que viven en esa ciudad; b) los comentarios que aprovechaban esa ocasión para censurar al Presidente Zapatero; c) los comentarios que aplaudían el socialismo contra la barbarie imperialista; d) los comentarios que censuraban al presidente de Repsol acompañando a semejante personaje sólo para asegurar un buen negocio.

Muchos de los comentaristas calificaban al Presidente de Venezuela como un Dictador de un país bananero. Otros señalaban : “dime que lees y te diré quién eres”.

Los comentaristas, en relación a la noticia del Diario El Mundo, se atornillaron más en lo que una vez se denominó en Ciencia Política : “la espiral del cinismo o de la hipocresía”.

La palabra más utilizada fue: “vergüenza” y “dictadura”, pero la polarización de esos escritos estuvo también presente para volver a ratificarnos que el maniqueísmo es un aspectos singular de los que opinan en las revistas digitalizadas.

Como se señaló hace ya muchos años: “las revoluciones tienen un doble significado para mucha gente: marca, por una parte, el fin de una época y, por la otra parte, las revoluciones señalan el comienzo de otras políticas sociales, como las llamadas en Venezuela “Misiones” que a lo mejor sirven como fuente motriz de los ideales de posibles cambios.

Mientras en el ciberespacio los escritores y reporteros ciudadanos pueden señalar sus verdades utilizando sus Blogs o el Twritter, en la comunicación no digital se matizan los argumentos y se organizan los debates de otra manera.

La importancia de la noticia del periódico El Mundo de Madrid podía medirse por sus casi 500 comentarios que se escribieron en menos de una hora. Fueron eso comentarios, probablemente, el instrumento más influyente en la formación de una opinión publicada que en general no fue nada favorable al acontecimiento de ese día y, particularmente, a los personajes como Chávez, Brufau y Zapatero.

La difusión de los testimonios de los lectores del diario fermentaron opiniones a la medida y según las características de los señalado en la noticia periodística y no cabe otro análisis de esos comentarios que no sea dentro del contexto histórico político del momento.

La durereza de lo que se dijo en ese día no pudo frenar los pocos comentarios positivos de una visita que no fue aceptada como buena.Por ejemplo, como lo había rematado el comentarista número 33 cuando escribió: “Todos los locos tienen cambio continuo de estado ánimo, sin excepción, y más aun cuando se habla de un DICTADOR. De momento las relaciones con ambos países son estupendas, pero no te descuide España, ni te fíes del loco, porque en cualquier momento puedes recibir una puñalada trapera por la espalda”.

Pero hubo otros que para demostrar su apoyo acompañaron su comentario con una expresión típica del país Vasco: “Gora Herriak”.

FASFLIP (Qué es to ?)

Esto es otra herramienta interesante pues allí usted puede colocar todas las hojas o los blogs que más le han llamado la atención
para consultarlos sólo con un simple CLICK.

SCRIBD (Qué es esto? )

Bueno SCRIBD es una herramienta muy interesante pues usted puede compartir sus escritos con otros internautas o recibidas de otros lugares los temas que a usted le interesa.

OhMyNews

UN PORTAL DE LOS REPORTEROS CIUDADANOS.

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Una Hoja WEB sobre POLITICA INTERNACIONAL

ELTraductor

Este es el traductor de GOOGLE

Health Care Is Politics, Not Economics

Health Care Is Politics, Not Economics
Why choosing a health care system is not about economic efficiency
Alfredo Ascanio (askain)

Today, central and local government machinery provides educational, health, and environmental services.

The state's social security system guarantees some protection against illness, age, unemployment, redundancy, and industrial injury.

There are some types of goods and services, which must, if they are to be supplied at all, be provided through public authorities with indirect payment being made by the community in taxation. These are called public or collective goods.

The growth in the provision of health services by the state is not, of course, without its critics.

Some say state provision is inadequate because payment levels are lower than what states define as subsistence needs. There are inequalities due to the regional variation in welfare and discrepancies of poverty index. Some find inhumane treatment from restrictive eligibility. The relative burden of rising welfare costs can seem less dramatic than the absolute rise in total costs. There can be intrusive administration. While welfare reform in the United States is about many of these issues, it is most certainly not about one: economics.

President Barack Obama is working to reclaim his health care initiative from critics and boost momentum to push his chief domestic priority through Congress.

The principle arguments against his plan are:

1) cost of their 10-year coverage plan;

2) control the rise in health care spending;

3) the issues about benefits for illegal immigration medical malpractice; and restrictions on abortion coverage.

Obama is still negotiating the health plan. He does not want the status quo. He is seeking a consensus on a new way forward.

What are the conservative organizations that do not want the plan? Some are: Freedom Works, Patriots and ResistNet Tea Party.

But these organizations know that 48 percent of Americans under 65 years old will, in 10 years, be uninsured. In the same time period, 57 percent of people under 21 will not have insurance. In 2010, according to the U.S. Treasury, 33 percent of Americans will not have coverage of any kind.

Welfare is a public business. What America needs now is a good assistance program and “workfare” especially for persons with incomes below the so-called poverty line. There are two techniques for administering these kinds of public subsidies to the poor. One is crude, while the other is significantly more subtle.

The crude technique limits benefits to those who can establish need through disclosure of their income and resources to an administrative official, and also explicitly pinpoints the beneficiaries.

The subtle technique spreads benefits across a broad spectrum of the population, subsidizing many without need as well as those in need.

In the subtle class the leading program is compulsory, contributory social insurance (social security) to provide income for old age, for survivors, for hospital care of the aged, and for disability.

This income transfer program and, in the ideal free enterprise society, earnings-related income sufficient to afford a decent standard of living would be available to all family groups and unattached individuals.

For some, this income would come from employment, for others from savings or from the proceeds of equity in insurance or retirement systems. But the free market does not insure an adequate income from these sources; both crude and subtle programs take up part of the slack.

In addition to the traditional preoccupation with relating relief to one's work work ethic, a new concern is that income subsidies and an insurance plan be adequate, and that they be provided in a manner that preserves human dignity, avoids putting a stigma on the poor, and provides no special advantage to any public official.

To adjust the older health-insurance status to the newer goals requires a hard-to-achieve balance between charity, suspicion, incentives, inequalities, and duress.

In almost 20 years, more than 20 congressional reports have looked at improving the living standards of the poor, but the American welfare system is, fundamentally, not enough.

Another problem is the fragmentation of federal relief programs. Poverty and welfare are now major public issues, and it is tempting to assert that an efficient, management-minded national administration would arrange for coordination of federal relief program and thus have the best of both worlds, unity within diversity.

However, no formula that will automatically create coordination of welfare programs at the federal level has been invented. Coordination “is not neutral,” according to Harold Seidman, former assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget.

Fedele Fauri of the University of Michigan School of Social Work, said that any radical plan would not be adopted soon, so instead the focus should be on improving the existing welfare system.

Success and failure in public program are relative terms at best. If a universally agreed objective could be achieved at the minimum possible cost, a program would, presumably, be a success. However, there are no universally agreed objectives for most programs and much more than just financial costs.

Is social security a success because it benefits a substantial segment of the population and is popular with most Americans, or is social security a failure because its benefit levels will not sustain an elderly individual without other resources and because it continues to be tied to a singularly regressive tax?

How much weight should be assigned popularity?

What tests are appropriate in evaluating public programs to provide a social security program for the low-income population?

Tom Peters, executive director of Tennessee Citizen Action, said that consumers have little choice when they shop for health insurance. "It creates a real danger for consumers, because they don’t have a choice."

The insurance companies can arbitrarily raise rates and there is nowhere else for consumers to go. Peters argues the lack of competition makes national health care coverage a more realistic option. "It would give people the option to see what a different plan would offer," he said. "I think there wouldn’t be some of the overhead cost that goes into the private plans."

According to some research, in the past decade, insurers recorded large profit increases, while premiums for Tennessee families increased by 62 percent. The insurance industry counters that government agencies have concluded they do, in fact, operate in a competitive market and that, since they are regulated, the regulators bare some of the responsibility for the rates. Critics claim that making national health care an option would be even more expensive than the current system.

Others said that there are internal contradictions in Obama's proposal said . Why? Because Obama wishes to relieve the suffering of Americans, but he does not wish to challenge the old “Bottom Line” of the competitive marketplace. Unfortunately for him and for most Americans, he can’t have it both ways.

Why is it that the private market is not used as a means of supply of all goods and services? Does the market in some sense fail as a resource-distributing medium? We are speaking of matters, which lie somewhat uneasily in borderline territory between economics and politics.

A convinced socialist is far more likely to view government intervention in economic affairs in a favorable light than in a person who is temperamentally more inclined to follow laissez-faire doctrines. Furthermore, the differences between them may not be easily reconciled on the basis of economic arguments.

Even when a strong case can be made, which suggests that the state can perform certain tasks more efficiently, in the economic sense, than private enterprise, one must still face the issue of the degree of power that the state should have over the individual’s affairs.

This, however, is a political rather than an economic question, one where value judgments are involved.
©2009 OhmyNewsOther articles by reporter Alfredo Ascanio