(I couldn’t think of a title for this ‘essay’. But I like Noam Chomsky and I quote him 🙂

It is obvious our corporate controlled media often fails in its job of keeping the public informed and holding those with power accountable( i.e Iraq). All too often the media is willing to carry the water for the Power elite.

As Noam Chomsky said

We live in an era of media concentration, vast efforts on many fronts (political, economic, military, ideological) to insulate state and private power from critical discussion or even popular awareness, and to reduce citizens to isolated atomized creatures restricted to satisfying personal ‘created wants.’ This massive and coordinated campaign has been partially successful, but only in a limited way.

 (Docudharma is like a big ocean to me. I guess I’ll jump but I hope not to be devoured by any sharks!) cross- posted at Daily Kos.

The situation in Somalia has not been good for some time.

A baby born in Somalia will have a life expectancy of 48.4 years.

 There is little date to measure the full extent of Somalia’s poverty but in 1994 the UN Development Program ranked Somolia 165th out of 173 countries in terms of its Human Development Index.

According to the World Bank, health standards in Somalia before the 1991 were among the worst in the world. It was estimated that there was 1 doctor for every 20,000 people (in the United States it was 1 doctor for every 470 people), and 1 nurse for every 1,900 persons (in the United States it was 1 nurse for every 70 persons). Only 2 percent of births were attended by a health professional, whereas in the United States nearly 100 percent of births were so attended. In 1990 average life expectancy at birth was 46 years, the infant mortality was about 123 per 1,000 live births (in the United States it is 7 per 1,000). The adult literacy rate was 27 percent.

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