BONO IS THE COURT JESTER

by bono hater Mon Jun 20, 2005 19:13

http://www.ucdsu.net/newswire.php?story_id=325&search_text=bono

by Elephant in the room Mon Jun 20, 2005 14:24

I forgot to include a link to the always vital Schnews, a weekly newsletter that somehow packs more in in a few pages a week than a week of most dailys.
See below
http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/pdf/news501.pdf

http://www.schnews.org.uk


Check out just two articles from this week's four pager


DOING THE BUSINESS



“Business is arriving at the G8 summit more
organised than it has ever been.”
- Corporate Watch

Last July Chancellor Gordon Brown and
Reuter’s chairman, Niall FitzGerald, set up a
Business Contact Group explicitly to provide
private sector input to the African Commission.
Its 16 or so corporate members read like a role call
of the most exploitative and despised companies
currently operating on the continent - including
Anglo American, Shell, De Beers, Rio Tinto
and... Diageo, who also er, own the Gleneagles
hotel where the G8 Summit will take place.
This group had plenty of input into the
African Commission report that called for more
public-private partnerships (PPPs). PPPs are
when the private sector is contracted to build
and operate infrastructure like roads or provide
basic services like water, health and electricity
- basically privatisation by the back door. In fact
these sorts of ‘partnerships’ have been such an
expensive cock up in the UK why not export the
idea to the rest of the world?
A report by the South African Institute of
International Affairs assessing PPPs across Africa
over the last 15 years found that: the private sector
is not always more effi cient, service provision is
often more expensive and big government contracts
are complex, demanding and open to
corruption, and energy and water have
been the least successful examples of
PPPs. Most importantly, PPPs do not
help the poor.
For more background see...
www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=1232



Up To Their Necks



All the countries now receiving full debt relief
are doing so because they are part of the HIPC
(Highly Indebted Poor Countries) programme.
This means they have been forced to commit
to the usual IMF and World Bank neo-liberal
market reforms - which, in reality, enforces
handovers of power and resources to Western
corporate interests for structurally-guaranteed
profi t making. This includes privatising essential
supplies like water into foreign control, as
Tanzania found out recently to its cost. Having
booted out a UK / German consortium for
being crap - having not even installed a single
new pipe for the £2.5m already bagged for
increasing water access - the company are now
threatening to sue for breach of contract (see
SchNEWS 499 for more online). Privatisation
has also been a condition attached to British aid
for Mozambique, Uganda and Ghana.
So, are these “reforms” good for making poverty
history? As Mark Curtis (historian and author)
reports, “Zambia, for example, is a country not
simply harmed by this model, but virtually destroyed
by it…forced by the World Bank and IMF to
promote sweeping trade liberalization and massive
privatization, and dismantle the public sector. These
reforms together with HIV/AIDS have increased
poverty and destroyed key industries. Zambia now
has the lowest life expectancy in the world: at 33
years” Another success story then. All this without
mentioning some of the many other countries (Like
Peru, Guyana, Nigeria and Haiti) in desperate need
of debt cancellation but excluded for not yet playing
neo-liberal ball suffi ciently… So whilst we will all
soon be awash in media coverage of guilt-cleansingpoptastic-
debt-relief-euphoria, remember not to get
too carried away with excitement.

by citizen education Sun Jun 19, 2005 05:08 citizeneducation at yahoo dot co dot uk

The greatness America has is that its currency the dollar has been established as the acccepted unit for international trade even though it has been plummetting for years due to its massive trade deficit.

One third of American exports are green pieces of paper which dont really exist. They are just numbers that appear on countries' bank accounts and which those countries pay interest on. A great scam.

And how does America get away with a scam like this?

a big army

so shiut up and stop complaining, we know where you live

by citizen education Sun Jun 19, 2005 05:01 citizeneducation at yahoo dot co dot uk

we think we are so good and that Africa should just take any old clothes and GM food we send them,

The clothes flood their markets so that their textiles industries close down due to bankruptsy - why buy local clothes when you can get them for free

and when the food aid arrives or the massivly subsidised food - it wipes out local food producers cus their produce suddenly becomes too expensive, more expensive than free food

but who cares its all about us and being able to wash away the guilt while we look at tv pictures of starving, black children who are dying.

and we extradite the health black kids who are about to sit their leaving cert

tell that to the next chugger you meet on the street who acosts you

by citizen education Sun Jun 19, 2005 04:42 citizeneducation at yahoo dot co dot uk

there are a lot of valuable natural resources in Africa but the ownership wasnt given up when colonialisation ended.

So while Africa is said to have lots of riches located there, they are still "legally" owned by Debiers and various oil companies etc etc so even the govts dont get a look in. Its all syphoned off staight to the white guys who have big armies to back up the historical legal documents which are basically evidence of barbarism and plundering.

Africa is getting sucked dry and all the aid is perhaps to keep them alive to be future markets for us to exploit or just to keep them over there so they dont come over to our country.

Their poverty has made us rich and all our politicians and the multinationals intend to keep it that way. God forbid they would assert their birthright to their global commons in Africa.

Its all respectable now - no one uses the Slavery word or the phrase Raping and Pilaging. Its all down to bits of paper with ink on them that we call legal contracts, title deeds.

But no one speaks of the initial deeds, the crimes......... thank god for swiss bank accounts

by Elephant in the room Fri Jun 17, 2005 17:57

"Also if your going to slag off people why not try come up with solutions."

Hmm lets see how can poor countries lift themselves out of poverty...How about removing the debilitating neo-liberal straightjacket and allowing them to decide they’re own economic policies?

In other words letting them follow the very same policies used historically by rich nations? ;)

Such as;

*Infant industry protection,

*the protection and funding of key industries and the active promotion of exports by the state,

* theft of intellectual property

*and the judicious ignorance of patents through an anti-patent policy.

Almost every nation which has industrialized successfully and are now part of the developed world got so not through free trade but through protectionism.

See
http://www.politics.ie/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3895&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/06/14/spin-lies-and-corruption/

See Kicking Away the Ladder?
Policies and Institutions for Economic Development in Historical Perspective

http://styluspub.com/books/AuthorDetail.aspx?id=7358

and The Age of Consent: A manifesto for a new world order
http://www.monbiot.com/index.php?p=883

by Cleaver Fri Jun 17, 2005 15:07

This is just lazy posting, aiming for Bono and Bob ,sure they might be used to throw a vener of respectability on the policies of the politicians they mix wth but maybe they are in some way raising debates about debt repayments & poverty in developing countries among the general public who might otherwise ignore it.

Also if your going to slag off people why not try come up with solutions. Your twinning towns idea might be ok if it involved more than donating clothes & food, sure, more charity will will really help the Africans help themselves isn't that the Live Aid way?

by paul o toole Fri Jun 17, 2005 13:47

.I posted an article the day Sir Bob and Saint Bono announced their once every 20 year activist-distraction gig. It was about a British company ,mining what was known in the mining world as.. ' the ritchest place on earth '... The company is known as 'Anglo Gold', and they were extracting the biggest gold seam in the world
Africa is not poor and these two clowns know it.
Their silence to me,about the policies of first worlds rape of Africa , is in fact actual support for these policies.
Bono said that he 'loved ' Tony blair and Gordon Brown from the podium at the Labour party conference.
He said that they were the 'Lennon and Mc artney of politics'. John Lennon I'm sure stood against everything that Bono supports. He is even invoking the legacy left behind by a real artist to bolster his position which is supporting the continnuing policy which keeps Africa poor, and will continnue to do so. The man disgusts me. He is a fraud, a facade of dissent, and support for this musical event serves only the continnued systematic impoverishment of the continent.