URGENT: HELP to finally end the death's of 30,000 people a day

by Davros - the Dalek Society for the Extermination of Half Measures and Half Truths Wed Jun 29, 2005 23:17

Here's some other interesting stuff by some top notch fellow killjoys:

ZNet Commentary
The G8 Summit: A Fraud And A Circus June 24, 2005
By John Pilger

The front page of the London Observer on 12 June announced, "55
billion Africa debt deal 'a victory for millions'." The "victory for
millions" is a quotation of Bob Geldof, who said, "Tomorrow 280
million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives
without owing you or me a penny...". The nonsense of this would be
breathtaking if the reader's breath had not already been extracted by
the unrelenting sophistry of Geldof, Bono, Blair, the Observer et al.
Africa's imperial plunder and tragedy have been turned into a circus
for the benefit of the so-called G8 leaders due in Scotland next
month and those of us willing to be distracted by the barkers of the
circus: the establishment media and its "celebrities". The illusion
of an anti establishment crusade led by pop stars - a cultivated,
controlling image of rebellion - serves to dilute a great political
movement of anger. In summit after summit, not a single significant
"promise" of the G8 has been kept, and the "victory for millions" is
no different. It is a fraud - actually a setback to reducing poverty
in Africa. Entirely conditional on vicious, discredited economic
programmes imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, the "package" will
ensure that the "chosen" countries slip deeper into poverty. Is it
any surprise that this is backed by Blair and his treasurer, Gordon
Brown, and George Bush; even the White House calls it a "milestone"?
For them, it is an important facade, held up by the famous and the
naive and the inane. Having effused about Blair, Geldof describes
Bush as "passionate and sincere" about ending poverty. Bono has
called Blair and Brown "the John and Paul of the global development
stage". Behind this front, rapacious power can "re-order" the lives
of millions in favour of totalitarian corporations and their control
of the world's resources. There is no conspiracy; the goal is no
secret. Gordon Brown spells it out in speech after speech, which
liberal journalists choose to ignore, preferring the Treasury spun
version. The G8 communique announcing the "victory for millions" is
unequivocal. Under a section headed "G8 proposals for HIPC debt
cancellation", it says that debt relief to poor countries will be
granted only if they are shown "adjusting their gross assistance
flows by the amount given": in other words, their aid will be reduced
by the same amount as the debt relief. So they gain nothing.
Paragraph Two states that "it is essential" that poor countries
"boost private sector development" and ensure "the elimination of
impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign". The
"55 billion" claimed by the Observer comes down, at most, to 1
billion spread over 18 countries. This will almost certainly be
halved - providing less than six days' worth of debt payments -
because Blair and Brown want the IMF to pay its share of the "relief"
by revaluing its vast stock of gold, and passionate and sincere Bush
has said no. The first unmentionable is that the gold was plundered
originally from Africa. The second unmentionable is that debt
payments are due to rise sharply from next year, more than doubling
by 2015. This will mean not "victory for millions", but death for
millions. At present, for every 1 dollar of "aid" to Africa, 3
dollars are taken out by western banks, institutions and governments,
and that does not account for the repatriated profit of
transnational corporations. Take the Congo. Thirty-two corporations,
all of them based in G8 countries, dominate the exploitation of this
deeply impoverished, minerals-rich country, where millions have died
in the "cause" of 200 years of imperialism. In the Cote d'Ivoire,
three G8 companies control 95 per cent of the processing and export
of cocoa: the main resource. The profits of Unilever, a British
company long in Africa, are a third larger than Mozambique's GDP. One
American company, Monsanto - of genetic engineering notoriety -
controls 52 per cent of the maize seed in South Africa, that
country's staple food. Blair could not give two flying faeces for the
people of Africa. Ian Taylor at the University of St Andrews used the
Freedom of Information Act to learn that while Blair was declaiming
his desire to "make poverty history", he was secretly cutting the
government's Africa desk officers and staff. At the same time, his
"department for international development" was forcing, by the back
door, privatisation of water supply in Ghana for the benefit of
British investors. This ministry lives by the dictates of its
"Business Partnership Unit", which is devoted to finding "ways in
which DfID can improve the enabling environment for productive
investment overseas and... contribute to the operation of the
financial sector". Poverty reduction? Of course not. A charade
promotes the modern imperial ideology known as neoliberalism, yet it
is almost never reported that way and the connections are seldom
made. In the issue of the Observer announcing "victory for millions"
was a secondary news item that British arms sales to Africa had
passed 1 billion. One British arms client is Malawi, which pays out
more on the interest on its debt than its entire health budget,
despite the fact that 15 per cent of its population has HIV. Gordon
Brown likes to use Malawi as example of why "we should make poverty
history", yet Malawi will not receive a penny of the "victory for
millions" relief. The charade is a gift for Blair, who will try
anything to persuade the public to "move on" from the third
unmentionable: his part in the greatest political scandal of the
modern era, his crime in Iraq. Although essentially an opportunist,
as his lying demonstrates, he presents himself as a Kiplingesque
imperialist. His "vision for Africa" is as patronising and
exploitative as a stage full of white pop stars (with black tokens
now added). His messianic references to "shaking the kaleidoscope" of
societies about which he understands little and "watching the pieces
fall" has translated into seven violent interventions abroad, more
than any British prime minister for half a century. Bob Geldof, an
Irishman at his court, duly knighted, says nothing about this. The
protesters going to the G8 summit at Gleneagles ought not to allow
themselves to be distracted by these games. If inspiration is needed,
along with evidence that direct action can work, they should look to
Latin America's mighty popular movements against total locura
capitalista (total capitalist folly). They should look to Bolivia,
the poorest country in Latin America, where an indigenous movement
has Blair's and Bush's corporate friends on the run, and Venezuela,
the only country in the world where oil revenue has been diverted for
the benefit of the majority, and Uruguay and Argentina, Ecuador and
Peru, and Brazil's great landless people's movement. Across the
continent, ordinary people are standing up to the old
Washington-sponsored order. "Que se vayan todos!" (Out with them
all!) say the crowds in the streets. Much of the propaganda that
passes for news in our own society is given to immobilising and
pacifying people and diverting them from the idea that they can
confront power. The current babble about Europe, of which no reporter
makes sense, is part of this; yet the French and Dutch "no" votes are
part of the same movement as in Latin America, returning democracy to
its true home: that of power accountable to the people, not to the
"free market" or the war policies of rampant bullies. And this is
just a beginning.

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk

ZNet Commentary
Are mainstream NGOs failing Africa? June 21, 2005
By Patrick Bond

by Patrick Bond, Dennis Brutus and Virginia Setshedi

What's on offer for Africa from the trendy but top-down initiatives
called Make Poverty History and Live 8, and even the
Johannesburg-based Global Call to Action Against Poverty? We worry
that these projects are, like many NGO activities in Africa,
unintentionally legitimating the institutions, processes and
personalities through which neoliberalism and imperialism do their
damage.

A better approach would be to endorse, strengthen and link the myriad
of Africa's bottom-up anti-racist, feminist and ecological struggles,
especially those focusing on economic justice.

After all, it should be evident to careful observers that Tony Blair
and Gordon Brown are no friends of Africa. And yet, once the
neoliberal New Labour government took office in 1997, the rush of
British NGOs to Brown's Treasury office was akin to lemmings dancing
over the ideological cliff.

With NGO-supplied teflon, Brown repeatedly endorsed and fostered
policies that destroyed hundreds of millions of lives across the
world, and refused to countenance democratic reform of the Bretton
Woods Institutions, whose important Monetary Policy Committee he
chairs.

To illustrate, Brown's Euro-solidaristic choice for International
Monetary Fund managing director in 2004 was Rodrigo de Rato, the
austerity-minded Spaniard whose political lineage is described by
Vicente Navarro of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health as
'ultra-right. While in Aznar's cabinet, he supported such policies as
making religion a compulsory subject in secondary schools, requiring
more hours of schooling in religion than in mathematics, undoing the
progressivity in the internal revenue code, funding the Foundation
dedicated to the promotion of francoism (i.e., Spanish fascism).'

NGOs should know who to make alliances with. Brown isn't good
material; mass social movements are. Those movements have their own
analyses, campaigns, priorities, discourses, strategies and tactics.
Though it may be harder to establish a singular global campaign from
their struggles, trying to impose one top-down is counterproductive.

Control of Make Poverty History by Oxfam is a telling example.
According to a recent New Statesman front-page critique of the
organization - 'Is Oxfam failing Africa?' (May 30) - a revolving door
exists between Oxfam, the Downing Street Policy Unit, Brown's office,
and the World Bank.

But what has resulted from such easy access? Even setting aside
Blair/Brown's financing of and participation in Iraq's looting and
destruction, British official development 'aid' included - not
atypically - foisting the notorious Adam Smith Institute on Africa.

Low-income black South Africans were victims when the British
Department for International Development (DfID) funded water
privatisation advice, resulting in disastrous municipal pilot
projects.

And in Dar es Salaam last month, the Tanzanian government had to
cancel a contract with London's Biwater, after it failed to meet
water delivery and pricing targets that the Adam Smith Institute
helped set out, courtesy of British taxpayer funding channeled by
Brown and DfID's Clare Short and Hilary Benn.

And yet Brown has been central to defining the parameters of Make
Poverty History and claims credit for advocating a Marshall Plan for
Africa and promoting fair trade instead of dogmatic liberalisation.

As George Monbiot explained in The Guardian at the end of May, 'It
doesn't take a great imaginative effort to see that a double game was
being played.
Before the election, Blair makes one of his tear-jerking appeals for
greater love, compassion and human fellowship, and gets the
anti-poverty movement off his back. After the election he discovers,
to his inestimable regret, that love, compassion and human fellowship
won't after all be possible, as a result of a ruling by the European
Commission' against Third World countries retention of industrial
protection tariffs.


The reason is that the Commission's trade negotiator, Peter
Mandelson, is apparently undermining the British trade concessions,
according to his director-general in mid-May (in a leaked email
memo): 'Mandelson is taking up our concerns and will press for a
revised UK line, noting that their statement is contrary to the
agreed EU position.'

The same double game is being played with aid. Brown recently
announced Britain will pay the fabled 0.7% of national income only by
2013, which is
33 years after the date promised back in 1970. According to the New
Statesman, 'Many in the Labour Party and in the NGO movement wonder
why it has taken so long, but again, Oxfam was a signatory to an open
letter congratulating the government on taking the action.'

Monbiot takes up the story: 'Again the government admitted, before
the election, that its critics were right. DfID published a long mea
culpa, in which it promised, "We will not make our aid conditional on
specific policy decisions by partner governments, or attempt to
impose policy choices on them (including ... privatisation or trade
liberalisation)". '

Warns Monboit, 'It looks great, until you read the whole document. On
privatization, DfID admits that there was "concern that in the 1980s
and 1990s donors pushed for the introduction of reforms, regardless
of whether these were in countries' best interests". The 1980s and
1990s, eh? What about the privatization it was demanding in 2004 and
early 2005? What about its recent assault on the public services of
Tanzania, South Africa, Ghana and the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh?
What about the money it is STILL paying the effing Adam Smith
Institute?'


Moving from aid to debt, confusion followed the alleged victory that
Africa and campaigners won from the G8 finance ministers on June 11.
Looking at the devil in the details, the Brussels-based Committee for
the Abolition of Third World Debt condemns the scheme.

The Committee's Eric Toussaint points out that 165 countries deserve
debt cancellation, but the finance ministers only agreed to partially
cancel the debt of between 18 and 38 countries, depending upon how
neoliberal conditionality is applied. The best case would be a $55
billion write-down of most - not all - debt for these poorest
countries, because some would still owe the Asian Development Bank,
the InterAmerican Development Bank and private lenders.

Putting the deal into perspective, African debt weighs in at more
than $300 billion, and the total Third World debt that should be
cancelled, according to Jubilee South, exceeds $2 trillion. As
Toussaint points out, 'The financial burden of the operation on rich
countries would amount to some $2 billion a year, compared to $350
billion the G8 devote to farming subsidies or $700 billion they spend
in military expenditure.'

Moreover, says Toussaint, 'The G8 decision represents a continuation
of the HIPC initiative, which means the imposition of heavily
neoliberal policies
privatisation of natural resources and of strategic economic sectors
to the benefit of transnational corporations; higher cost of health
care and education; a rise in Value Added Tax; free flow of capital,
which leads to capital leaving the country as shown by several UNCTAD
reports; lower tariff protection, which leads to thousands of small
and middle producers losing their livelihoods because they cannot
compete with imported goods.'

While some debt is being cancelled immediately - most is not being
paid back in any case, due to country unaffordability - can anyone
trust Brown to deliver the future funds? Six years ago in the German
city of Cologne, a heralded G8 debt relief package was purportedly
worth $100 billion. An audit found that implementation of all debt
relief between 1996 and 2003 amounted to just $26.3 billion.

Why, then, do groups like Oxfam and U2 singer Bono's Washington NGO
Data - Debt, AIDS and Trade for Africa - continue the charade, and
why do some Africans play along?

At least some of the northern NGOs - like Jubilee USA, War on Want,
World Development Movement and Christian Aid - are in continual
dialogue with progressive Third World movements. But this has meant
little, given that, according to Stuart Hodkinson of the British
magazine Red Pepper, 'Oxfam's unrivalled financial resources and
existing public profile make it by far the most powerful organisation
in the Make Poverty History coalition. Last year, Oxfam's annual
income surpassed £180m including £40m from government and other
public funds.'

Make Poverty History is pushing white bands, in part as a symbol from
which yet more funding can be extracted? Hodkinson quotes campaigning
staff who 'stay inside' the campaign simply because, as one admitted,
'Although we hate the message and the corporate branding, some NGOs
are making tens of thousands of pounds through the wristbands.'

Concludes filmmaker John Pilger, who was once very close to Oxfam,
'Many NGOs have embraced a version of corporatism and a closeness to
the British government, whose neoliberal trade policies remain a
source of much of the world's poverty.'

Africa has seen many such 'Coopted NGOs' (also termed CoNGOs).
Possibly the toughest evaluation of this phenomenon was offered by
James Petras and Henry Veltmayer, who are both academics but with
extensive experience with social movements. Their 2001 article, 'NGOs
in the service of imperialism', is still the seminal critique of
those which '. confer with top business and financial directors and
make policy decisions that affect - in the great majority of cases,
adversely - millions of people, especially the poor, women and
informal sector workers. NGO leaders are a new class not based on
property ownership or government resources but derived from imperial
funding and their own capacity to control significant popular groups.'

Petras and Veltmayer continue: 'NGOs have become the latest vehicle
for upward mobility for the ambitious educated classes. Academics,
journalists and professionals have abandoned their earlier interests
in poorly rewarded leftist movements for lucrative careers in
managing NGOs. They bring with them their organisational and
rhetorical skills and a certain populist language. These structures
have displaced and destroyed the organised leftist movements and
coopted their intellectual strategists and organisational leaders.'

There are indeed NGOs, not only in Washington and London, but in
South Africa and across Africa which, as Petras and Veltmayer allege,
'deflect popular discontent away from the powerful institutions
towards local micro-projects, apolitical "grass roots"
self-exploitation and "popular education" that avoids class analysis
of imperialism and capitalism. On the one hand they criticise
dictatorships and human rights violations but on the other they
compete with radical socio-political movements in an attempt to
channel popular movements into collaborative relations with dominant
neoliberal elites.

At some point, this general problem will have to be more explicitly
confronted. At the Africa Social Forum's Lusaka meeting last
December, resentment was expressed by the Social Movements Indaba
coalition from South Africa (including anti-privatisation, anti-debt,
landless and environmental
activists): 'The underrepresentation of social movements in relation
to NGOs is reflected in the political content of the forum. It
manifests in the persistence of the notion that the Africa Social
Forum is nothing other than a space, in contrast to the perspective
that it should have a programme to advance our struggle against
neoliberalism.'

Perhaps once the dust has settled on the wretched deals done by the
G8 to the applause of CoNGOs, the latest version of the Africa
charity fad will be buried. Then the more durable activists will
again be on the frontlines and front pages, whether through specific
campaigns against state and corporate malfeasance, or other forms of
progressive mobilisation and democratic advocacy, or the construction
of national Social Forums and internationally-networked sectoral
forums that deliver serious solidarity.

A great opportunity has just arisen between water activists in Accra
and Johannesburg. A public water catchment agency in the latter city
is muscling in on the World Bank's privatisation contract, in league
with a Dutch water profiteer, so stay tuned for a fight.

These are the kinds of really New Partnerships for Africa's
Development we need (Mbeki's NEPAD was termed 'philosophically spot
on' by the Bush State Department). These bottom-up alliances between
Africa's progressive social, ecological and labour movements will, we
believe, increasingly request the mainstream NGOs to please move out
of the way.

by dara Wed Jun 29, 2005 17:49

check out the above link, an excellent piece on MPH.

Bono and Bob have all the radicalism of a toothbrush.

by Davros - The Dalek Society for the Easing of Affluent Guilt Wed Jun 29, 2005 16:40

N.G.O.s have thrown their lot in with the coopted protest that is brought to you by the crypto-neoliberalism of mediocre minstrels.

1: As most of you know, except the jabroni above, the debt drop that Blair and Brown are so committed to comes with 'conditionalities' (whatever happened to the word 'conditions'?)that the benefiting countries facilitate privatisation of natural resources and state services. A track record of such policy has proven disasterous and resulted in death.

2: 'Developing' countries owe us NOTHING. The developed gave them the money so they could better facilitate the 'developed's' theft of their natural resources.

3: The debt drop proviso that highly indebted governments clean up their act is a joke when you consider that Uganda is considered OK. OK at nicking raw materials for the 'developed' from the D.R.C. maybe. Also, what nations should Africa look to for examples of good governance? The U.S. and G.B. (with their illegal invasions, murder, mass deception and election rigging)? By the way, I read media tycoon and Thatcher fan Bob has ordered the participating musos not to mention the war.

4: Of the top ten arms providers to the developing world seven are in the G8. So, they're a bit like someone asking the participants of a fist fight to make peace whilst selling them knuckle dusters at the same time.

5: Blair, Bush and other neo-colonial fundamentalist capitalist Christians are using the all singing all dancing sleight of hand that is Live 8 to pull off one of history's most sickening con jobs.

6: The debt was going to be covered via the sale of gold plundered from the 'developing' world and held by the IMF. Not anymore. Will Africans have to do without aid to cover the cost of their debt now that the developed world has decided not to sell off the stuff they robbed from them?

7:The very reality of the G8 is so profoundly undemocratic it shocks the imagination.

8: I could go on and on with examples etc. but it has all been posted on this site before, with links etc. Just a recap here.

Finally: The G8 should be abolished. Bob and Bono are either idiots or closet neo-liberal agenda setters. Participating N.G.O.s have lost all credibility and are merely another bunch of confused and patronising neo-colonialists. IGNORE THE LIVE 8 DECEPTION. Instead attempt to identify grass-roots organisations that are actually from the developing world and give them your support.

The bit in the posting above that makes me really sick is the bit where the half-wit attempts to remind the reader that the people dying in the countries concerned are humans just like us, with real feelings. Go to hell pal.