Africa’s classic depiction in the mainstream media, as a giant basketcase full of endless war, famine and helpless children creates an illusion of a continent utterly dependent on Western handouts. In fact, the precise opposite is true – it is the West that is reliant on African handouts. These handouts come in many and varied forms. They include illicit flows of resources, the profits of which invariably find their way into the West’s banking sector via strings of tax havens (as thoroughly documented in Nicholas Shaxson’s Poisoned Wells). Another is the mechanism of debt-extortion whereby banks lend money to military rulers (often helped to power by Western governments, such as the Congo’s former President Mobutu), who then keep the money for themselves (often in a private account with the lending bank), leaving the country paying exorbitant interest on an exponentially growing debt.
Category: EU
[The 4th Media Editor’s note: The following article was written in 2008. However, we believe the issue the article deals with is still very much contemporary and deeply appealing to most of our global readers.]…
In the 2012 edition of Occupy Money released last week, Professor Margrit Kennedy writes that a stunning 35% to 40% of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take…
NEW YORK – USA – In a remarkable admission by former Nixon era Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, reveals what is happening at the moment in the world and particularly the Middle East. [ACCURATE SATIRE] Speaking from his luxurious Manhattan apartment, the elder statesman, who will be 89 in May, is all too forward with his analysis of the current situation in the world forum of Geo-politics and economics. “The United States is bating China and Russia, and the final nail in the coffin will be Iran, which is, of course, the main target of Israel. We have allowed China to increase their military strength and Russia to recover from Sovietization, to give them a false sense of bravado, this will create an all together faster demise for them. We’re like the sharp shooter daring the noob to pick up the gun, and when they try, it’s bang bang. The coming war will will be so severe that only one superpower can win, and that’s us folks. This is why the EU is in such a hurry to form a complete superstate because they know what is coming, and to survive, Europe will have to be one whole cohesive state. Their urgency tells me that they know full well that the big showdown is upon us. O how I have dreamed of this delightful moment.”
Tahrir Square is dark, and all of a sudden endlessly sad. There are still countless tents in the middle of the roundabout, banners carried by the wind, even a small and provisory ‘Museum of Revolution’….
Part I: Africa’s New Thirty Years’ War? Mali at first glance seems a most unlikely place for the NATO powers, led by a neo-colonialist French government of Socialist President Francois Hollande (and quietly backed to the hilt by the Obama Administration), to launch what is being called by some a new Thirty Years’ War Against Terrorism. Mali, with a population of some 12 million, and a landmass three and a half times the size of Germany, is a land-locked largely Saharan Desert country in the center of western Africa, bordered by Algeria to its north, Mauritania to its west, Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Niger to its southern part. People I know who have spent time there before the recent US-led efforts at destabilization called it one of the most peaceful and beautiful places on earth, the home of Timbuktu. Its people are some ninety percent Muslim of varying persuasions. It has a rural subsistence agriculture and adult illiteracy of nearly 50%. Yet this country is suddenly the center of a new global “war on terror.”
French defense ministry officials have said that they are planning to make a withdrawal from Mali by April. Since January 11, when the French military began to bomb and launch a ground invasion into this resource-rich country, the government in Paris has declared that its operations are limited and they were only there as a precursor to the intervention of a regional force from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Although several thousand troops from various African states including Chad, Nigeria as well as the national army of Mali have entered the battle alongside the French, the former colonial power also made an appeal for the United Nations to take over the operations which are really designed to secure the resources of Mali for the benefit of western industrialized states. Earlier UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had publicly stated that direct intervention by the international body would jeopardize its personnel carrying out humanitarian work inside the country and throughout the region.
The policy you have when you don’t have a policy Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered a statement about the country’s national security policy to a carefully selected crowd of defense, public service, and academic personnel at the Australian National University late last month. The 58 page paper titled Strong and Secure: A Strategy for Australia’s National Security supersedes the last one given by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd back in 2008 and is considered a supplement to the White Paper, Australia in the Asian Century presented by Premier Gillard last October. The paper outlines the country’s assessment of priorities, risks, and capabilities.
President Obama ran for president in 2008 on a promise of closing down the U.S. prisoner detention center at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Recently, Obama went back on his word by…
GATA and «golden cartel» By the end of XX the most meticulous, nit-picking experts started to suspect there was something wrong with the gold market operations. To be exact: even if the gold…