The Retson Tedheke's Blog

Big Money Behind Wars: The Military-Industrial Complex - Jonathan Turley

Perpetual war represents perpetual profits for the ever expanding business and government interests

In January 1961, US President Dwight D Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn the nation of what he viewed as one of its greatest threats: the military-industrial complex composed of military contractors and lobbyists perpetuating war.

Eisenhower warned that "an immense military establishment and a large arms industry" had emerged as a hidden force in US politics and that Americans "must not fail to comprehend its grave implications". The speech may have been Eisenhower's most courageous and prophetic moment. Fifty years and some later, Americans find themselves in what seems like perpetual war. No sooner do we draw down on operations in Iraq than leaders demand an intervention in Libya or Syria or Iran. While perpetual war constitutes perpetual losses for families, and ever expanding budgets, it also represents perpetual profits for a new and larger complex of business and government interests. The new military-industrial complex is fuelled by a conveniently ambiguous and unseen enemy: the terrorist. Former President George W Bush and his aides insisted on calling counter-terrorism efforts a "war". This concerted effort by leaders like former Vice President Dick Cheney (himself the former CEO of defence-contractor Halliburton) was not some empty rhetorical exercise. Not only would a war maximise the inherent powers of the president, but it would maximise the budgets for military and homeland agencies. This new coalition of companies, agencies, and lobbyists dwarfs the system known by Eisenhower when he warned Americans to "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex". Ironically, it has had some of its best days under President Barack Obama who has radically expanded drone attacks and claimed that he alone determines what a war is for the purposes of consulting Congress.

Good For US Economy?: While few politicians are willing to admit it, we don't just endure wars we seem to need war - at least for some people. A study showed that roughly 75 percent of the fallen in these wars come from working class families. They do not need war. They pay the cost of the war. Eisenhower would likely be appalled by the size of the industrial and governmental workforce committed to war or counter-terrorism activities. Military and homeland budgets now support millions of people in an otherwise declining economy. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow each year from the public coffers to agencies and contractors who have an incentive to keep the country on a war-footing - and footing the bill for war. Across the country, the war-based economy can be seen in an industry which includes everything from Homeland Security educational degrees to counter-terrorism consultants to private-run preferred traveller programmes for airport security gates. Recently, the "black budget" of secret intelligence programmes alone was estimated at $52.6bn for 2013. That is only the secret programmes, not the much larger intelligence and counter intelligence budgets. We now have 16 spy agencies that employ 107,035 employees. This is separate from the over one million people employed by the military and national security law enforcement agencies. The core of this expanding complex is an axis of influence of corporations, lobbyists, and agencies that have created a massive, self-sustaining terror-based industry.

The Contractors: In the last eight years, trillions of dollars have flowed to military and homeland security companies. When the administration starts a war like Libya, it is a windfall for companies who are given generous contracts to produce everything from replacement missiles to ready-to-eat meals. In the first 10 days of the Libyan war alone, the administration spent roughly $550m. That figure includes about $340m for munitions - mostly cruise missiles that must be replaced. Not only did Democratic members of Congress offer post-hoc support for the Libyan attack, but they also proposed a permanent authorisation for presidents to attack targets deemed connected to terrorism - a perpetual war on terror. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) offers an even steadier profit margin. According to Morgan Keegan, a wealth management and capital firm, investment in homeland security companies is expected to yield a 12 percent annual growth through 2013 - an astronomical return when compared to other parts of the tanking economy.

The Lobbyists: There are thousands of lobbyists in Washington to guarantee the ever-expanding budgets for war and homeland security. One such example is former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff who pushed the purchase of the heavily criticised (and little tested) full-body scanners used in airports. When Chertoff was giving dozens of interviews to convince the public that the machines were needed to hold back the terror threat, many people were unaware that the manufacturer of the machine is a client of the Chertoff Group, his highly profitable security consulting agency. (Those hugely expensive machines were later scrapped after Rapiscan, the manufacturer, received the windfall.). Lobbyists maintain pressure on politicians by framing every budget in "tough on terror" versus "soft on terror" terms. They have the perfect products to pitch - products that are designed to destroy themselves and be replaced in an ever-lasting war on terror.

The Agencies: It is not just revolving doors that tie federal agencies to these lobbyists and companies. The war-based economy allows for military and homeland departments to be virtually untouchable. Environmental and social programmes are eliminated or curtailed by billions as war-related budgets continue to expand to meet "new threats". With the support of an army of lobbyists and companies, cabinet members like former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, are invincible in Washington. When citizens complained of watching their children groped by the TSA, Napolitano defiantly retorted that if people did not want their children groped, they should yield and use the unpopular full-body machines - the machines being sold by her predecessor, Chertoff. It is not just the Defense and DHS departments that enjoy the war windfall. Take the Department of Justice (DOJ). A massive counter terrorism system has been created employing tens of thousands of personnel with billions of dollars to search for domestic terrorists. The problem has been a comparative shortage of actual terrorists to justify the size of this internal security system. Accordingly, the DOJ has counted everything from simple immigration cases to credit card fraud as terror cases in a body count approach not seen since the Vietnam War. For example, the DOJ claimed to have busted a major terror-network as part of "Operation Cedar Sweep", where Lebanese citizens were accused of sending money to terrorists. They were later forced to drop all charges against all 27 defendants as unsupportable. It turned out to be a bunch of simple head shops. Nevertheless, the new internal security system continues to grind on with expanding powers and budgets. A few years ago, the DOJ even changed the definition of terrorism to allow for an ever-widening number of cases to be considered "terror-related".

Symbiotic Relationship: Our economic war-dependence is matched by political war-dependence. Many members represent districts with contractors that supply homeland security needs and our on-going wars. Even with polls showing that the majority of Americans are opposed to continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the new military-industrial complex continues to easily muster the necessary support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. It is a testament to the influence of this alliance that hundreds of billions are being spent in Afghanistan and Iraq while Congress is planning to cut billions from core social programmes, including a possible rollback on Medicare due to lack of money. None of that matters. It doesn't even matter that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called the US the enemy and said he wishes that he had joined the Taliban. Even the documented billions stolen by government officials in Iraq and Afghanistan are treated as a mere cost of doing business. It is what Eisenhower described as the "misplaced power" of the military-industrial complex - power that makes public opposition and even thousands of dead soldiers immaterial. War may be hell for some but it is heaven for others in a war-dependent economy.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and has testified in Congress on the massive counter-terrorism budgets and bureaucracy in the United States.

The original article can be found here

The history of colonialism has made it impossible for West African countries to have the infrastructure to properly respond to any crisis particularly a health crisis such as the recent Ebola Epidemic.

Africa Before Colonialism: How could Africa, with all its abundance of mineral wealth and unsurpassed history of the development of science and mathematics, be left so barren by the invading exploiters? Africa’s historic contributions to the world are fundamental and extensive, but are barely mentioned in our primary schools as part of the racist propaganda, which supports colonialism.

Mathematics: For example Africa is home to the world’s earliest known use of measurement and calculation. The continent is the birthplace of both basic and advanced mathematics. Thousands of years ago, Africans were using numerals, algebra and geometry in daily life.

Article was taken for luv4self@yahoogroups internet forum. Inspired by the book "The Miseducation of the Negro" by Carter G Woodson

INITIATING THE MISEDUCATION OF THE AFRICAN - PART I: As African children head back to school to face another school year I would like to make an attempt to explain to our community and particularly to young parents why and how the African child has been systematically mis-educated in the western world during the last 500 years, so that they can better understand the root causes of some of the aberrations and self destructive forms of behaviour they see in our community and to help them realize that if they want a brighter future for their children and for our community, then it is imperative that they no longer leave the education of their children solely in the hands of the western educational system, but rather to follow the advice of Malcolm X who told us years ago that "the black child's education starts when the school bells rings at 4 p.m in the afternoon." (This may vary depending on what time school ends in your country) We didn't follow his advice then and today our youth are suffering the consequences. The situation of African children around the planet has considerably deteriorated since the days of Malcolm X, so that we are now forced to follow the advice of Dr Asa Hilliard one of Africa's great educators who died recently and left us these parting words. "The education of African people is an urgent necessity. It is a matter of life and death. We cannot abide another generation of children who have no identity and who are ignorant about Africa."

Why hasn’t the U.S. bombed the oil wells that ISIS controls into oblivion by now? Would you believe that it is because the Obama administration “didn’t want to do environmental damage”? Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell has publicly admitted that we have purposely avoided damaging the main source of income for ISIS, and his explanation for why we were doing this is utterly bizarre. But at this point what could the Obama administration say that would actually make sense? Everyone now knows that ISIS has been making hundreds of millions of dollars selling oil in Turkey, and that this has been done with the full knowledge and complicity of the Obama White House. This is potentially the biggest scandal of the entire Obama presidency, and yet so far the Republicans have not jumped on it. If you or I even gave five bucks to ISIS, we would be arrested and hauled off to Guantanamo Bay. And yet Barack Obama is allowing ISIS to funnel massive quantities of oil through our NATO ally Turkey, and he is not doing anything to stop this from happening. It is a betrayal of the American people that is so vast that it is hard to put into words. By now, virtually everyone on the entire planet knows exactly what is going on. For example, Iraq’s former National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie shared the following on his Facebook page on Saturday…

“First and foremost, the Turks help the militants sell stolen Iraqi and Syrian oil for $20 a barrel, which is half the market price.”

Until Russia started bombing the living daylights out of them, an endless parade of trucks carrying ISIS oil would go back and forth over the Turkish border completely unmolested. Following the downing of a Russian SU-24 bomber by Turkey in an area where many of these trucks travel, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to publicly air this dirty laundry. Just check out what he told reporters following a meeting with French President Francois Hollande last week…

Commercial-scale oil smuggling from Islamic State controlled territory into Turkey must be stopped, Putin said after meeting Hollande in Moscow.

“Vehicles, carrying oil, lined up in a chain going beyond the horizon,” said Putin, reminding the press that the scale of the issue was discussed at the G20 summit in Antalya earlier this month, where the Russian leader demonstrated reconnaissance footage taken by Russian pilots.
The views resemble a “living oil pipe” stretched from ISIS and rebel controlled areas of Syria into Turkey, the Russian President stressed. “Day and night they are going to Turkey. Trucks always go there loaded, and back from there – empty.”

“We are talking about a commercial-scale supply of oil from the occupied Syrian territories seized by terrorists. It is from these areas [that oil comes from], and not with any others. And we can see it from the air, where these vehicles are going,” Putin said.

If the Russians could see all of this, the U.S. military could see it too. In fact, we have far better surveillance capabilities than the Russians do. So why didn’t Obama put an end to this? Well, as I mentioned above, former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell told PBS that the Obama administration didn’t want “to create environmental damage”, and he insists that the oil wells are “infrastructure that’s going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn’t there anymore”. The following comes from the Daily Caller…

Appearing on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” on Tuesday, Rose pointed out that before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the U.S. had not bombed ISIS-controlled oil tankers.

Morell explained, “Prior to Paris, there seemed to be a judgment that … look, we don’t want to destroy these oil tankers because that’s infrastructure that’s going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn’t there anymore, and it’s going to create environmental damage. And we didn’t go after oil wells — actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls because we didn’t want to do environmental damage and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure, right.”

In case you think that this is some sort of a joke, you can watch video of Morell making these comments on PBS below…

After the horrific terror attacks in Paris, the Obama administration finally was shamed into bombing a few of these oil trucks. But 45 minutes before the U.S. military bombed them, they dropped leaflets telling the truck drivers to “get out of your trucks now and run away from them”.

What kind of “war on terror” are we running? Why in the world would we want to warn the terrorists to get away from their trucks? Meanwhile, things between Russia and Turkey continue to get even more tense. The Russians have slapped severe economic sanctions on the Turks, they have shut down all channels of communication with Turkey’s military, and they are bombing every Turkish vehicle that they can find inside Syria. The following comes from a report that was put out by Debka…

In the last two days, Putin has been found saying one thing and doing another: Although he declared that Russia would not go to war with Turkey for “stabbing it in the back”, debkafile’s military and intelligence sources report that since Wednesday night, Nov. 25, Russian heavy bombers and warplanes have been hitting every Turkish vehicle moving or stationary inside Syria.

They bombed the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, located on the Turkey-Syria frontier, as well trailers and tractors parked in an area belonging to the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation, on the Syrian side of the border.

As I wrote about the other day, it has been documented that our NATO ally Turkey has been “training ISIS militants, funneling weapons to them, buying their oil, and tending to their wounded in Turkish hospitals”. Now, heavy bombing by the Russians threatens to cut off those links…

In addition to punishing the Turkish leader, Russia’s massive military operations in Syria aim to degrade the rebel groups fighting the Assad regime. Heavy bombing sorties this week on the Syrian-Turkish border are cutting off tens of thousands of rebels from their only source of fresh supplies of weapons, ammo, food and fighters, leaving them without a line of retreat and nowhere to send their wounded.

At this point, Russia and Turkey are very close to a state of war. But as a member of NATO, the United States is obligated to help protect Turkey if a full-blown shooting war does break out. We are closer to World War III than we have been in decades, and yet most Americans are still completely and totally oblivious to what is taking place. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail, because things over in the Middle East threaten to spiral completely and totally out of control.

The original article can be found here

Contemporary capitalism is characterized by a political economy which revolves around finance capital, is based on a savage form of free market fundamentalism, and thrives on a wave of globalizing processes and global financial networks that have produced global economic oligarchies with the capacity to influence the shaping of policymaking across nations. As a result, contemporary advanced capitalist societies are plagued by dangerous levels of income and wealth inequality, mass unemployment, rising poverty rates, social polarization, and collapsing social provisions. Furthermore, democracy and the social contract are under constant attack by the current system and there is an ongoing pressure by the corporate and financial elite to convert all public goods and services into private goods and services.

The rising inequality in advanced capitalist countries is well documented. Most recently, Thomas Piketty’s publishing sensation Capital in the Twentieth-First Century, translated into English and published by Harvard University Press, provides massive data showing a widening gap between the rich and the poor, thus questioning not only the claim that the capitalist economy works for all but also underscoring the point of how dangerous the current system is to democracy itself. Indeed, a few years ago, Larry M. Bartels’s Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, published by Princeton University Press, pointed to the same gap between the rich and poor in the United States under Republican administrations. The way wealth has changed in the United States over the last few decades, with those in Generation X and Generation Y accumulating “less wealth than their parents did at the same age 25 years ago”, is also demonstrated in a study produced by Eugene Steuerle, et. al. on behalf of the Urban Institute in Washington DC. And in a recent Strategic Analysis released just this past spring by the Levy Economics Institute with the title “Is Rising Inequality a Hindrance to the US Economic Recovery?”, the authors, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, et al., demonstrate through macro modeling simulations that the current processes of inequality in the United States are unsustainable and that, if they continue, will result in weak growth and increased unemployment.

As for the problem of mass unemployment, the facts speak for themselves. Five years after the alleged end of the global financial crisis, the official unemployment rate in the US remains as of May at 6.3% (it averaged 5.8% from 1948 until 2014) while in the eurozone the official unemployment rate as of May 2014 stood at 11.6%. In the periphery of the eurozone, which has been hard hit by austerity policies conceived in Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington as part of the international bail-out programs that went into effect when several eurozone periphery countries reached the brink of bankruptcy after the global financial crisis of 2008-09 reached Europe’s shores, the official unemployment rates has reached stratospheric levels: 27% for Greece; 25% for Spain; 15% for Portugal; and 12% for Ireland, the nation with the highest emigration rate in all of Europe and whose government was actually asking the unemployed as of recently to leave and take jobs in other European countries. In Greece, six years of an austerity-caused depression have shrunk the nation’s GDP by a quarter. Yet, both European Union (EU) officials and their lackeys in Athens have been trying hard to convince Greek citizens that a “success story” is under way because the enforcement of a draconian fiscal adjustment which dropped the standard of living back to 1960 levels produced a primary surplus. In the meantime, the debt-to-GDP ratio has reached an all-time high, rising from less than 139% in 2009 to nearly 180%.

Ireland’s public debt, which stood at 25% of GDP in 2008, grew to nearly 65% by 2010 and climbed to over 125% by the end of 2013. Yet German Chancellor Angela Merkel also hailed Ireland’s experience with austerity as a “tremendous success story”. Portugal’s public debt, which was slightly less than 70% in 2008, jumped to over 100% by 2011 and then to over 130% by 2013. That’s another “success story”. And Spain’s public debt has surged to nearly 95% of GDP, standing at close to 1 trillion euros – three times as much as it was at the start of the crisis in 2008 – and is projected to go over 100% by the end of 2014. In short, all the bailed-out eurozone countries are sinking under the weight of debt while unemployment spreads like the plague – the result of the “voodoo” economics that the witch doctors of the EU and the International Monetary Fund cooked up in order to formulate the so-called “rescue” plans. However, according to national government and EU propaganda, everything in the periphery is working in compliance with the strategic plan for helping those countries exit the crisis.

Denial of reality, deception and distortion are traditional tactics used by the powers-that-be and their elite intellectual acolytes. We also saw this in the reaction of major media outlets like The Financial Times, Bloomberg, and Forbes Magazine, to name but just a few, to the publication of Piketty’s book. The Frenchman either adopted aflawed methodology, or got his data wrong, or is simply engaging in anti-capitalist propaganda. Indeed, as yet another commentator of the Financial Times stressed, with the belief that he hit a gold vein, upon reviewing Capital in the Twentieth-FirstCentury, even if Mr. Piketty’s data about increasing inequality in capitalist societies are correct, he is not telling us why inequality is bad! In other words, Mr. Martin Wolf was essentially pondering about just what is so wrong with predatory capitalism making the rich richer and the poor poorer? As actually existing capitalism has given up any pretext of being a “socially responsible” socioeconomic system and caters almost solely to the needs and interests of the rich and powerful by enforcing policies that are detrimental to the rest of society, the defenders of the status quo will get even more dangerous by denying the ugly truth about predatory capitalism. They don’t want to hear that actually existing capitalism is a system that favors passionately and defends ruthlessly the interests of the 1% over those of the rest of society. Doing so might jeopardize the goal of the elite to roll back the course of history to the detriment of the working populations so they can further enrich themselves and act like the new rulers of the world.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism's politico-economic project.

The original article can be found here

Nigeria: A Highly Religious Nation in Crisis of Moral Decadence - Sam Aweda

PROBABLE CAUSES (LAMENTATION: PART I)

Nigerians generally are naturally enthusiastic religious people. The minarets blast five times a day simultaneously across the length and breadth of the country, calling the people of the Islamic faith to prayers. Wherever your location is, you cannot claim not to hear it except those living in any of the Government Reservation areas (GRA). A Muslim does not believe he has completed his personal house until a mosque is erected in the compound. Many in the Islamic faith endeavour to perform Umra in far away Mecca as many times as possible to make special prayers. Every street and corner of all our big cities, villages and hamlets, are full of Churches. The Sunday services are filled to full capacity, some running three or more sessions. In spite of all these, corruption, dishonesty, moral decadence, decay, injustice, cheating, bribery, extortion, stealing and looting of government treasuries are on the increase. Could it be people other than these faithful worshippers that are perpetrating these evils? But I once met a policeman who wore a tag on his uniform, with an inscription "Touch not my anointed-----"yet he was harassing and extorting motorists on the high way. I had thought that the religious houses are there to mould the characters of the worshippers in order to have a peaceful and habitable society, where all and sundry will live in brotherly love without being difficult to one another but instead be helpful to one another. Is it that these preaching are no longer emphasized on the pulpit or is it the worshippers that rub them off their ears the moment the services are ended and return to their different businesses as usual?

Nigeria’s wealthiest pastor, Bishop David Oyedepo is always in the news – He was in the news in the United Kingdom. Sadly for him, Britain is not Nigeria, where the corrupt courts absolved him of all wrong doings, his abuses and violence against a young worshipper of his church at Winner Chapel – aka “Cananland” It was the video of his satanic slap of a young girl, probably an uneducated parishioner, who didn't know how best to express her love and witness for Jesus, that exposed the abuse and muddled message that is being promulgated by the bishop to his gullible and biblical ignorant followers. Since then, I have penned a couple of articles calling on the federal government intervention to enact laws and policies to checkmate abuses - physical, sexual, emotional, mental, and moral abuses in places of worship in the nation in order to protect the vulnerable. I'm not too concerned about the learned and intelligent parishioners that sit under such blasphemous teachings every week. Hosea 4:6 says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” To earn a PhD or have a lucrative job or business does not make one knowledgeable. However, it still baffles me how an educated and intelligent person could sit under such teachers and listen to the junks that some of them teach from their pulpit every week. So, it behoves the government to protect the weak and vulnerable especially from physical and sexual abuses in the name of God.

"The home of freedom has been assaulted by terrorists determined to attack and suppress freedom." - Malcolm Turnbull on the Paris attacks.

France should not be synonymous with the word "freedom". As with all colonial empires, its history is soaked with the blood of oppressed peoples across the globe. And its record of perpetrating violence continues. The size of the territory claimed by the French empire in the 19th and 20th centuries was second only to Britain. From North Africa to South-East Asia, the Middle East to the South Pacific, millions were subjugated, repressed and murdered as French rulers scrambled to secure resources and markets for manufactured goods and profitable investments. It was only in the face of heroic mass struggles by the colonised determined to win their independence that France was eventually forced to cede control in the 1950s and '60s. From the outset of French colonialism in Vietnam, any form of political dissent was met with repression. Books and newspapers deemed subversive were confiscated. Anti-colonial political activists were sentenced to death or imprisoned on island fortresses. The grotesque violence would only escalate. After the defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific War, the French ruling class was determined to re-establish its control over Vietnam. In 1946, the prime minister ordered the shelling of Haiphong, killing 6,000 Vietnamese. It wasn't until the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu that the national liberation forces drove the French out of the country.

Violence was part of the fabric of French rule. The best farmland was concentrated in the hands of the colonialists and their collaborators, leaving the majority of peasants vulnerable to famine. Some 2 million Vietnamese died during the Second World War; there was a famine despite the granaries being full with rice. Conditions on the rubber plantations and in the mines were described as like slavery. Attempts at escape were met with hunger and torture. At one Michelin plantation, 12,000 workers died between 1917 and 1944. Vietnamese workers were paid on average 48 piastres a year for their hard labour. This was a pittance, as Vietnamese historian Ngo Vinh Long noted: "Even a dog belonging to a colonial household cost an average of 150 piastres a year to feed". The French claimed a "civilising" mission as false as Britain's white man's burden. Take literacy. Pre-conquest, 80 percent of the population were considered functionally literate. By 1939, the figures had reversed, with 80 percent now illiterate.

The story was the same in Algeria. Before the French invasion in 1830, there was a high rate of literacy. By the time of independence, it had been reduced to a mere 10 percent. The virulently racist French settlers, numbering 1 million by the 1950s, lived a luxury lifestyle. But for the 6 million Arabs and Berbers, French colonialism was a disaster that they resisted by any means necessary. Violence wasn't the terrain chosen by the independence movement. It was given. The crushing of a rising in Setif in eastern Algeria in 1945 paints a picture of a "pitiless war". At least 15,000 were killed by French troops and settler death squads. The National Liberation Front (FLN) was formed in 1954, and quickly became the dominant nationalist organisation. It was committed to military confrontation with the French, including bombings on French soil. But as philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "It is not their violence, but ours, turned back". By the end of 1956, 450,000 French troops were on Algerian soil. This build-up was directed by the Socialist Party prime minister, Guy Mollet, the same party as François Hollande's. In 1957, an eight-day general strike was broken by repression. It took another round of mass protests, riots and strikes in 1962 for the Algerian revolution to triumph.

The violence of the French state was not confined to Algerian soil. In October 1961, Paris police massacred up to 300 Algerian immigrants. They were part of a peaceful unarmed protest of some 30,000 called out by the FLN to break an imposed curfew. Confident that they could act with impunity, the police herded panicked protesters onto bridges across the city, where they clubbed and then tossed them unconscious into the River Seine. For weeks, bodies, mutilated by truncheons and rifle butts, washed up on the river's banks. Thousands more were arrested and taken to makeshift detention camps where they were tortured. This dark episode was the worst violence in Paris since the Second World War. The colonial legacy lives on. The children of North African immigrants continue to live on the periphery of the "city of lights". Their shantytowns of the 1960s have been replaced by impoverished ghettoised housing estates. Here, curfews and armoured vehicles are not a historic relic.

The 70 percent of the French prison population that is estimated to be Muslim is testament to the enduring reality of state violence and racism. The policing of oppressed identities is codified into law by various bans on the Muslim veil. Nor is French imperialism a thing of the past. From the Ivory Coast to Mali, the Central African Republic, Libya and Syria, French foreign policy has been increasingly muscular, particularly in its old colonial stomping ground. Today as French fighter jets scream over Raqqa and lifeless bloodied bodies of children are pulled from the rubble of bombed apartment blocks, we would do well to remember the millions who have suffered a similar fate in the name of French "civilisation".

Liz Walsh is a member of Socialist Alternative and has been active in revolutionary politics since the early 2000s. She has played a leading role in social justice campaigns from refugee rights to the struggle against women's oppression.

The original article can be found here

African Arise? Economic Growth Rates Across The Region

Trends in Poverty in Africa: Decade after decade, politicians and international organizations have failed to reduce poverty. Nor have they been able to help Africa generate growth or build basic infrastructure. Worse, between 1975 and 2000 it was the only place on earth where poverty has intensified. It's only recently that the situation started to slowly improve.

Excluding the African continent from the World: In fact, there has been some growth since 1995 but it's been mostly in the very new services sector so it created only a few jobs whereas manufacturing and agriculture could have done much better. As the British prime minister declared in 2001 African poverty is "a scar on the conscience of the world". In recent years, globalization and technological inflation have made it only worse. It only helped further excluding the continent and widening the gaps with the rest of the world. However development economists and experts from all boards are now approaching the problem from new angles to provide innovative ways to fight African poverty. Better yet, some African countries are now emerging as real economic powers thanks to better leadership and deals with foreign investors to build infrastructure. Let's see how all that improves our understanding of poverty in Africa, the plague of a continent.

GLOBALIZATION AND CAUSES OF POVERTY IN AFRICA

Poverty in Africa:
Map of the Places Connected to Electricity Network

Better off rich or poor?: Aside from political and social reasons (e.g. corruption, ethnic violence), many economists argue that the absence of economic growth is in part due to a detrimental geography that impacts on the economy. But in many cases, oil-rich African countries are also more likely to be exploited by other countries or powerful corporations who always find a way to not pay much-needed taxes (billions and billions of dollars). In most developing countries, disparities pose the problem of redistribution of wealth, but many African countries are simply too poor to redistribute anything. The average income level is sometimes so low that even working people live under poverty. So, how do you fix that?

Free Trade Agreements Against The African Continent: International trade policies, for example, are incomparably more important than international aid to end African poverty and help its countries to integrate the global market. Surprising ? Not that much considering the global competition that the continent has to face: not only are the US, the European Union protecting their key industries (especially those that Africa could compete with, like agriculture), but now Asian countries also got in the game, spearheaded by India and China. With each of them seeking to protect their benefits, the international community should rather give preferential market conditions to poor countries (e.g. for export or agricultural development). This would provide them a path to fast development, and hopefully diffuse the benefits to inner regions. In that way the internal market could also thrive and help alleviate poverty in African countries that are landlocked. Read here how African farmers have finally won their case at the World Trade Organization (WTO).

INTERNATIONAL AIDS IN AFRICA

Delivery of Humanitarian Aid in Africa

Corruption and Poverty Reduction: So far local governments, international aid and market reforms had only a minimal effect on the population. Consequence: folks have had to solve their problems on their own, outside the system. It is only recently that new international policies, such as the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal (MDG) in Africa, have stopped overlooking the effect of politics on local economies: transparent and accountable government, rule of law, public resources management, free and fair election combined with an active civil society are now recognized as a vital factor of poverty alleviation. This whole forms what specialists now call “good governance”. Considering the extent of corruption and violence of local councils and governments, it’s not surprising that a huge part of the African population can only fend for itself most of the time, relying on a makeshift economy. This makes them hard to reach by international aid but at least they have an alternative system to fall back upon: coping through sharing. Not only farmers in rural areas but African urbanites as well manage to avoid the claws of the law. This makes many development policies totally ineffective.

International Aid - More Transparent, Less Corrupt: Another issue is that of international aid. Aid donors obviously want to make sure that their money is put to the right use, rather than to building palaces for individual use. Now how things have changed is that foreign aid has become demand-driven with local communities, governments and NGOs competing to receive the funds. This should help foster competitiveness and efficiency of development projects as well as transparency. In other words it should radically reduce corruption and embezzlement. This model was field tested and can help avoid the case of the African Millennium Villages, blindly “shooting” money in every direction in a local community, like a crazy action hero who doesn't believe in nuances and complexities of real life. What is needed is targeted funding that provides new opportunities and incentives for people to participate in the development of their country. Humanitarian aid remains way too opaque, only the most concrete and effective programs should remain. In particular those that help local entrepreneurs, not multinationals.

GEOGRAPHY AND REGIONAL AFRICAN POVERTY

Geography and Regional Poverty in Africa

Too Poor to Redistribute Anything?: Recently specialists have increasingly taken into account the role of geography to explain the absence of economic growth and the aggravation of poverty in Africa. Whereas in many developing countries there are disparities that pose the problem of redistribution of wealth, Africa is simply too poor to redistribute anything. Well that's not totally true. Africa is full of natural resources, but to give just one example many multinational companies that extract these resources don't even pay any taxes to the country where they operate. In other cases, it's simply that the local aristocracy keeps all the revenues to itself.

The African Paradox: It's Both Rich and Poor: So poverty in Africa is paradoxical: the continent is made of 54 countries of low population density and rich in natural resources. Of course, as usual the resources are not evenly distributed between regions, countries and within local populations. The countries are separated into resource-rich and -poor and into coastal and landlocked ones. Across all categories, most countries have remained stuck with a GDP per capita below $2000 for the past six decades.

The Need for Tailored Development: Unlike other continents, a great share of the population in Africa lives in landlocked, resource-scarce countries which accounts for 1% of its overall growth rate. Another consequence of this is that policymakers need to start thinking in terms of context-based development strategies rather than continent-based ones. In particular concerning the resource-poor landlocked regions which will remain the very core of the African poverty puzzle. A puzzle that year after year became obviously unsolvable in a day. These very countries are the ones that would need a sort of targeted, continuous aid flow in order to steadily raise consumption levels, therefore consistently reducing poorness in Africa. Nevertheless, today's aid flows only focus on short-term emergencies. Read here about the influence of oil on poverty in Sudan and Darfur

HEALTH AND POVERTY IN AFRICA

Almost half of the population in Africa suffers from water-related diseases. On top of insufficient hygiene education, the frequent inundations (and lack of risk prevention) play an important role: in Mozambique over 1 million people were displaced by the floods of 1999/2000 and an unknown number killed.

Diseases - Threat to Development: Diseases in Africa – and in particular HIV-AIDS – are another major threat to economic development. As an academic (Whiteside 2002) puts it: “one of the main consequences of the disease is that it impoverishes individuals, households and communities”, thus further entrenching the roots of poverty in Africa. This is a vicious cycle by which poverty boosts the spread of HIV which in turn increases poverty. The case of the poor in South Africa shows that despite the country's substantial growth, that wealth is still too concentrated in the hands of an "uninfected" minority. That way the gap between the rich and the poor only gets bigger and bigger, making it harder for impoverished populations to catch up with the well-off.

Hygiene and Sanitation First: As for basic sanitation and hygiene, it is first and foremost an educational issue. Hygienic habits have consistently prevented millions of deaths across the world in the past decades. And just like in all the countries where it happened, massive full-scale educational campaigns are needed to significantly alleviate poverty in Africa. Read about the role of HIV/AIDS in worsening poverty in South Africa here.

EDUCATION AND POVERTY IN AFRICA

Education and Schools in Africa

Education - A Neglected Cause of Poverty: Starting to feel slightly overwhelmed? We're just talking about everyday life poverty here! ... So, not only does proper education help eradicate a great deal of diseases (STIs, sanitation, etc), but there is also a direct link between levels of education and poverty. Authoritarian rule in most countries has only made the situation worse, deepening both levels of education and poverty in Africa. For that reason, although some argue that authoritarian regimes can better spur development in some cases (China, Singapore,…), but in this case democracy seems more appropriate for the case of Africa.

Is Democracy Better Suited to Africa?: Experts who hold this argument ground it on several factors including: the multi-ethnics nature of most countries (better representation of everyone’s interests), the need for better governance and redistribution of the riches in absence of strong political will, and pervasiveness of corruption that drives people away from the legal and institutional life. But the experience of democracy in the West has also resulted as we've seen with the protests in 2011 that most of rich countries' wealth eventually ended up in the hands of a very small elite.

Education to gain skills first and foremost: Even though many fancy universities tend to forget it, education is in general about teaching people skills (duh), thereby enhancing productivity, creativity, and exchanges. Higher education is crucial to bring Africa back into the world system (yes it’s been kind of left aside) and bridge the digital gap with other continents. What we need is then consistent education in ICTs on top of developing the infrastructure (optic fiber, antennas, electricity grids,...) so that people can benefit from an advanced use of ICTs and harness their economic potential.

Fighting on all fronts: Obviously on a priority list of fighting poverty in Africa, this comes after meeting the most basic needs such as food, water, health, energy,... How could you possibly charge a computer's battery without electricity in your town? Yet they did that mistake a few years ago and sent thousands of laptops. Read here about education and fighting poverty in Kenya.

HUNGER AND WATER

Hunger and Under-Nourished Population in Africa

Hunger, a typical feature of African poverty?: In the past 30 years only sub-Saharan Africa saw no improvement in fight against malnutrition and hunger in Africa (or several types of malnutrition). Currently there are an estimated 80% of Africans who suffer from hunger, and 30% of whom are children. Despite poverty in Nigeria and in Zimbabwe, these countries were part of the group that manage to reduce its underweight population between 1976 and 1995. On the other hand just as many countries - a dozen - were suffering from sharp rises in under-nutrition. The worst case is that of poverty in Ethiopia which left over a million people underfed. The plight of hunger is undoubtedly one of the most severe effects of poverty in Africa, where it is incomparably harsher than in most other places.

Water, diseases & geography: "All peoples, whatever their stage of development and their social and economic conditions, have the right to have access to drinking water in quantities and of a quality equal to their basic needs". (Action Plan, United Nations Water Conference, Mar del Plata, 1977) More than 30 years after this statement, more than 50% of Africans still suffer from water-related diseases (cholera, diarrhea). Although the continent is blessed with large rivers such as the Congo, the Nile, the Zambezi and the Niger, uneven geographical distribution causes sharp shortages of water in Africa. History has shown that despite technical, financial, economic and institutional support in water-related projects, poor governance has been a major factor in ruining those efforts and resources.

THE END OF THE TUNNEL...?

The causes and effects of poverty in Africa are fueling a seriously vicious cycle that stops Africans from getting the most basic services. It affects simple water supply, sanitation, health care and education in incredibly diverse ways. Ultimately it becomes so all-pervasive that it overwhelms the application of the very best practices drawn from past lessons. The way out of poverty in Africa is therefore hardly imaginable without the constructive and appropriate help and cooperation of the international community, along with (increasingly) that of private businesses from other countries.

The original article can be found here

"Americans need to realize that our economy has thrived not in spite of government, but in many ways because of government. Without a whole host of government rules, capitalism could not exist. Even regulations and social programs help sustain a market economy by fixing many of its serious social and economic problems.”

One of the most common and misleading economic myths in the United States is the idea that the free market is “natural” – that it exists in some natural world, separate from government. In this view, government rules and regulations only “interfere” with the natural beneficial workings of the market. Even the term “free market” implies that it can exist free from government and that it prospers best when government leaves it alone. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, a market economy does not exist separate from government – it is very much a product of government rules and regulations. The dirty little secret of our “free” market system is that it would simply not exist as we know it without the presence of an active government that creates and maintains the rules and conditions that allow it to operate efficiently.

With workers around the world burdened by joblessness and stagnant incomes, Marx’s critique that capitalism is inherently unjust and self-destructive cannot be so easily dismissed

Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap Forward into capitalism, communism faded into the quaint backdrop of James Bond movies or the deviant mantra of Kim Jong Un. The class conflict that Marx believed determined the course of history seemed to melt away in a prosperous era of free trade and free enterprise. The far-reaching power of globalization, linking the most remote corners of the planet in lucrative bonds of finance, outsourcing and “borderless” manufacturing, offered everybody from Silicon Valley tech gurus to Chinese farm girls ample opportunities to get rich. Asia in the latter decades of the 20th century witnessed perhaps the most remarkable record of poverty alleviation in human history — all thanks to the very capitalist tools of trade, entrepreneurship and foreign investment.