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| Jair |
G8: Bono and Geldof slept with the enemy
and betrayed the cause, writes Bianca Jagger
From the mag New Statesman:
When G8 finance ministers announced last month a $40bn debt-relief package for some of the world's poorest countries, Bob Geldof praised it as "a victory for the millions of people in the campaign around the world". Bono called it "a little piece of history". Forget the immoral condition of enforced liberalisation and privatisation that it contained. That was not all. Bono went on to hail George W Bush as the saviour of Africa. "I think he has done an incredible job," he pronounced, adding: "Bush deserves a place in history for turning the fate of the continent around." He came . . . (continues: 989 words)
http://www.newstatesman.com/nssubsfilter.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_Politics&newDisplayURN=200507110006
[Edited by Jair] |
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| Maxlugar |
Bono is right.
Can you name an American president that has pledged more money for Africa?
Didn't think so.
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| Voodoo Scrounge |
would have to agree |
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| Jumping Jack |
More blind and ignorant philosophical hatred. Sad, sad, sad. |
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| texile |
she's gonna piss people off - but she's absolutely, unsentimentally correct. |
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| corgi37 |
Why do Europeans hate Bush, and the U.S. i guess, so much? Are they still humiliated about WW2? Is it because Europe is more or less redundant? I just dont get it.
I got nothing against the guy. He's just a dumb multi-millionaire, voted in by a vast majority of people. Whether the voters are dumb, time will tell.
We are in bed with the prick too, but shit, i couldnt give a stuff.
Though there is certainly anti-U.S. feelings here, the main vocal opponents are European immigrants. The chick i work with is a Hun, and boy, does she hate all things American. And British for that matter.
Matters not in the long run. In 20 years, we'll all be using Chinese currency (the Yuan) and Africa will still be a basket case.
Who knows? Maybe in 50 years, people will be holding huge concerts in Beijing to raise funds for America?
Not us though. Oh no. Hopefully we Aussies will grease up to the Reds real good, and get special favours.
Either that, or maybe we can build a transportation machine, and zap ourselves to Alpha Centauri, and be on the groovy planet on LOST IN SPACE where the teenagers never grow up.
[Edited by corgi37] |
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| glencar |
Corgi, seriously, benember when the Japanese were going to take over the world? The Chinese aren't taking over anything. And Bianca is now officially a moron. She's become a pale imitation of those 60's activists who got all caught up in labels & gave us political correctness. |
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| Jumacfly |
quote:
corgi37 wrote:
Why do Europeans hate Bush, and the U.S. i guess, so much? [Edited by corgi37]
many Europeans can live without Bush and really don 't care..
and saying European hate US and American people is one more cliché...It's like saying all Aussies are crocodile hunters my dear Corgi 
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| Jumping Jack |
The venon against all things American by the European press and adopted by the gullible is due to primarily to European arrogance that they are somehow wiser and culturally superior to the rest of the world. The fact that they now have high unemployment rates, stagnant socialistic economies and a marginal role in world affairs creates extreme jealousy among the European media elites. Americans are attacked on a daily basis to distract from their own failings. They worry about the influence of McDonalds when when they should be worried about Muslim immigration who won't assimilate, the real threat to their cultures.
You are absolutely correct about the Chinese. In 20 years when China is the dominant economic and military power you will be looking back on the good old days when a US crippled with political correctness was everyone's prime concern. I can't wait to hear the liberals whine about how terrorists are treated in China instead of whether their Korans got wet. |
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| Jumacfly |
quote:
Jumping Jack wrote:
The venon against all things American by the European press and adopted by the gullible is due to primarily to European arrogance that they are somehow wiser and culturally superior to the rest of the world. The fact that they now have high unemployment rates, stagnant socialistic economies and a marginal role in world affairs creates extreme jealousy among the European media elites. Americans are attacked on a daily basis to distract from their own failings. They worry about the influence of McDonalds when when they should be worried about Muslim immigration who won't assimilate, the real threat to their cultures.
You are absolutely correct about the Chinese. In 20 years when China is the dominant economic and military power you will be looking back on the good old days when a US crippled with political correctness was everyone's prime concern. I can't wait to hear the liberals whine about how terrorists are treated in China instead of whether their Korans got wet.
funny! |
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| Poplar |
The tone in this thread is beautiful. Unity, sort of.
Impending Stones is making us all giddy.
Sad to say, Bush has done more for Africa than any other us prez. The downside: Even with all the problems in the mideast, Africa is the Planet's biggest problem.  scarry.
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| lotsajizz |
quote:
Jumping Jack wrote:
You are absolutely correct about the Chinese. In 20 years when China is the dominant economic and military power you will be looking back on the good old days when a US crippled with political correctness was everyone's prime concern. I can't wait to hear the liberals whine about how terrorists are treated in China instead of whether their Korans got wet.
It will be the idiot conservatives who enabled THAT scenario |
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| gimmekeef |
The amount of money that actually will benfit the people of Africa is a pittance of what is needed.Unfortunately throwing money at the situation will not cure the root causes.Bush and the G8 did the political expedient thing and met expectations.This will resurface again and they'll be back whining for trillions..... |
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| texile |
[And Bianca is now officially a moron. She's become a pale imitation of those 60's activists who got all caught up in labels & gave us political correctness.
[/quote]
lol - i believe that's the main criticism most would direct toward the bob and bono show....
who have rendered all radical dissent moot...it's called revolution-lite.
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| corgi37 |
I think "Revolution-Latte" is more appropriate. |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
Maxlugar wrote:
Can you name an American president that has pledged more money for Africa?
Too bad it wasn't his own money. Just another charge to Uncle Sam's never ending credit card. |
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| Dan |
quote:
Too bad it wasn't his own money. Just another charge to Uncle Sam's never ending credit card.
Thank you! At the risk of sounding like a bleeeding heart liberal, I don't just hate Bush because of the idiotic and dishonest Iraq war, but because of all the other ways he is spending my tax dollars. If the Republican party wasn't so overwhelmingly polluted with the Xtian Gawd Freeks running the place I would rather just airlift $40 billion worth of birth control pills and condoms over the continent than let it go and let the World Bank (headed by neocon Paul Wolfowitz) and the IMF give them more cash, guaranteed by American tax dollars.
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| texile |
corgi, it ain't just europeans and it ain't just right and left.
here in texas, we have a longstanding disdain for shrub;
he squandered the education system, executed more people during his term than most states do in decades, sanctifying texas' "old sparkey" into a symbolic state treasure of a fucked-up capital punishment system...(hey, we execute retarded people here - we are the model and he IS the man)now he's extending his ineptitude to the rest of y'all.
he's a punk, a clueless, arrogant, disengaged punk who listens and answers to no one (except his "lord" - but apparently his lord only speaks in bushisms)
yet affects everyone with impunity;
ask a european about bush? ha...
try asking a texas democrat, or even moderate, about shrub and you might just evaporate form the heat of their contempt;
its more than politics.... its a deep, passionate, texas-size disgust;
he is a moral void...wrapped up in moralistic arrogance;
and about those oily friends........
yeah, some of us are a little biased about the guy. |
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| glencar |
Duly noted! |
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| Poplar |
the BBC is a pile of shit.
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| Jumping Jack |
2 well thought out and very interesting analayses of Africa for your reading pleasure:
The Tragedy of Africa
Thomas Sowell
July 12, 2005
The official declarations coming out of the G8 meetings in Scotland, as well as the raucous demonstrations surrounding those meetings, talk about saving Africa. But, looking back over the decades and generations, Africa has been "saved" so many times that you have to wonder why it still needs saving.
Desperate and tragic conditions afflict millions in Africa today and any humane person would like to help. But the repeated failures of previous help ought to make us at least question the particular manner in which Africa can be helped.
"Forgiveness" of foreign debts is always high on the agenda of those on the political left.
At any given moment, this would of course free up money that African governments could spend to help relieve their people's distress -- assuming that this is what they would spend it for. But why would anyone think that promoting irresponsible government borrowing by periodically "forgiving" their debts is going to help African countries in the long run?
As for the people of Africa, they have to survive in the short run in order to get to the long run. So emergency aid for emergency conditions makes far more sense than long-run "foreign aid" programs with an almost unbroken track record of failure, not only in Africa but around the world.
Years ago, a courageous economist in India pointed out that, however helpful it was to receive food from abroad during India's famines, the long-run policy of continually giving wheat to India was just reducing the ability of Indian farmers to grow wheat and sell it for a price that would cover their costs.
Eventually the policy of continually dumping wheat into India was stopped and today India produces so much wheat that it has been able to send some to Africa to deal with African famines.
Promoting dependency and irresponsible borrowing is not the way to help the poor internationally any more than these are ways of helping the poor at home. Such policies benefit the bureaucracies that administer foreign aid and enable vain people to see themselves as saviors, even when they are doing more harm than good.
Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the most tragic geographic handicaps of any region of the world. Navigable waterways, which have been crucial to the development of nations and of cultures, are severely limited in most of Africa. Poor soil and inadequate and undependable rainfall patterns shrink the possibilities still further.
Ideologues love to think of African poverty as caused by "exploitation" on the part of Western countries. But, with a few notable exceptions, Africa has had little to be exploited. Even at the height of European imperialism, there was far less foreign trade or foreign investment in the whole vast continent of Africa than in a little country like Belgium or Switzerland.
In more recent times, so-called "foreign aid" has left many monuments of futility in Africa, from rusting machinery and the ruins of many projects to cows sent from Europe that keeled over in the African heat.
With all its handicaps, Africa used to feed itself and even export agricultural produce to Europe. In some of the more geographically favored parts of sub-Saharan Africa, iron was smelted thousands of years ago.
During the first two decades after African nations gained their independence in the 1960s, one sub-Saharan nation that stood out with its economic prosperity and political stability amid economic disasters and social catastrophes among its neighbors was the Ivory Coast under President Felix Houphouet-Boigny.
Yet neither the Ivory Coast nor its leader attracted nearly as much attention, much less adulation, as was showered on Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, or other big-name African leaders who led their countries into ruin.
The Ivory Coast in those days relied on markets instead of the kind of policies and rhetoric that the intelligentsia favored. When its policies changed, it became just another African basket case.
Today, too many people in the West continue to see Africa as an outlet for the visions and policies of the left that have failed in the West and are even more certain to fail in Africa.
The tragedy of Africa: Part II
Thomas Sowell
July 13, 2005
Nature and man have combined to make Africa the most tragic of the continents -- and the men who did this have been both black and white.
The great French historian Fernand Braudel said, "In understanding Black Africa, geography is more important than history." Much of Africa's history was in fact shaped by its geography.
Almost every great city in the world has arisen on navigable waterways -- and such waterways are more scarce in Africa than in any other continent. An aircraft carrier can dock on the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan but there is not a single river where that is possible on the vast continent of Africa, which is larger than Europe or North America.
Even smaller boats can travel only a limited distance on most African rivers because of cascades and waterfalls. Most of the continent is more than 1,000 feet above sea level and more than half of Africa is more than 2,000 feet above sea level. That means its rivers and stream must plunge down from those heights on their way to the sea.
Water transport was crucial in the thousands of years before there were trains or automobiles. It was crucial for developing an economy and crucial for developing a culture in touch with enough other widely scattered cultures to make use of advances in the rest of the world. But many African societies have been isolated by that continent's dearth of both navigable rivers and harbors.
Isolated regions have almost invariably lagged behind regions in touch with a wider cultural universe. One among many signs of the isolation and cultural fragmentation of much of sub-Saharan Africa is that African languages are one third of all the languages in the world, even though African peoples are only about 10 percent of the world's population.
Small, tribal societies were another consequence of geographic isolation -- and the vulnerability of such societies to conquest by outsiders was another.
If cultural diversity was all that the multiculturalists claim, Africa would be a heaven on earth. Too often and in too many places it has been a hell on earth.
Many people expected great things from Africa when new independent African nations began to emerge from colonial rule in the 1960s, often headed by leaders who had been educated in Europe and America.
Unfortunately, what these new leaders brought back to Africa from the West were not the things that had made the West prosperous and powerful but the untested theories of Western intellectuals and ideologues who had taught them. Such African leaders by and large lacked both the common sense of the African masses and the technological and economic experience of the West.
The net result was that African leaders, full of confidence because of their Western education and the adulation of the Western intelligentsia, made their people guinea pigs for half-baked theories that had contributed nothing to the rise of the West and had contributed much to its social degeneration.
Poverty-stricken Africa could afford these economic and social disasters far less than the affluent West could. However, African leaders were not judged in the West by their results but by their rhetoric and their visions that resonated with the rhetoric and the visions of the Western intelligentsia.
Thus Julius Nyerere became virtually a secular saint in the Western media while he was driving the people of Tanzania deeper into poverty and tyranny. Nor was he alone.
Conversely, when Felix Houphouet-Boigny made the Ivory Coast an oasis of economic advancement and civil peace, he was either ignored or disdained. He was one of the few new African leaders with any previous experience in business or any understanding of economics. His successors have ruined the country.
Whatever damage European colonialism did to Africa during its relatively brief reign, that was probably less than the damage done later by well-meaning Western would-be saviors of Africa. Africans do not need to be treated as mascots but as people whose own efforts, skills, and initiatives need to be freed from the tyranny of their leaders and the paternalism of Western busybodies.
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