TRIBUTE TO PROF AWOONOR

Kofi Awoonor

By Ekow Mensah.

The Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG) has paid glowing tribute to Professor Kofi Awoonor, former chairman of the council of state who passes away in a terrorist attack in Kenya.

 It described the late Professor as a combatant for Social justice and Pan Africanism.

The full text of the statement is published below;

TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR KOFI AWOONOR

The Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG) has learnt of the death of Professor Kofi Awoonor, an academic of high repute, a poet, author, diplomat and extraordinary political activist with deep shock and sorrow.

That his death occurred in far away Kenya at the hands of cowardly terrorists, determined to impose their religious bigotry on the world can only deepen our anger at the reactionary forces beat on eroding the gains of the democratic movement worldwide.

The forces of progress throughout the world ought to remain steadfast in the continuing battle against zealots whose sole objective is to impose their world view through the employment of terror including state terrorism.

The SFG salute Professor Kofi Awoonor, who keenly participated in many activities it organised to promote socialism and Pan Africanism.

He was a great ally and a combatant for social justice and would be missed greatly by all who cherish the values of freedom.

 As a mark of our respect for this great African, the SFG will organise a night of tributes to Professor Awoonor, at the Freedom Centre in Accra on Monday, September 30, 2013 at 6:00pm. We invite all socialists, progressives, patriotic Ghanaians and the general public to participate in this event designed to honour one of Ghana’s most celebrated academics.

We extend our heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family, the Government and people of Ghana and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to which he belonged.

Kwesi Pratt, Jnr.

For Convener 

Ghana To Host Pan-African Congress

By Ekow Mensah

Ghana has been requested to host the 8th Pan- African Congress next year.

The request was conveyed to Vice President Paa Kwesi Amissah- Arthur by Major-General Kahinda Otafiire, Chairman of the Worldwide Pan African Movement at a meeting in Accra.

General Otafiire, doubles as the Minister of Justice of Uganda and was in the country to speak at the Kwame Nkrumah memorial lectures to mark the 104th birth day of the founder of the Republic of Ghana.

He told the Vice President “Nkrumah and Ghana have played key roles in the Pan-African Movement and it is time to take your responsibility one step further”.

General Otafire said the African Union and many African countries have pledged financial support to the Congress which will focus attention on the problems of Africa and their solutions in the 21st Century.

It is expected that atleast 2000 delegates from all over world will participate in the congress.

Ghana’s first President Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah played a key role in the Organisation of the 5th Pan African Congress in Manchester in the United Kingdom.

Historians including Mereka Sherwood say that the 5th Pan African Congress provided a great impetus to the decolonisation process in Africa .

It is expected that a local organising committee made up of people representing all shades of political opinion, Non-governmental organisations, religious and cultural groups will be set up very soon.

Vice president Amissah- Arthur said Ghana remains committed to the principles and ideals of Pan Africanism.

He said the Government of Ghana will examine the request and take a decision in the interest of Ghana and Africa.

Present at the meeting was Mr Kyeretwie Opoku, Convener of the Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG).

Editorial

We Have Lost An Avid Reader

Professor Kofi Awoonor, former Chairman of the Council of State was a self-confessed avid reader of “The Insight”.

In message to the newspaper on its 20^th anniversary, Professor Awoonor wrote that “The Insight” continues to provide intellectual nourishment for people like him.

Professor Awoonor was undoubtedly an out spoken advocate of socialism and Pan- Africanism. He was a distinguished poet, author, academic and a political activist of the left variety.

The Insight” is deeply shocked by his death at the hands of terrorists in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

We mourn the death of this great son of Ghana and extend our condolences to the bereaved family, the Government and people of Ghana as well as the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to which he belonged.

May his soul rest in perfect peace.

Reforms in Cuba

“THE updating of our economic model is not a miracle that can be performed overnight, as some think. Its complete implementation will be achieved gradually over the coming five year period, since it involves a great deal of detail, planning, coordination, on both the judicial level and in the meticulous preparation of all who will participate in the practical work.”

These were the words of President Raúl Castro Ruz, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, two years ago, on April 19, 2011, in his closing comments to the 6th Party Congress which approved the Social and Economic Policy Guidelines of the Party and the Revolution.

The country has moved forward over these 24 months, at a pace which reflects the urgency of these agreements. The critical nature of what was approved has meant that the 12 chapters of Guidelines have had, in one way or another, an impact on life in our society, during this period.

This has occurred within an international context which continues to have a strong effect on the nation, with a blockade which remains intact, a cruel and genocidal policy on the part of the most powerful country in the world, to commercially and financially asphyxiate Cuba, in a world in which access to credit is difficult for us, amidst a world financial crisis generated by this same power. The economic crisis has rapidly become a brazen attack on food security, on the environment and the availability of energy resources – in effect an attack on the most elemental of human rights - life. Within Cuba, even as progress is made, our insufficient export capacity multiplies the effects of the crisis.

We cannot fail to mention, in a discussion of these past two years, the role played by the Guidelines Implementation and Development Permanent Commission which, as it was charged, has harmoniously led the efforts and actions taken by national bodies and entities involved in the updating of our economic model, with the support of the Ministry of Economy and Planning.

Likewise, the National Assembly has given the 6th Congress Guidelines legal stature, debating and approving measures within its sessions, concurring with the will of the Party that the Guidelines not be directly converted into law, since it is the government’s responsibility to administer and, therefore, to determine their implementation.

Over this two year period, the updating of Cuba’s economic model has moved forward with the Party Congress Guidelines.

The railroad development project; the buying and selling of homes and motor vehicles; the progress and growth of self-employment, including the most recent move to rent state restaurants to cooperatives; direct sales by agricultural producers to hotels; the 17 measures adopted to improve the functioning of Basic Units of Cooperative Production, putting them on equal footing with other forms of agricultural production; Decree-Law 300 which replaces No. 259 governing the awarding of idle land in usufruct, are but a few of the examples which demonstrate that the approved Guidelines are not dead letter, and will not simply be filed away.

Equally indicative are other measures such as the approval of legal norms to support what is being implemented; the establishment of non-agricultural cooperatives, 126 of which are functioning; the emergence of Enterprise Management Central Organizations which should not only improve the functioning of their respective sectors, but energize the production of goods and services in the Cuban economy, as well; the re-structuring of central state administration, based on a better, more rational organizational design, to more clearly delineate state and enterprise management responsibilities.

The country’s bank policy also reflects agreements made at historic 6th Congress. In December 2011, Decree-law 280 entered into effect providing individual access to credit, with priority given to requests for funds to construct or repair a home. Also significant is the new procedure allowing for the granting of subsidies for this purpose, to the neediest – clearly reflecting the basic principle of our Revolution and the 6th Congress that no one will be left unprotected. Also an embodiment of this spirit is the new tax system law, Law 113, from January 1, 2013 which seeks an improved distribution of the wealth generated by the country.

During these two years, a page has been turned in relation to the role played by physical planning and urban regulation; the country’s external finances have not been neglected in the slightest and Cuba’s prestige is growing, given its reliability in honoring each and every commitment, collaborating seriously and getting results.

Without a doubt, a critical step in the entire process of planning and organization throughout the country, with the necessary coordination, is the determination of the bases for the long-term Social and Economic Development Program, which will include the definition of indicators to be used and precise objectives to be met by 2030.

Another of the principal decisions made at the 6th Party Congress was the convocation of the Party’s First National Conference which was held with the purpose of evaluating the organization’s work with realism and a critical spirit, as well as determining the changes needed to play a strong leadership role in society and the state, as is delineated in Article 5 of the Constitution.

The central concept which the Conference addressed, and is still addressing, is the change of mentality which, as First Secretary Raúl Castro said, “will require the most work to accomplish, having been tied for many years to the same dogmas and obsolete opinions.”

Compañero Raúl, on April 19, 2011, said to us, “It is imperative that we immediately concentrate on getting the agreements made by this Congress implemented, guided in our conduct by the common denominators: order, discipline and rigor.”

Although there is still much to be done, if anything illustrates the application of these three concepts, it is the progress made in terms of liquidating outstanding accounts payable and receivable, which took a qualitative step forward between December of 2011 and December, 2012, even though continual follow-up and greater progress are needed, given the cascading negative effects these outstanding accounts have on the economy.

The provinces of Artemisa and Mayabeque are immersed in the implementation of a project to improve the functioning of People’s Power bodies, reflecting the need to develop formulas which allow a clearer delineation of the respective responsibilities and relationships between the Provincial Assemblies, the Central Sate Administration, budget supported entities and enterprises located in the territory, as well as strengthening the autonomy of municipalities.

At the same time, a new cadre policy is being rolled out, to guarantee the accomplishment of everything we have before us. A product of this strategy is the rejuvenation of the Party’s Central Committee elected two years ago, the new National Assembly of People’s Power and its Council of State, bodies which additionally providing evidence of progress in the inclusion of more women and Blacks in decision-making positions within the country. To this can be added the creation of the Advanced Studies State Cadre School, where hundreds of compañeros have completed courses.

During the past 24 months, the Central Committee has, as charged, checked on the progress of Guideline implementation twice a year and expanded Council of Ministers meetings have reviewed progress, on a monthly basis, from an operational and strategic point of view. These events have been broadly covered in the country’s media.

It has been two years of arduous work and commitment to the people, who authored the proposed Guidelines. The entire society gathered between December 1 and February 28, in 1,070 meetings, with 8,913,838 participants, who made 3,010,471 statements, which were taken into consideration in analyzing the original proposal of 291 Guidelines, and developing the 313-Guideline document approved at the 6th Congress.

This process had an antecedent. On July 26, 2007, in Camagüey, the Revolution’s leadership called on the people to express their concerns with a view toward charting the homeland’s future. The response included more than four million proposals, the essence of which was reflected in the 6th Congress agreements.

As compañero Raúl emphasized this past April 2, during a meeting of the Council of Ministers, “If we do an analysis of our trajectory thus far, we can see that progress is being made at a good pace, given that the magnitude and complexity of our problems do not allow us to resolve them overnight. We must resist the pressure of those who insist that we need to move more rapidly.”

The country is at a better point, the Cuban President also said, adding that the Party’s program has helped us work in a more orderly and disciplined manner, pointing out that the directives agreed upon for the development of the economic plan and budget are closely aligned with the implementation of the 6th Congress Social and Economic Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution.

Despite the progress, we are not satisfied. The tasks which remain before us are more complex, of greater importance and impact on the updating of Cuba’s economic model. That is why, in reality, the 6th Congress has not concluded. Raul’s call, “Now, to work!” made two years ago, at the closure of the meeting in the Convention Center, leaves no doubt.

Margaret Thatcher and the decline of West

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher’s first high-profile political job came in 1970 when she was appointed to serve as education and science minister in the cabinet of the liberal Tory Edward Heath.

She imposed a series of brutal budget cuts, the most infamous of which was the abolition of a program left over from the Great Depression, which guaranteed a daily pint of milk to schoolchildren between the ages of seven and eleven.

This was a program which had done much good in the poorer mining, industrial, and farming towns and villages of Wales, Scotland, and the north of England, where vitamin deficiency diseases like rickets and pellagra had been an immense public health problem.

But for Thatcher, that daily pint of milk was the essence of communism, a violation of the free market. The milk distributions were stopped. Since then, Thatcher has been hated by all Britons of goodwill, and since then her nickname has been “Thatcher milk snatcher.” This is the epitaph which should be inscribed on her tomb.

The Romans had a saying, “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum” - say nothing but good things about the dead. It is good advice, but in the face of certain enormous crimes against humanity, it cannot be honored. Such is the case of Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher offers one of the most egregious cases in recent history of a sociopath in power. She can be seen as the mother, or at least as the grandmother, of the world economic depression which broke out in 2007-2008. Thatcher was a fanatical apostle of the economic theories of the Austrian school ideologue Friedrich von Hayek and especially of Hayek’s 1944 screed, The Road to Serfdom, a raving attack on the highly successful economic methods of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal in the United States. On at least one occasion, Thatcher is known to have brandished a copy of Hayek’s scribblings as her personal holy book.

Hayek had started after World War I as a hack writer in the pay of rent-gouging Viennese landlords who wanted propaganda articles condemning the evils of rent control. He was considered a very marginal academic, almost a crackpot, until he attracted the attention of economic illiterate David Rockefeller, who hired Hayek to help him in cramming for exams at the London School of Economics.

Hayek, like his co-thinker Ludwig von Mises, was an exponent of the backward and primitive Austrian school of economic theory, which had been concocted by feudal-reactionary quackademics in the Habsburg empire to undercut the prestigious German-American school of dirigism and protectionism exemplified by figures like Friedrich List, one of the main inspirations for the recent economic success of places like Japan, Taiwan, and China.

For the Austrian school, any government intervention in or regulation of economic life is automatically classed as totalitarianism. The Austrian school relies on crude slogans of deregulation, privatization, and the free market. The Austrian school is sometimes called the psychological school, since it rejects as collectivist analyses which tried to grasp the broad objectivity of a national economy. The theoretical vantage point of the Austrian school is always the sociopathic urges and desires of the individual predatory speculator.

Austrianism is therefore much inferior to the deeply flawed neo-Keynesian synthesis, which tends to reproduce the outlook of central bankers. The Austrians are even more inferior in comparison to the American System, which has its central focus in the development of the modern labor force.

Before Thatcher, the strange beliefs of figures like von Mises and von Hayek - such as their demand that government must never lift a finger to prevent or mitigate a devastating economic depression - meant that they were not presentable in polite society. If an economist claimed that a pint of milk for school children was the leading edge of Bolshevism, most people concluded that such an economist needed to be committed to a mental institution. If such an economist insisted on this point, he risked being reminded that Hitler and the Nazis had been long since swept into the garbage can of history.

Margaret Thatcher changed all that. The overall impact of her political career has been a radical degradation of the universe of economic discourse of the Western world in the direction of ideas seen in the 1950s and 60s as hopelessly reactionary, or even psychotic. In this sense, Thatcher can be classed as the unifying symbol of a retrograde cultural paradigm shift, not just in Europe and the United States, but worldwide - especially when the influence of her signature monetarist/neoliberal economics on the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and similar institutions is taken into account.

The austerity policies today ravaging Europe under the auspices of the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission would be simply unthinkable without the massive wave of economic ignorance and barbarism unleashed by Thatcher.

A Creature of Lord Victor Rothschild

The legend of Thatcher portrays her as a self-made woman, a greengrocer’s daughter from Grantham.

In reality, the emergence of Thatcher was the work of a formidable political syndicate. One of Thatcher’s most important handlers was by any measure Lord Victor Rothschild (1910-1990), the third Baron Rothschild. Lord Vic was nominally a Labour peer in the House of Lords, but much of his influence derived from his work between 1963 and 1970 as worldwide head of “research” - meaning intelligence - for Royal Dutch Shell, the policy flagship of the seven sisters oil cartel. During much of this time, Lord Vic was a key security adviser to Thatcher. For a number of years Lord Vic also ran the Central Policy Review Staff, the de facto think tank of the British government. Lord Vic was also closely associated with Sir Keith Joseph, a Tory government minister and Thatcher’s top political brain truster.

Thatcher was for many years elected to parliament from the safe Conservative seat of Finchley. However, intelligence reports from the 1980s sometimes noted that Thatcher’s hold on this rotten borough or pocket borough had been consolidated with decisive help from Lord Vic.

Thatcher’s Gurus: Sir Alfred Sherman and Sir Keith Joseph

Another key Svengali for Thatcher was Sir Alfred Sherman, who had fought as a communist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, but had been followed the typical neocon pattern of evolution towards reactionary ideas. Sir Alfred had been a close adviser to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Sherman joined with Sir Keith Joseph and Thatcher in 1974 to found the Center for Policy Studies, and soon went on to play a key role in the Conservative Philosophy Group, which elaborated the ideology later known as Thatcherism. This was basically Austrianism with adjustments for the specific conditions of 1970s Britain.

Sir Alfred facilitated Thatcher’s transformation from an obscure backbencher to shadow Prime Minister for the Tories. Thatcher paid tribute to him in 2005, recalling that “We could never have defeated socialism if it hadn’t been for Sir Alfred.” But Sherman sometimes fail to conceal the true brutality of Thatcherism. On one occasion he told a Soviet journalist, “As for the Lumpenproletariat, colored people and the Irish, let’s face it, the only way to hold them in check is to have enough well armed and properly trained police.”

Sir Alfred also helps us to understand the real relation between Thatcher and her handlers. After Thatcher had lost power, he said of her: “Lady Thatcher is great theater as long as someone else is writing her lines; she hasn’t got a clue.” And indeed, much of Thatcher’s political career can be reduced to the obsessive parroting of not more than half a dozen primitive slogans, but with devastating effect.

Sir Keith Joseph, the son of a rich Tory grandee and Lord Mayor of London, had long held that figures like Heath were not nearly reactionary enough. Indeed, Sir Keith and not Thatcher might have become prime minister for the Tories, had it not been for one fateful outburst. Reading a 1974 speech written for him by Sir Alfred Sherman, Joseph added his observation is that, as a result of teen pregnancies among the lower orders of British society, “our human stock is threatened.”

This sounded very much like Nazi eugenics, and essentially disqualified Sir Keith from ever reaching number 10 Downing Street. Instead, both Joseph and Sherman focused their energies on installing Maggie in that post. Later, Joseph would become a point man in efforts to bust the teachers’ union, levy tuition fees for higher education, and radically cut the salaries of teachers and professors. Thus the note of brutal social Darwinism announced by Sir Keith remained throughout as a constant of Thatcher. Sir Keith also pioneered deindustrialization as an active government policy. When some Tories wanted to rebuild and modernize the shipyards on the Mersey River in Liverpool, Sir Keith argued instead for a “managed rundown.” Industrial demontage was another hallmark of Thatcherism.

Another secret of Thatcher’s success was the shameless use of advertising and marketing. Some of this was copied from American methods going back to Richard Nixon, but Thatcher elevated the demagogy of mass manipulation to an entirely new level. In her 1979 and 1983 campaigns, Thatcher relied on the Saatchi and Saatchi PLC advertising agency, which had been founded by two Iraqi Jewish brothers. The Saatchis were responsible for Conservative party advertising which claimed that “Labour isn’t working.” Based on the reputation this firm acquired through a helping Thatcher to her early victories, Saatchi and Saatchi became for a time the largest advertising agency in the world. Maurice Saatchi, now a member of the House of Lords, was made the chairman of the Conservative party.

However, even with this extensive support network, it is not clear that Thatcher ever received the support of a majority of British voters. Her ceiling seems to have been between 40 and 45%, which translated into a majority in the House of Commons only because of the British “first past the post” or winner-take-all system in each election district.

Before they were willing to accept the degradation of Thatcherism, the British people had to be softened up by many years of crisis. No country suffered more from the fake 1973 oil shock than Britain. There was a period of mass strike captivity in which the British la

bor movement proved it could paralyze the government, but also proved that it was incapable of seizing power and solving the main problems of society. In 1974, electric current and heating were often interrupted, and conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath put the nation on a three-day week. As I wrote about this phase in Surviving the Cataclysm, “the Sick Man of Europe appeared destined to sink beneath the waters of the North Sea, with journalists asking front-page questions like ‘Is Britain Dying?’”

Thatcher Filled the Post-Keynesian Void with Barbarism

It was good luck for Thatcher and her gang that this crisis then had to be administered by the Labour Party government of James Callaghan. The crisis of British society in the middle 1970s had an ideological as well as a practical impact. As I wrote in Surviving the Cataclysm:

“this crisis is associated with the abandonment of Keynesian economics by the British Labour Party, and by extension by the center-left around the world. At the Labour Party conference of September 1976, Callaghan remarked that ‘we used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession… I tell you, in all candor, that the option no longer exists and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked… by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy, followed by higher levels of unemployment.’ According to one British commentator, these were the ‘words which effectively buried Keynes.’ The liquidation of Keynes left the field dominated by the primitive Viennese monetarism of von Hayek and the even more primitive monetarism of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School. Callaghan himself would soon be supplanted by Thatcher.”

In this new atmosphere, Thatcher’s governing team was full of monetarists or neoliberal ideologues who could pretend to be professing a new economic theory, rather than simply repackaging a set of cruel and stupid doctrines which had been discredited in the 1930s. This applied to figures like Norman Tebbitt, Nigel Lawson, and Norman Fowler.

Keynes had recommended a mild inflation as a cure for depression. Thatcher demanded the opposite: she wanted to bring on a depression in order to cure inflation. Inflation is a complaint of the rich, who feel that the purchasing power of their cash horde is being diminished. Deflationary depression means unemployment, and this is the scourge of people who need to work for a living. Thatcher proceeded to apply the monetarist recipe with a vengeance, following Milton Friedman’s dumbed-down version of Austrianism. Since Friedman had taught that inflation is a purely monetary phenomenon, Thatcher collapsed the British money supply in a massive exercise of deflation. The value of the British pound soared, and anyone who had any debt was crushed.

Thatcher Caused the British Deflationary Depression of 1979-81

Under Callaghan, unemployment had stood at one million. Thatcher managed to double this to over 2 million in short order. It is estimated that in the early years of Thatcherism no fewer than 2 million manufacturing jobs were permanently destroyed in Britain, and the overall level of industrial production and manufacturing output was reduced by one third. The destruction of domestic export industry was helped by the grotesquely overvalued pound. But the City of London banks were able to use the overvalued pound to buy up assets all around the world at a discount. Unfortunately for Great Britain is a nation, a massive balance of payments crisis ensued.

A constant feature of Thatcherism was the desire to shift the burden of taxation from the wealthy to the middle class, working people, and the poor. This was done through the use of regressive taxation. One such regressive tax was the value-added tax or VAT, which Thatcher raised to 15%. Real unemployment is thought to have reached as many as 5 million persons during this phase.

By 1981, there were riots in Brixton near Lambeth in south London which were widely attributed to unemployment and despair. Contemporary observers had the impression that the entire social fabric of the British Isles was being destroyed. People who might feel attracted to the rhetoric of Ron Paul and Rand Paul need to be reminded that the essential program of Austro-libertarians of this ilk is precisely to induce a massive deflationary depression along the lines of Thatcher’s infamous handiwork. The goal is to shift more wealth to those who already have it.

Traditional politicians have promised to raise the standard of living like putting a chicken in every pot. Thatcher, by contrast, was able to have a homeless person living in almost every doorway in the British Isles. Recipients of social welfare payments (“the dole”) saw their benefits gouged and were put under a slave labor or workfare regime, based on earlier US models.

Some of the less radical members of the British ruling elite now began to have second thoughts about Thatcher’s ideological fanaticism. Thatcher called these figures “The Wets,” and always suggested their main issue was the resentment of leaders who had been prominent under Heath. Lord Carrington and Lord Thorneycroft went to Thatcher in 1981 and demanded that she resign, since her economic policies were manifestly a failure. Thatcher’s response was her trademark demagogy about the need to “stay the course” and her lunatic cry that “the lady’s not for turning.”

Thatcher Saved By 1982 War with Argentina

In spite of her bluster, Thatcher would not have survived much longer in office without the Falklands or Malvinas war with Argentina in the spring of 1982. There are indications that Thatcher lured the inept ruling junta in Buenos Aires into grabbing these islands in the South Atlantic. With different tactics, Argentina could probably have administered the British fleet a crushing defeat, but incompetent counsels prevailed. The British could never have taken back the islands without comprehensive logistical and other support from the United States. This was a moment of great shame for Washington, since according to John Quincy Adam’s Monroe Doctrine, these islands were an integral part of Argentina and the United States was duty bound to oppose the British aggression.

The US had also pledged to defend Argentina under the Rio Pact. But this meant nothing to General Al Haig and the somnambulist Ronald Reagan, who did everything possible to help Thatcher. Thatcher proclaimed that she had overcome the “Suez syndrome” of 1956, meaning that Britain was back as an aggressive imperialist power. Based on chauvinist hysteria around the Malvinas, Thatcher was able to win the 1983 general election, even though she got only 42.4% of the votes.

Thatcher’s foreign policy as carried out by Lord Geoffrey Howe was worthy of the mythical reactionary Colonel Blimp. Thatcher was a great admirer of the Chilean fascist Augusto Pinochet, whose Friedmanite economic policies were essentially identical to her own. She considered Nelson Mandela as a dangerous communist, and did everything possible to prevent economic sanctions from being imposed on apartheid South Africa by the British Commonwealth. This brought her into bitter conflict with Commonwealth leaders like Rajiv Gandhi of India and Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia. But Thatcher took the lead in promoting USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev as a man she could do business. Later, Thatcher would gloat over the destruction of Soviet power to which she had contributed.

Thatcher’s racist and jingoistic Little England foreign policy also earned her the enmity of Queen Elizabeth II, who had her vast empire to look after. When Thatcher was denied an honorary degree by Oxford, and when she was criticized by the Church of England, it is safe to assume that those two pillars of the establishment were acting according to the wishes of Buckingham Palace. A political cartoon dating back to one of Thatcher’s elections showed Queen Elizabeth as a Labour Party agitator in the streets screaming “Tories out!”

But Thatcher’s electoral fortunes were also helped by extensive bombing campaigns by the Irish Republican Army, and organization now known to have been thoroughly penetrated and decisively influenced by British intelligence. When the IRA bombed Thatcher’s hotel in Brighton in October 1984, the Iron Lady launched a new campaign of antiterrorist posturing.

But a great event of Thatcher’s second term in office was her systematic destruction of the miners’ union during the course of a one-year strike in 1984-85. By crushing the militant miners of the National Union of Mineworkers under Arthur Scargill, Thatcher was able to put the entire British labor movement permanently onto the defensive. Thatcher destroyed not only the miners’ union, but put the entire British re-privatized coal mining industry (previously nationalized between 1946 and 1987 as the National Coal Board) on the path to extinction.

Great Britain has been described as an island of coal surrounded by a sea of fish, but Thatcher’s monetarism in service to the financial parasites of the city of London basically wiped out both mining and commercial fisheries. The conclusion is that Thatcher wanted to destroy the unions as a possible platform of mass resistance against the rule of financial oligarchs, and also welcomed the end of industrial capitalists as another group who might oppose the City of London. Britain today is a postindustrial rubble field and junkyard, largely thanks to Thatcher.

Deindustrialization through Deregulation and Privatization

Throughout her time in office, Thatcher mercilessly sought to privatize British government assets, generally selling them off to wealthy Tory clients at bargain basement prices. In addition to the National Coal Board, she also returned British Telecom to the private sector, and set into motion the process which has led to the disastrous re-privatization of British Rail.

By the end of Thatcher’s term in office, when the Chunnel or tunnel under the English Channel was nearing completion, British industrial capabilities were so weak that the London government experienced tremendous difficulty in providing a short Channel Tunnel Rail Link between London and Folkstone-Dover. Observers on the continent joked that Britain from an industrial point of view had become impotent, isolated, and irrelevant.

Thatcher was unable to privatize or abolish the British National Health Service, but she did everything possible to cripple it by drastic spending cuts which cost many lives. Labour MP Glenda Jackson has commented on the tragic state of British hospitals during the Thatcher regime.

In line with her crackpot ideology, Thatcher also fomented a reckless and irresponsible process of deregulation. One of the centerpieces of this was the 1986 “Big Bang” or complete deregulation of the London financial markets. This involved a transition from open outcry trading pits to screen-based trading, but it made London the wild West for derivatives swindles. From this point on, the British regulatory regime was even weaker than the US one. But, precisely because of this lax oversight, predatory bankers, hedge fund hyenas, and other shady enterprises crowded into London, making a success of real estate developments like Canary Wharf.

Mad Cow Disease Courtesy of Thatcher

Thatcher’s deregulation push also had very sinister consequences in the intermediate run. Thatcher was convinced that British farmers were being needlessly harassed by nosy agricultural inspectors, so she slashed that form of oversight as well. In the opinion of some informed observers, the worldwide epidemic of so-called Mad Cow disease (or BSE) can be traced back to abuses which flourished under Thatcher’s practically nonexistent regulatory regime in the British beef industry. Once again, producers paid the price: exports of British beef to the European Union were banned from March 1996 to May 2006.

Like Beppe Grillo today, Thatcher also waged war against local governments she did not like because they were controlled by the Labour Party and opposed her policies. Thatcher’s campaign to destroy the Labour-dominated Greater London Council was a case in point. Thatcher alleged that these local governments were expensive playgrounds for the “loony left.” She also targeted the local governments of Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham/Coventry, Leeds, and other working-class cities.

Thatcher also cultivated an atmosphere of hatred against continental Europe. She claimed that socialism had been defeated in Britain, but could always make a comeback through the machinations of the European super-state emerging in Brussels. In reality, Thatcher was able to cripple the European project by thoroughly infecting it with her primitive and barbaric economic methods, which came to dominate the European Commission and the European Central Bank, supplanting earlier and more effective approaches based on Catholic social thought and social democratic pro-worker thinking. One of Thatcher’s ministers was the infamous Nicholas Ridley, who responded to the collapse of the East German communist regime with chauvinist-inflammatory propaganda warning of the reemergence of a “Fourth Reich.” Today’s US-UK attack on the euro is built on this foundation.

Thatcher’s Downfall: The Regressive Poll Tax

Thatcher set herself up to be ousted through her fanatical ideological commitment to regressive taxation, meaning in practice the redistribution of wealth from the middle class, working people, and the poor to the rich and super rich who were the beneficiaries of her system. The experience of human society shows that regressive taxes, where everyone pays the same amount, cut heavily into the necessities of the poor and the amenities of the middle class, while hardly touching the sybaritic luxuries of the rich. Proportional taxes do the same thing: this applies especially to sales taxes and to Thatcher’s value-added tax (VAT). The only acceptable tax is a progressive tax, which increases its percentage bite as income rises from affluent to rich to super-rich. Those with the greatest ability to pay should contribute most.

One of the worst imaginable taxes is a lump-sum poll tax, formerly used in the American South as a subterfuge to prevent poor black people from voting. In 1990, Thatcher wanted to favor her wealthy backers by switching from local property taxes based on the value of real estate owned to a lump-sum property tax that would fall equally on rich and poor. Thatcher’s poll tax was designed to hit 35 million people, rather than the 18 million who had been paying the property tax. This openly regressive and reactionary tax was tremendously unpopular, and it hit many households which had been supporting Thatcher and the Tories. Soon public opinion surveys showed Thatcher almost 19 points behind the Labour Party.

Thatcher Pushed Bush into War with Iraq

Thatcher may have seen the handwriting on the wall, and may have tried to save herself with yet another war. When the regime of Bush the Elder in the United States had lured Saddam Hussein into occupying Kuwait, the Thatcher regime was the first to demand a military counterattack against the Iraqis based on Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter. Thatcher’s admirers claim that her desire for war with Iraq was far greater than that of the outwardly wimpy President George Herbert Walker Bush. After a key Anglo-American summit at the beginning of this crisis, press leaks inspired by Thatcher suggested that Bush - perhaps still frightened by the fate of LBJ in Vietnam - had begun to “go wobbly” on the military mobilization, and that Thatcher had been forced to carry out an emergency backbone transplant on the president.

What followed was Operation Desert Shield, the deployment of immense NATO military resources into Saudi Arabia. But since the bombing did not start until the middle of January, Thatcher’s hopes for a quick new Malvinas were in vain. Instead, in early November 1990, Lord Geoffrey Howe - a loyalist who had now gone over to the Wets - resigned from her government. Soon, Thatcher faced a challenge from Tory leader Michael “Tarzan” Heseltine. When this challenge revealed the extent of hatred against Thatcher, the Iron Lady finally quit.

Thatcher Claimed “There Is No Such Thing as Society”

One of Thatcher’s most infamous slogans was in that “there is no such thing as society.” This is because, under Austrian school doctrine, economics does not involve an objective worldwide productive process based on a worldwide division of labor, but rather studies the subjective individual psychological choices of predatory speculators. This is also what Ron Paul and Rand Paul believe. There is no society, since there are only discrete alienated individuals competing with each other. Thatcher was also convinced that money, not skilled labor, modern factories, or state-of-the-art infrastructure was the metaphysical representation of wealth. With Thatcherism, market fetishism, money fetishism and general alienation were more intense than hitherto observed.

Thatcher was, despite her chauvinist bluster, a determined enemy of the modern nation state. She was especially hated in Scotland, the site of so many industrial bankruptcies caused by her. Because of this pervasive hatred, the British Conservative Party was fatally weakened in Scotland, with the Scottish National Party and others filling the void. The ability of the British establishment to foment a separatist movement of dupes in Scotland at the present time is the direct consequence of the economic devastation wrought under Thatcher.

The general line of the Anglo-American intelligence establishment, as seen in Iraq, Sudan, and Serbia and planned for many other countries, is the creation of micro-states, mini-states, rump states, failed states, and warlords through the actions of secessionist movements and other vehicles. None of these impotent and squabbling petty entities will have any hope of resisting the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the leading multinational corporations. Thatcherite economics has thus prepared a new round of anti-national subversion a quarter-century after she left government.

As we can see in this case of Scottish secessionism, the British establishment habitually uses the British Isles as a kind of show window for the policies which it wants to inflict on the rest of the world, with special regard for the United States. That was also true of Thatcher herself, who was used as a prototype for the Reagan regime in the United States. Thatcher’s mantra of deregulation, privatization, market fetishism, union busting, colonial aggression, and general sociopathic outlook was wholly taken over by the reactionary actor in the White House.

Thatcher’s Key Role in the Decline of the West

For almost half a century after 1933, the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal provided the model for public institutions and policy in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and in much of the world. The New Deal state was highly successful, withstanding challenges from economic depression, fascism and communism, while unlocking the secrets of the atom, and inaugurating the era of manned space travel. But the oligarchical elites of the Western world always resented the New Deal because it placed limits on their boundless greed and lust for arbitrary power and status. As the Soviet challenge receded, these oligarchical elites began using the methods of deregulation and privatization to dismantle the New Deal institutions.

After Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had in 1971 wantonly deregulated the highly successful Bretton Woods economic system set up in 1944, the time was ripe for a demagogic ideologue of oligarchical privilege to emerge. That demagogue was Thatcher. Her career has unquestionably marked the beginning of a new phase of the decline of the West. Whether Thatcher’s sociopathic handiwork can be rolled back and her damage undone is the question which remains to be answered.

Islamic Terrorism Is Not the Answer to Human Problems

By Ozodi Osuji

My Dictionary defines terrorism as acts designed to intimidate people, arouse intense fear of harm and death in them so that out of desire to live and not killed by the terrorist they embrace the public policy choice the terrorist espouses.

Why is terrorism prevalent in human society? It is because human beings live in bodies and bodies are vulnerable; bodies are prone to harm and death. Those who live in body and desire to live and knowing that their bodies could be destroyed are afraid of harm and death; they do things to avoid harm and death.

Terrorists are aware that people want to live and fear harm and death; they deliberately and randomly kill some people and inflict maximum harm on many people and hope to induce optimal fear of harm and death in the rest of the population. Terrorists’ hope that out of fear of what the terrorists could do to them people would embrace the terrorists’ public policy choice.

Terrorists, in effect, want to use fear and intimidation to get people to accept their views on how to organize society. Their philosophy is: do as we ask you to do or else we kill you.

Terrorists use fear to control people. They do not use reason to persuade people into accepting their public police option.

        For example, in the long run, Arab Muslims want to get the entire world to embrace their religion and in the short run they want the West to sacrifice the nation of Israel, give the land to Arabs. Arab Muslim terrorists thus embark on killing Westerners with the hope of generating such fear in them that they would embrace Islam and give Palestine to Arabs.

       Terrorists additionally want to create chaos and anarchy; they want to create breakdown of law and order in society, create so much havoc that nothing works and then hope to ride in and take over society and impose their ideas of what society ought to look like.  In the case of Muslim terrorists, their hope is to transform society to seventh century Arabia (Mohammed’s era).

        Terrorists want to disrupt the economy so that the economic system breaks down as people cower in their hiding places and not go to work.  An example of where this has happened is in Northeastern Nigeria (around Maiduguri). Here, a Muslim terrorist group called Boko Haram (who eschew Western education and want to live in preliterate seventh century Arabia like environment) has brought most economic activity in the region to a standstill; people are afraid to leave their homes or gather in work places lest the terrorists bomb and kill them. The result is that the Muslims who live in that region of Nigeria no longer go to work; their children no longer go to school.  Muslims are the ones suffering in Maiduguri.

       The Southern Christian part of Nigeria is largely untouched by Islamic terrorism and progresses. In effect, Muslims are their own worst enemies; they are setting their people backwards, as the Taliban terrorists set Afghanistan backwards, so back that the people now live in the Stone Age!  Other people build rockets to transport them into space to explore space and Afghanis consider riding donkeys’ progress in transportation!

      Terrorists who kill persons they do not know, children included are maximally evil persons; they are wicked beyond belief.  Individual terrorists generally have anti-social personality disorder and have no sense of guilt or remorse from their criminal activities; they rationalize their criminal acts with the notion of religion; their evil God tells them that it is okay to kill some of his children so as to make the rest of them live in fear of death (the real God wants people to live fear free existence).

        On April 15, 2013 two Chechen Muslims in America set off bombs at the finishing lines of the Boston Marathon. That explosion killed strangers; children included, and hurt almost two hundred persons. The Muslim terrorists wrecked maximum havoc on the people and city of Boston:  for a week the chaos they created literally brought the economy of Boston to standstill; perhaps over a billion dollars was lost businesses.

         Islamic terrorists do this sort of thing all the time; therefore, it is rational to consider Islam a terrorist organization.

       The current canard is that Islam is a religion of peace. Really? When did Islam become a religion of peace? Let us quickly review its history and see the trail of violence that has always characterized Islam.

      Mohammad, the founder of Islam, was born in Mecca (in today’s Saudi Arabia) in 570 AD. He worked as a camel driver for a wealthy couple. When the man died his wife, Khadija, at the age of 54 married 25 year old Mohammed. 

        Mohammad who hitherto was poor is now in money. He had all the time in the world in his hands. He began going into surrounding hills, sitting in a cave to meditate.

       In 610 AD the 40 year old Mohammad claimed that the angel Gabriel was talking to him. Since he was illiterate and could not write down what his voices were telling him he got his friend, Abubaker to write it down. The result of that channeling is the Koran, now Muslims Holy book.

       Essentially, Mohammed took the Christianity that he was familiar with and massaged it a bit and claimed to be the person that Jesus had promised his followers would come and consolidate his teaching (Christians believe that it is the Holy Spirit but Mohammad claims to be the person). Mohammed called himself the seal of the prophets, the last prophet who is here to consolidate what the Abrahamic prophets had always been talking about.

      Mohammed asked people to totally submit to the will of God (Allah) and his prophet, himself. That is, he is to become the unquestioned dictator telling people about God and they had to obey him.

      The people of Mecca did not take him seriously; indeed, he was considered a madman, a hallucinating psychotic, claiming that his voices came from God. This assessment of the man was lent credence by his tendency to have indiscriminate sex with many women including with a ten year old, girl called Aisha.

        People who have sex with ten year old children are pedophiles and insane so people had reason to see Mohammed as insane and went after him and he ran away.

      Mohammed ran from his native Mecca to Medina and while at Medina organized a militia and with it came back to Mecca and fought the people and defeated them and converted them to his Islam with the sword. That is to say that the religion of Islam began in violence and is maintained with violence and continues in violence.

      Upon Mohammed’s death his followers used the sword to sweep through what is now called the Middle East and converted the people to Islam.  Middle Easterners at the time were mostly Christians.

       This point is very crucial for it shows that it was Muslims who initiated war on Christians. Muslims used the sword to convert Christian Syrians, Mesopotamians and Palestinians etc.to Islam.

       In 643 AD Muslims used force to conquer Christian Egypt and converted Christian Egyptians to Islam.  Thereafter, they used force to conquer what is now called Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and converted the people to Islam.

        In 711 AD Muslims swept into Christian Spain and Portugal and used the sword to conquer the people. They then went up north intent on conquering all of Europe and converting the people to Islam.

      The Franks (Germans) under Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer) fought the Muslims and in the famous battle of Poitier in southern France in 733 AD stopped the Muslims from taking over Europe.

       Subsequently, Christians fought with Muslims and finally drove them out of Spain in 1492, the year that Christopher Columbus came to America!

      Indeed, one of the motivations for Columbus seeking a different route to India was because the Muslims had taken over the land route to India and prevented Indians and Chinese trading with Europeans.

        As they were sweeping into Northwestern Europe, Muslims also swept into Asia. They took over Persia (today’s Iran, a former Zoroaster society), India, and got as far as Western China. They swept south and got to as far as Indonesia and converted the people to their religion of war.

       The point here is that Islam began in violence and continues in violence; therefore, I do not know where people get off calling it the religion of peace.

       Muslims are bent on converting the entire world’s population to Islam and if not deterred would use force today to convert all of Europe and the Americas to Islam.

        In Africa Muslims took the Sahel region of West Africa and are currently warring to take over the rain forested religion (in the past mosquitos killed horses in the rain forests and prevented Arabs on horses from sweeping into southern West Africa and converting the people to Islam; to Islam the house of war).

       Muslims are today converting a large chunk of East and Central Africans, even South Africans to their religion of violence.

       In 1453, Turks who had been converted to Islam by the Arabs overran the Balkans and took over Constantinople, the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire and used force to convert the people to Islam; they converted Christian cathedrals like the Sophia to Islamic mosques.

      Naturally, Christians looked with distaste as the Mohammedans ran wild taking over their lands. In the tenth century Pope Urban called for a holy war, crusade, to go get back some of the Christian lands taken over by the Mahomets, especially to take back Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon (all Hitherto Christian nations). 

         The Crusades were fought and for a while Christians retrieved some Christian lands in the Middle East but in the end the Mahomets reconquered the place, so that today the Middle East that used to be the cradle of Christianity is Muslim land.

       Mohammed died in 632 AD. Some of his followers pledged allegiance to his son and others to his friend Abubaker. The two groups became the two major denominations of Islam, Shia (those who accept his son’s leadership) and Sunni (those who accept his friend’s leadership).

      When Muslims are not cutting Christians throats the two warring denominations cut each other’s throats. Islamdom is a house of perpetual war! It fits for that which began in war must live in war!

      For our present purposes, the salient point is that Islam has always been a religion of war, not a religion of peace.

         We should stop deceiving ourselves and call a spade a spade.  Muslims are bent on converting the entire world’s population to Islam and want to do it with force.  Terrorism is the current means that Muslims think that they could use to convert the people to their religion of war.

       In my judgment, Islam is not a religion; it is a political ideology with which Arabs want to convert the entire world to their world view and rule them. Islam asks its followers to pray facing Mecca and to pray in Arabic. This means that they want their followers to accept Mecca as their headquarters and accept Mecca people to rule them; that is, accept Arabs and their culture to dominate them.

      (Christians accept Italian popes to rule Christianity; Rome the capital of Italy is the headquarters of Christianity.)

       Let me reiterate, in my view, Islam is a political ideology on a mission to have Arabs rule the world and the sooner folks understood this fact the better for all of us; let us stop treating Islam with kid gloves, it is not a religion, it is Arabs means for conquering and ruling the world.

       The propaganda that Islam is a religion of peace which naive Westerners are sold is currently allowing Westerners to permit Muslims to come and settle in the West.  As we speak, there are Muslim communities in practically every American and European city. When Muslims become a substantial part of Western societies they would try to convert the rest of the people to their religion.  

      What Islam could not accomplish with force, convert Westerners to Islam, it is now trying to accomplish through seeming peaceful settling in Western societies.

      Muslims would impose the Koran, Hadith and Sharia on Westerners; and, worse, they would force Western women into their harems (so that they satisfy their desire for each man to have seventy two women available to him for sex at all times; Muslims relegate women to living in walled off back yards and prevent them from going out into the world; some of those female sex objects are as young as ten years old...Arabs go to India and literally buy ten year old girls as their sex slaves). 

         Arab Muslims are intent on taking over the world and gullible Westerners are currently making it easier for them to do so by using the idea of freedom of religion protected by their constitutions to allow them to build their Mosques in the West.  Westerners allow the Muslims in their midst to read their Korans but in Saudi Arabia if you are seen with a Bible you would be arrested, flogged and jailed.

        Muslims do not want to have Christians in their lands but come to Christian lands and naïve Islam sympathizers like President Barack Obama (that man seems a closet Muslim?) allow them to build their Mosques where their terrorists had destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City (it takes brazen guts for these monsters to even contemplate building their house of worship to the devil they call their god in a place they had just killed thousands of Americans!). 

       We ought to reevaluate our immigration policy and stop allowing Muslim immigrants into the West. The West is a Christian civilization and should not risk having Muslims come and take it over. It is about time that we gave up the nonsense of multicultural society and affirmed a scientific and loving culture; Christianity trumps all other religions in teaching love for our fellow human beings.

      Since Islam is not a religion but a political ideology, a violent one at that, in my view, Congress ought to legislate that Islam is a political ideology and ban it in America. Until this is done Americans run the risk of being forced into this dreadful religion of violence that calls itself a religion of peace.

       Now, let us return to terrorism.  Terrorists understand that people want to live at all costs and that if you randomly killed some of them that many of them would allow you to tell them what to do.   But is this always true?

      Initially, people feel intimidated by violence but after a while something in them rebel and they decide to fight violence with violence and if needs be die fighting rather than be intimidated by those willing to kill them.

      After September 11, 2001 Americans decided that they were not going to cower to threat and now no longer allow Arab Muslim terrorists to cow them into accepting their public policy (such as abandoning the only democratic and civilized country in the Middle East, Israel). 

       At present most political realists like this writer know that the best thing to-do to terrorists is to kill them. Since terrorists use force on people force should be used on them.

        The only language criminals understand is force so force must be exercised on them; you do not treat criminals with kid gloves; if you do they take you on a ride; if you forgive murderers they would keep on killing people; punishment is what these sub human beings deserve.

        Simply point guns at Muslim terrorists and shoot and kill them. We should not be sentimental with these murderers or allow our Christian idea of forgiving evil doers to dispose us to forgive them. I say just kill them; they are refuse and killing them is pretty much like taking garbage to the garbage dump.   

        You do not fool around with men intent on killing you or converting you to their primitive so-called religion; you fight back and kill them and do not allow yourself to feel guilty or remorseful from killing the camel humpers.  They are a menace to civilization and ought to be gotten rid of from the face of the earth. No other religion at this time is giving humanity as much headache as these murderous savages from Arabia.

      Having said this much about Muslim terrorists, one appreciates some of their legitimate grievances, although one wants to address them through civilized means. I am not naive.

      Europeans control the world’s economy and have exploited non Europeans. I am a black man and know the fate of black folks in the contemporary world.

     Africans were enslaved by Arabs and Europeans; at the moment black folks are discriminated against; they are generally the last hired and first fired from jobs. 

        Some brain dead white Americans occasionally bemuse us with the claptrap that black folks are less intelligent than white folks. Their goal is to use that rubbish to justify enslaving, oppressing and abusing black folks; their objective is to use the utter rubbish of racial difference to persuade black folks to see themselves as an inferior people and see white folks as superior persons hence allow white folks to rule them. That would not work; actually it elicits its opposite: black folk’s perception of white men as barbarians to be civilized (most Africans that I know of see white folks as uncivilized and want to civilize them!).

        I have no illusions about Arabs and white folks. I know that both used terrorism to kill as many people as possible and drove the rest off their lands and took the land over; I know that Arabs and white men used terrorism to enslave black men and had black men work for them for free or else they were killed.  The point is that the both Arabs and white men are not innocent.

       But despite his violence the white man has done one thing that many of us black folks admire: he has discovered the scientific method. With the scientific method we are now able to understand how the physical universe works. I believe that if science is unimpeded by the end of this millennium we would master the physical universe and certainly control most of the diseases that make a mess of human bodies.

        Muslims have not contributed significantly to science and technology. Initially, they borrowed Indians mathematics and Greek rationalism and put those to their advantage but that was a long-ago; they are not part of the modern world of science and technology.

        No Muslim country is developed, industrialized and democratic.  Thus, Muslim lands do not have what black folks’ desire: science, technology and democracy. Therefore, we are not interested in their worldview and domination of the world.

      Despite the white man’s evil past I prefer him to Arab Muslims. This does not mean that I endorse white folk’s evils.

        Clearly, the West must become free from racism. Actually, the West has no choice in the matter for if she does not rid itself of racism she would go the way of the Neanderthal.

      If you recall, Neanderthals evolved in Africa and subsequently moved into Europe. While in Europe, they lived as brutes.

       In the meantime more civilized form of human beings evolved in Africa; those groups moved into Europe about 60,000 years ago. The more civilized African new comers got rid of the Neanderthals and took over Europe.  

     Today, once again, a more evolved Africans are on the move! These Africans are moving into Europe and the Americas.

        If those currently living in Europe and the Americas prefer to live as Neanderthals, brutes, the in-coming Africans would do to them what they did to Neanderthals sixty thousand years ago.

        A more civilized people, and Africans are the most civilized human beings on the face of the earth today, always defeat powerful Neanderthals. Despite Neanderthals bigger clubs unarmed Africans took over Europe; despite today’s Western advanced technology simple but loving Africans will inherit Europe.

       The preferred situation is for Africans to civilize the other races of mankind and bring them to their level of humanity. With Africans loving nature, Western science and technology and Orientals metaphysics we can move the world to a higher level of civilization.

       In sum, Arab Muslim terrorism is not the solution to the problems we face in the extant world.  Islamic terrorists are savages because they rule by instilling fear into people; civilized people understanding that fear holds people down do not manipulate that fear to control them, but, instead, seek ways to help them overcome fear and help them to live fully. In Abraham Maslow’s categories, civilized persons help folks to actualize whatever potential each of them has in him or her.

      We should not hesitate in chopping off Muslim terrorists’ heads, for they want to return us to seventh century Arabia where folks lived in darkness.

      We ought to be living in light; light is metaphor for knowledge of our oneness and our need to love every human being to love our whole self.

Ozodi Osuji

April 22, 2013

ozodiosuji@gmail.com

Reflection on a Putsch… What is France’s Real Role?

French President Francois Hollande

By Avic

Whatever the driving force behind this coup a feeling of déjà vu provokes suspicions. Even if Washington was behind this regime change, France was aware of the entire operation. The spokesperson of an armed group who calls news agencies from Paris is inevitably known by the secret services, and is given the green light to do so.

Since Friday (March 22), AFP (Agence France-Presse) and RFI (Radio France International) have been preparing us for the capture of Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, by the rebels gathered together in the Seleka coalition. On Sunday morning (March 24), the spokesman for the mercenaries announced from Paris via AFP that the Presidential Palace had been taken and President Francois Bozize had fled. This is yet another military intervention in Africa carried out by rebels who are rebels merely in name.

All these interventions have the same characteristics and are played out in the same fashion.

- They come from an area where the subsoil tends to be rich, or where a charismatic leader is ready to assume his long-standing future position.

- They take care to open an office in a European capital for the sake of their media relations and image. They have huge financial resources and arms of unknown origin at their disposal.

- They also have irrefutable reasons for justifying their revolt and raising global awareness of their cause. They also require trainers and training grounds, which they always find. Then there’s nothing left but to launch the operation. From the very beginning, the media start talking about them so as to introduce them to us and to tell us their demands, whilst underlining all the negative aspects of the future victim as neutrally as possible.

Following the first clashes and first deaths, emotions and indignation enter the fray. A solution must be found quickly and it’s up to the UN to find it. The Security Council will issue a resolution to be interpreted as it sees fit, which will require negotiations with the rebels and will decide how intervention forces (regional if possible) will be formed. We already know the result as we’ve seen it many times. We know that negotiations will come to nothing or will be denounced when it’s convenient. We know that one way or another, the goal is elimination of the target, whether physical or not.

This Sunday (March 24), Bozize played out the last act of the scenario. However, he really ought to have waited, given that he’s been through many coups attempts and was even brought to power by one in 2003. Once he became president, he quickly felt that Paris wasn’t going to make his task easy. To have an idea of the complexity of Francois Bozize’s relations with France, we must remember that this man is not new in Central African leadership. He was there during the Bokassa years - he was brigadier general at the time.

In 1982, he fomented a coup against Bokassa's successor President Andre Kolingba, who had been brought in by the French. The coup failed, but he had just committed treason against France. After ten years of exile, he returned to Bangui and gradually became the strong man of government.

In 2001, he was head of the army when another attempt was made to overthrow the government. The coup failed and yet he was suspected of being involved. New exile would lead him to Chad along with a few loyal troops. From there, he would lead several attacks that were unsuccessful because the Central African president has the advantage of French support and an effective guard made up of Libyans.

However, in 2003, in face of the country's chronic instability and the growing unpopularity of Ange Patasse, French support would cease and eventually Bozize seized power with help from Chad and discreet cooperation from France. For ten years, Bozize was thus an ally, but only out of obligation, ruling a country where nobody has ever been able to gain presidential office without a French adviser.

During the Chirac era, the French government did everything to throw a spanner into the works of this inappropriate putschist with a rather coloured past. Added to economic and financial difficulties, France’s ill-will pushed Bozize to find solutions elsewhere. He made use of all his contacts, even indirectly, to find the capital to rebuild the country’s infrastructure which had been totally squandered and abandoned, and to pay its officials and soldiers, sometimes many months late. He also tried to attract the few investors that dared to face the wrath of Paris. His Freemason contacts would play some part, but the needs were enormous.

Towards the end of the Chirac era, everything seemed to go back to normal thanks to the efforts of Omar Bongo. It was again the perfect good student of Franc-Afrique. Meanwhile, the fishing capital that he had initiated in order to save the day began to bear fruit. He would benefit from the new race for mineral riches. The Central African Republic has serious advantages in this area. Her subsoil is highly rich in minerals but this wealth is yet to be properly evaluated, which was of particular interest to China with her large investment capacity.

It was a perfect meeting between Bangui and Beijing. Yet this kind of meeting is sure to result in a spontaneous coup d’état, or popular discontent due to rising food prices, or even an armed rebellion of an oppressed minority. Especially when the subsoil is as rich as it is in the Central African Republic.

First and foremost, there’s the gold and the diamonds. Nobody can say with any certainty what the country's exact potential for diamond extraction is, but we know that quantities are considerable and the quality is recognised. Yet in spite of this, diamond production revenue is far below expectations. Naturally, one of the underlying reasons is widespread corruption on every level.

Then there’s the fact that diamond exploitation stills tends to be a cottage industry. Mechanised diamond production constitutes less than 10 percent of national production, which is well behind the machinery of De Beers in South Africa and Angola. The diamond trade also suffers from the dark aura that surrounds it, as well as smuggling, especially with the Democratic Republic of Congo, as the diamond area stretches over the border between the two countries.

In addition to diamonds, which are one of the country’s main resources, a recent American study has just discovered uranium. In other words, it might as well say goodbye to sovereignty, if it had ever dreamed of such a thing.

As good news tends to come in threes, we can also mention that there is oil, but we already knew that. The oil fields are located in the north of the country, near to the Chadian border. The license was granted to the American company Grynberg RSM. Due to the risks and difficulties, the company threw in the towel and China has taken over, together with a Sudanese company. Research is now led by the Chinese company CNPC in an area which has proven potential for one million barrels, offering hopeful signs that there might be five times as much. Nobody will be surprised that this area is the rebels stronghold.

We could almost say that Bozize was looking for his coup. The mercenaries have apparently succeeded in theirs.

So what is France’s true role? Having no reason to be there would be a first in this country. In such a case, the question arises for the United States. Whatever the driving force behind this coup may be, the feeling of déjà vu provokes suspicions. Even if Washington was behind this regime change, France was aware of the entire operation. The spokesperson of an armed group who calls news agencies from Paris is inevitably known by the secret services, and is given the green light to do so. This explains why the government did not seem worried at all worried for the French nationals in Bangui.

Source:Ocnus.net 2013

India's growth story exaggerated

By Syed Zafar Mehdi

India may boast of many hi-tech super specialty hospitals, but there are not even primary health centers in most parts of the country. The budget allocation for health is among the lowest in the world. A report in Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, said that most Indians shell out 78 per cent of their medical bills themselves. The only country worse off as far as private spending on health is concerned is Pakistan, where the figure is 82.5 per cent. The basic problem is infrastructure and support staff and great majority of the population is still deprived of basic healthcare.

In major policy circles across the world, India is being hailed as a great success story of globalization, a vibrant nation with growing financial and industrial clout, one of the main protagonists of new economy and new international policy, and a viable counter-weight to China's sudden rise.

These ideas may not be entirely unfounded but they certainly obscure the extent to which old problems persist and are being dug deeper. It won’t be exaggeration to state that the palpable buzz about ‘Incredible India’ is based on many a myths that the cheerleaders of India's growth story often overlook or ignore.

It might not please many Indians, but notwithstanding the substantial accomplishments made in various fields, India still has a long way to go before taking the mantle of a ‘superpower’ or even jump into the big league. As noted author and columnist Thomas Friedman once remarked, India is a six lane super highway, but full of potholes, cracked cement, and unfinished sidewalks.

Few years back, London-based independent think-tank Legatum Institute in its report concluded that India's economy is growing rapidly and the country is likely to leapfrog into the league of economic superpowers by 2030. Since then, the global economic recession has led to dramatic developments across the world, posing serious challenges to emerging economies in particular. Though India has managed to stand its ground, but many serious challenges persist on many fronts.

Some 'sponsored' surveys and reports are painting the rosy picture of India, ignoring many realities that lie underneath the surface. As per the Grant Thornton Global Dynamism Index, India is the fifth best country in the world for dynamic growing businesses. The index is a reflection of the feasible environment it offers for expansion of businesses. Further, India's economic confidence reached 68 per cent in August 2012, marking a surge of 8 points from previous months, according to 'Ipsos Economic Pulse of the World' survey. As per a study by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd (Deloitte), India is slated to be the second largest manufacturing country in the next five years, followed by Brazil. On the Ernst & Young's (E&Y) renewable attractiveness index, India is perched at fourth position. On the solar index, India is ranked second and on the wind index, it is ranked third, as per the latest study by E&Y and UBM India Pvt Ltd.

What these surveys tell ypu is that India is a rising power and Goliath and everything about India is hunky-dory. What they don’t tell you is that most of Indian states are mired in world's highest levels of poverty and some human development indicators are among the worst in the developing world. The hype about India as emerging global giant overlooks the simple fact that the growth is not inclusive and superficial to the extent that it is only on the surface and not getting penetrated deep enough to be sustainable and beneficial to all.


In modern India's context, dualism juxtaposes the hi-tech boom areas with the vast tracts of economy that have barely been touched by post-91 economic reforms. In Indian society, small islands of excellence, prosperity and possibilities are surrounded by a sea of mediocrity, deprivation and discontent.

India may be a full-fledged capitalist country, a liberal economy and a rising money power, but there are people who still eat grass, sell their children, hawk their kidneys, and commit suicides out of desperation. For every million new entrants to India's burgeoning middle class, there are tens of millions still trapped in grinding web of rural poverty, barely earning a dollar after a back-breaking labor. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2010 – a report by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), ranks India below countries such as Rwanda and Sudan, putting it in the “alarming levels of hunger” range. While the cheerleaders drumbeat about the overall growth, they don’t seem to care about the poorest of the poor.

Countries like China and Vietnam, like India, have shown sharp growth in GDP rates. But unlike India, they have also succeeded in bringing down the levels of poverty and hunger. The major reasons for that is lack of education, abysmal quality of work, rampant corruption, sloppy implementation of projects and schemes, lack of proactive action in policies and the unchecked population growth. Development models have only created islands of prosperity and oceans of deprivation.

Some 65 per cent of people in India live on agriculture, which accounts for around 18 per cent of GDP. The World Development Report in 2008 stated that one per cent growth in agriculture is twice more effective in reducing poverty than similar growth in the non-agricultural sector. But lately, the focus hs shifted from agriculture to IT and telecom sectors.

Gender inequality and malnutrition are highly correlated, and it is no surprise that Global Gender Gap Report 2010 ranked India 112th out of 134 nations worldwide for gender equality. It reminds me of the arithmetic sum we used to solve in school days. It was about a monkey who climbs two feet and slips down one foot in a minute, so in how many minutes will the monkey take to climb a 25 feet pole. India's growth story looks very similar to this interesting monkey sum.

Leadership, execution and arrogance are some of the nagging problem areas. On leadership, Indians think too small and do not believe in setting big, ambitious goals. The execution and implementation of schemes and plans is pathetic. Arrogance is the most interesting element. For everything, they seem to have an answer. The problems that make this ‘hype’ questionable is the huge population that is yet to fully enjoy the fruits of growth, the challenges of food, energy and ecological security and capability of the institutions to facilitate this leveling of India’s economic landscape.

Education scenario is dismal. In the QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education World University Rankings and Academic Ranking of World Universities, India figures nowhere in the world’s top-100 universities. Besides, according to recent World Bank reports, while more than 95 per cent of children attend primary school, just 40 per cent of Indian adolescents attend secondary school (Grades 9-12). So, with the spotlight on India as the higher education hub, this news must come as a shock.

India may boast of many hi-tech super specialty hospitals, but there are not even primary health centers in most parts of the country. The budget allocation for health is among the lowest in the world. A report in Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, said that most Indians shell out 78 per cent of their medical bills themselves. The only country worse off as far as private spending on health is concerned is Pakistan, where the figure is 82.5 per cent. The basic problem is infrastructure and support staff and great majority of the population is still deprived of basic healthcare.

Corruption is a monster. The government machinery is taking the full advantage of its age-old drawbacks and pulling down the country in a big way. Corruption, sycophancy and nepotism are so deep rooted that honest research, innovations and their application is not possible. On one hand, they spend Rs. 70,000 crores on the CommonWealth Games to let the world know that the country has arrived on the big stage; on the other hand, they struggle to provide basic amenities to people living in remotest of villages, the Bharat that India lives in. It is difficult to hide the disparity between real and imagined India. The dichotomy is too ugly, but real. And, I did not even mention the civil liberties and human rights scenario, the tyranny against tribal people in the name of development and dams, discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities and the fierce battle on the ground. That is an entirely different debate for some other day.