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| Seventeen African countries gained their independence in 1960, but by 1968 there had been 64 coups or coup attempts [GALLO/GETTY] |
Fifty years ago 17 African states celebrated their independence from Britain, France and Belgium. There were high hopes that resource-rich Africa would flourish. A cartoon at that time depicted the map of Africa as a growing giant bursting out of his chains. In Nigeria the main newspaper, The Daily Times, had one word on its front page on October 1, 1960: “Freedom.” That expressed the wave of optimism that had surged across Africa.
The Daily Times’ editorial that day read: “Two great assets we have inherited from the British – parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. We shall firmly uphold these principles. And we shall do more. We shall jealously guard the sanctity of our constitution and our fundamental human rights.”
Cold War lenses
But by 1968 there had been 64 coups or coup attempts in Africa. Within two decades only two parliamentary democracies survived; Gambia and Botswana. Only Botswana out of the continent’s 53 countries has remained a well-governed democracy for 50 years. The rest became a mix of one party states and dictatorships, many of them military ones.
September 1, 2010 by John Myers
“The world must prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. I will take no options off the table in dealing with this potential Iranian threat.“ –Barack Obama.
What better way to prove he is not a Muslim than for President Barack Obama to strike at the heart of the Middle East? And what better way to reflate the economy, unite the nation and secure America’s future energy needs? It’s a grand slam and the White House knows it.
Then again, Iran is making it easy for Obama to get his war. Tehran’s leaders appear to have graduated from the Adolf Hitler School of Diplomacy. The day after announcing the start-up of Iran’s Russian-built Bushehr nuclear power plant President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pulled a cover away from an aircraft called the Karrar and announced it was Iran’s first long-range drone. Not so subtly the Iranians have coined it, “The Ambassador of Death”.
Furthermore says Ahmadinejad, “Enemies know well that Iran is an invincible fortress and I do not believe the U.S. masters of the Zionists will allow the regime to take any measures against Iran.”
Not so quick President Mahmoud. The last leader that questioned an American President’s will for war was the leader of your next door neighbor. That president, named Saddam, saw not one but two wars with the United States; one initiated by the father, the other by the son.
America’s infrastructure is falling down and failing, especially in the energy department. Between Environmental groups, opposed [obsessed] to everything but clean energy [which just isn't viable now], and the BP incident [how convenient] we better decide on either Nuclear or Oil/Coal/Natural Gas [FROM HOME] to fuel industry and keep this country moving…We are already considered a second rate country… The division of our citizens [which has so successfully succeeded in freezing us] and the CCE [Corrupt Corporate Elitists #judeword] has successfully divided this country, and are taxing us to/till and after death. They tumbled the entire financial, housing,and now health sectors [to their benefit], and stand to make even more money as we just sit and watch. ~Congratulations~We better *get it* soon or this nation as we know it will be doomed forever…It has been shown that empires don’t last long so we need to turn inward and repair ourselves, gain back our Constitutional “Rights”, and start rebuilding. I’m hoping that there are still enough Americans out there who can and will work…A socialistic society has been proven to be an enabler…I have watched this happen around me with my own eyes…How is it we have an immigration problem?…They come here for work and a better life…A life we shall all see soon to become nonexistent for the “working class of America”…We have just watched the greatest transfer of wealth this nation has ever seen. We stood by and not only watched it but enabled and are still enabling it to happen…
~jude
Valery Bushukhin / Itar-Tass
Workers in white uniforms carrying out maintenance work in the Beloyarsk nuclear power plant in the Sverdlovsk region.
Editor’s note: This is the fifth and last in a series of articles about President Medvedev’s efforts to modernize the economy.
The idea to build more efficient and environmentally friendly nuclear reactors, which Rudolf Baklushin helped test in the Soviet Union decades ago, has had its ups and downs.
As deputy chief engineer, he oversaw the construction and — in 1973 — the opening of the first Soviet fast breeder reactor, which produces more fuel than it burns and yields less dangerous waste.
“I volunteered because it promised new, interesting work and new prospects for the industry,” said Baklushin, who is now a nuclear scientist at an institute near Moscow.
But costs of building such reactors were high, and when geologists discovered new, extensive deposits of uranium, the development of the technology was no longer considered a priority.
But despite being at least half a century old, the idea has assumed a fresh urgency recently since President Dmitry Medvedev made it part of his modernization agenda.
Should further tests of the technology succeed, Russia will by 2020 start to commercially produce the reactors — capitalizing on an impressive worldwide lead in the research.
“I would say Russia is certainly the leader in fast reactor technology,” said Michael Driscoll, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Second, I would say, is France.”
Some of the 26 reactors that Rosatom, the state nuclear corporation, plans to build before 2030 will use the new technology, corporation spokesman Sergei Novikov said. According to the corporation’s outlook, it will completely phase out the current, third-generation equipment by the start of next century.
Medvedev’s prioritization of the technology last year assured the project a guarantee of receiving sufficient federal spending amid Russia’s uneasy recovery from the global economic crisis. The government has allocated 110.4 billion rubles ($3.6 billion) for research in this and other nuclear energy areas until 2020 under the New Generation Nuclear Technologies program adopted in February.
By Paul Craig Roberts
I write about major problems: the collapsing US economy, wars based on lies and deception, the police state based on “the war on terror” and other fabrications such as those orchestrated by corrupt police and prosecutors, who boost their performance reports by convicting the innocent, and so on. America is a very distressing place. The fact that so many Americans are taken in by the lies told by “their” government makes America all the more depressing.
Often, however, it is small annoyances that waste Americans’ time and drive up blood pressures. One of the worst things that ever happened to Americans was the breakup of the AT&T telephone monopoly. As Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in 1981, if 150 percent of my time and energy had not been required to cure stagflation in the face of opposition from Wall Street and Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, I might have been able to prevent the destruction of the best communications service in the world, and one that was very inexpensive to customers.
The rest of the story… hopefully you already read this …~jude
Since BP announced that CEO Tony Hayward would receive a multi-million dollar golden parachute and be replaced by Bob Dudley, we have witnessed an incredibly broad, and powerful, propaganda campaign. A campaign that peaked this week with the US government, clearly acting in BP’s best interests, itself announcing, via outlets willing to allow themselves to be used to transfer the propaganda, like the New York Times, this message: “The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated — and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm.”
The Times was accommodating enough to lead the story with a nice photo of a fishing boat motoring across clean water with several birds in the foreground.
This message was disseminated far and wide, via other mainstream media outlets like the AP and Reuters, effectively announcing to the masses that despite the Gulf of Mexico suffering the largest marine oil disaster in US history, most of the oil was simply “gone.”
Thus, it’s only what is on the surface that counts. If you can’t see it, there is not a problem.
This kind of government cover-up is nothing new, of course.
“The War is Worth Waging”: Afghanistan’s Vast Reserves of Minerals and Natural Gas
The War on Afghanistan is a Profit driven “Resource War”.
By Michel Chossudovsky
The 2001 bombing and invasion of Afghanistan has been presented to World public opinion as a “Just War”, a war directed against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, a war to eliminate “Islamic terrorism” and instate Western style democracy.
The economic dimensions of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) are rarely mentioned. The post 9/11 “counter-terrorism campaign” has served to obfuscate the real objectives of the US-NATO war.
The war on Afghanistan is part of a profit driven agenda: a war of economic conquest and plunder, ”a resource war”.
While Afghanistan is acknowledged as a strategic hub in Central Asia, bordering on the former Soviet Union, China and Iran, at the crossroads of pipeline routes and major oil and gas reserves, its huge mineral wealth as well as its untapped natural gas reserves have remained, until June 2010, totally unknown to the American public.
According to a joint report by the Pentagon, the US Geological Survey (USGS) and USAID, Afghanistan is now said to possess “previously unknown” and untapped mineral reserves, estimated authoritatively to be of the order of one trillion dollars (New York Times, U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan – NYTimes.com, June 14, 2010, See also BBC, 14 June 2010).
No Time to Waste…Read Now: The World Order {link to entire piece}
Blip:
Society was now replaced by a mere facade of society. Only one crime university course has ever been allowed to mention the societal impact of parasitism ! It is the greatest and most universal taboo in the world today. Michael Voslensky’s “NOMENKLATURA, The Soviet Elite”identifies the Communist “new class” as a parasitic group. In reviewing this work in FORTUNE Oct 15, 1984, Daniel Seligman notes, “Voslensky’s portrait leaves us thinking that the Nomenklatura is an entirely parasitic operation. Its interests are clearly not those of most Soviet citizens.” The same observation can be made of the World Order’s ruling group in any nation today, and particularly in the United States.
By SREERAM CHAULIA
SONIPAT, India, May 14 (UPI) — The revival of the long-dormant Policy Planning Division of India’s Ministry of External Affairs in September through the initiative of Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor is a positive step for a country that wants to climb up the rungs of global status and power.
Policy planning bureaus have played a vital role in foreign ministries of great powers by providing broad direction, outlook and blueprints that percolate through the veins and arteries of the system.
The famous Cold War doctrine of containment, for instance, was the brainchild of George Kennan, the first director of Policy Planning in the U.S. State Department. His “X” article in the journal Foreign Affairs (July 1947) recorded his acute observations on the wellsprings of Soviet conduct and laid out the parameters of a global response to the Soviet Union’s “expansive tendencies.”
Posted: 21 Apr 2010 05:11 AM
BY: Michael Panzaer
I’m not sure whether it is a coincidence, an orchestrated campaign, or a meme that is gaining traction, but three sobering commentaries on America‘s diminishing fortunes have popped up over the past few days:
“Bankrupt Empire“ (Doug Bandow, National Interest)
The United States government is effectively bankrupt. Washington no longer can afford to micromanage the world. International social engineering is a dubious venture under the best of circumstances. It is folly to attempt while drowning in red ink.
Traditional military threats against America have largely disappeared. There’s no more Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, Maoist China is distant history and Washington is allied with virtually every industrialized state. As Colin Powell famously put it while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: “I’m running out of enemies. . . . I’m down to Kim Il-Sung and Castro.” However, the United States continues to act as the globe’s 911 number.
Unfortunately, a hyperactive foreign policy requires a big military. America accounts for roughly half of global military outlays. In real terms Washington spends more on “defense” today than it during the Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War.
U.S. military expenditures are extraordinary by any measure. My Cato Institute colleagues Chris Preble and Charles Zakaib recently compared American and European military outlays. U.S. expenditures have been trending upward and now approach five percent of GDP. In contrast, European outlays have consistently fallen as a percentage of GDP, to an average of less than two percent.
The difference is even starker when comparing per capita GDP military expenditures. The U.S. is around $2,200. Most European states fall well below $1,000. Adding in non-Pentagon defense spending—Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Department of Energy (nuclear weapons)—yields American military outlays of $835.1 billion in 2008, which represented 5.9 percent of GDP and $2,700 per capita.
Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations worries that the increased financial obligations (forget unrealistic estimates about cutting the deficit) resulting from health-care legislation will preclude maintaining such oversize expenditures in the future, thereby threatening America’s “global standing.” He asks: Who will “police the sea lanes, stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combat terrorism, respond to genocide and other unconscionable human rights violations, and deter rogue states from aggression?”
Of course, nobody is threatening to close the sea lanes these days. Washington has found it hard to stop nuclear proliferation without initiating war, yet promiscuous U.S. military intervention creates a powerful incentive for nations to seek nuclear weapons. Armored divisions and carrier groups aren’t useful in confronting terrorists. Iraq demonstrates how the brutality of war often is more inhumane than the depredations of dictators. And there are lots of other nations capable of deterring rogue states.
The United States should not attempt to do everything even if it could afford to do so. But it can’t. When it comes to the federal Treasury, there’s nothing there. If Uncle Sam was a real person, he would declare bankruptcy.
