The West and Others~~Western Civilization, Global Continuity & The 'Third' World~~
Photo; the Turf... a little bit of Heaven, Abraka, Delta State, Nigeria
"A part of the fortune of the Queen of England comes from drug trafficking."~~Jacques Cheminade, candidate for the 2012 French presidential election
Britain’s financial regulator has fined the British queen’s bank for money laundering failures as a French presidential candidate has said part of the queen’s fortune “comes from drug trafficking.”
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has fined the British queen’s bank, Coutts Bank, 8.75 million pounds for failing to carry out correct checks on “politically exposed persons” and prevent money laundering.
“The failings at Coutts were serious, systemic and were allowed to persist for almost three years. They resulted in an unacceptable risk of Coutts handling the proceeds of crime,” the FSA said in a statement posted on its official website.
On 21 March, Jacques Cheminade, an independent presidential candidate running in the French election, said, “a part of the fortune of the Queen of England comes from drug trafficking.”
“No, not any property, there are several other sources. But it is a series of trafficking in which, yes, there is trafficking drugs,” Cheminade said on television LCP French National Assembly.
Known as the British queen’s banker, Coutts was criticised for “significant, widespread and unacceptable” failures, as described by Tracey McDermott, acting director of enforcement and financial crime.
“The size of the financial penalty demonstrates how seriously we view its failures,” McDermott said.
This Reflection could be written today, tomorrow or any other day without the risk of being mistaken. Our species faces new problems. When 20 years ago I stated at the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro that a species was in danger of extinction, I had fewer reasons than today for warning about a danger that I was seeing perhaps 100 years away. At that time, a handful of leaders of the most powerful countries were in charge of the world. They applauded my words as a matter of mere courtesy and placidly continued to dig for the burial of our species. It seemed that on our planet, common sense and order reigned. For a while economic development, backed by technology and science appeared to be the Alpha and Omega of human society.
Today, everything is much clearer. Profound truths have been surfacing. Almost 200 States, supposedly independent, constitute the political organization which in theory has the job of governing the destiny of the world.
Approximately 25,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of allied or enemy forces ready to defend the changing order, by interest or necessity, virtually reduce to zero the rights of billions of people.
I shall not commit the naiveté of assigning the blame to Russia or China for the development of that kind of weaponry, after the monstrous massacre at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ordered by Truman after Roosevelt’s death.
Nor shall I fall prey to the error of denying the Holocaust that signified the deaths of millions of children and adults, men or women, mainly Jews, gypsies, Russians or other nationalities, who were victims of Nazism. For that reason the odious policy of those who deny the Palestinian people their right to exist is repugnant.
Does anyone by chance think that the United States will be capable of acting with the independence that will keep it from the inevitable disaster awaiting it?
In a few weeks, the 40 million dollars President Obama promised to collect for his electoral campaign will only serve to show that the currency of his country is greatly devalued, and that the US, with its unusual growing public debt drawing close to 20 quadrillion, is living on the money it prints up and not on the money it produces. The rest of the world pays for what they waste.
Nor does anyone believe that the Democratic candidate would be any better or worse than his Republican foes: whether they are called Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum. Light years separate the three characters as important as Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King. It is really unheard-of to observe such a technologically powerful nation and a government so bereft of both ideas and moral values.
Iran has no nuclear weapons. It is being accused of producing enriched uranium that serves as fuel energy or components for medical uses. Whatever one can say, its possession or production is not equivalent to the production of nuclear weapons. Dozens of countries use enriched uranium as an energy source, but this cannot be used in the manufacture of a nuclear weapon without a prior complicated purification process.
However, Israel, with the aid and cooperation of the United States, manufactured nuclear weaponry without informing or accounting to anybody, today not admitting their possession of these weapons, they have hundreds of them. To prevent the development of research in neighboring Arab countries, they attacked and destroyed reactors in Iraq and Syria. They have also declared their aim of attacking and destroying the production centers for nuclear fuel in Iran.
International politics have been revolving around that crucial topic in that complex and dangerous part of the world, where most of the fuel that moves the world economy is produced and supplied.
The selective elimination of Iran’s most eminent scientists by Israel and their NATO allies has become a practice that motivates hatred and feelings of revenge.
The Israeli government has openly stated its objective to attack the plant manufacturing Iran’s enriched uranium, and the government of the United States has invested billions of dollars to manufacture a bomb for that purpose.
On March 16, 2012, Michel Chossudovsky and Finian Cunningham published an article revealing that “A top US Air Force General has described the largest conventional bomb – the re-invented bunkers of 13.6 tones – as “fantastic” for a military attack on Iran.
Mother Of All Bombs
“Such an eloquent comment on the massive killer-artifact took place in the same week that President Barack Obama appeared to warn against “easy words” on the Persian Gulf War.” Herbert Carlisle, deputy chief of staff for US Air Force operations added that probably the bomb would be used in any attack on Iran ordered by Washington.
“The MOP, also referred to as ‘The Mother of All Bombs’, is designed to drill through 60 meters of concrete before it detonates its massive bomb. It is believed to be the largest conventional weapon, non-nuclear, in the US arsenal.”
“The Pentagon is planning a process of wide destruction of Iran’s infrastructure and massive civilian victims through the combined use of tactical nuclear bombs and monstrous conventional bombs with mushroom-shaped clouds, including the MOABs and the larger GBU-57A/B or Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) that exceeds the MOAB in destructive capacity.
“The MOP is described as “a powerful new bomb that aims straight at subterranean Iranian and North Korean nuclear facilities. The giant bomb -longer than 11 persons shoulder to shoulder, or more than 6 meters from end to end’.”
I ask the reader to excuse me for this complicated military jargon.
As one can see, such calculations arise from the supposition that the Iranian combatants, numbering millions of men and women well-known for their religious zeal and their fighting traditions, surrender without firing a shot.
In recent days, the Iranians have seen how US soldiers occupying Afghanistan, in just three weeks, urinated on the corpses of killed Afghans, burned copies of the Koran and murdered more than 15 defenseless citizens.
Let us imagine US forces launching monstrous bombs on industrial institutions, capable of penetrating through 60 meters of concrete. Never has such an undertaking ever been conceived.
Not one word more is needed to understand the gravity of such a policy. In that way, our species will be inexorably led towards disaster. If we do not learn how to understand, we shall never learn how to survive.
As for me, I harbor not the slightest doubt that the United States is about to commit and lead the world towards the greatest mistake in its history.
“Depopulation should be the highest priority of US foreign policy towards the Third World”~~Henry Kissinger
Since the time of the British Empire and the manifesto of Cecil Rhodes, the pursuit of treasures on the hopeless continent has demonstrated the expendability of human life. Despite decades of apathy among the primary resource consumers, the increasing reach of social media propaganda has ignited public interest in Africa’s long overlooked social issues. In the wake of celebrity endorsed pro-intervention publicity stunts, public opinion in the United States is now being mobilized in favor of a greater military presence on the African continent. Following the deployment of one hundred US military personnel to Uganda in 2011, a new bill has been introduced to the Congress calling for the further expansion of regional military forces in pursuit of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), an ailing rebel group allegedly responsible for recruiting child soldiers and conducting crimes against humanity.
As the Obama administration claims to welcome the peaceful rise of China on the world stage, recent policy shifts toward an American Pacific Century indicate a desire to maintain the capacity to project military force toward the emerging superpower. In addition to maintaining a permanent military presence in Northern Australia, the construction of an expansive military base on South Korea’s Jeju Island has indicated growing antagonism towards Beijing. The base maintains the capacity to host up to twenty American and South Korean warships, including submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers once completed in 2014 – in addition to the presence of Aegis anti-ballistic systems. In response, Chinese leadership has referred to the increasing militarization in the region as an open provocation.
On the economic front, China has been excluded from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a trade agreement intended to administer US-designed international trading regulations throughout Asia, to the benefit of American corporations. As further fundamental policy divisions emerge subsequent to China and Russia’s UNSC veto mandating intervention in Syria, the Obama administration has begun utilizing alternative measures to exert new economic pressure towards Beijing. The United States, along with the EU and Japan have called on the World Trade Organization to block Chinese-funded mining projects in the US, in addition to a freeze on World Bank financing for China’s extensive mining projects.
In a move to counteract Chinese economic ascendancy, Washington is crusading against China’s export restrictions on minerals that are crucial components in the production of consumer electronics such as flat-screen televisions, smart phones, laptop batteries, and a host of other products. In a 2010 white paper entitled “Critical Raw Materials for the EU,” the European Commission cites the immediate need for reserve supplies of tantalum, cobalt, niobium, and tungsten among others; the US Department of Energy 2010 white paper “Critical Mineral Strategy” also acknowledged the strategic importance of these key components. Coincidently, the US military is now attempting to increase its presence in what is widely considered the world’s most resource rich nation, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The DRC has suffered immensely during its history of foreign plunder and colonial occupation; it maintains the second lowest GDP per capita despite having an estimated $24 trillion in untapped raw minerals deposits. During the Congo Wars of the 1996 to 2003, the United States provided training and arms to Rwandan and Ugandan militias who later invaded the eastern provinces of the DRC in proxy. In addition to benefiting various multinational corporations, the regimes of Paul Kagame in Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda both profited immensely from the plunder of Congolese conflict minerals such as cassiterite, wolframite, coltan (from which niobium and tantalum are derived) and gold. The DRC holds more than 30% of the world’s diamond reserves and 80% of the world’s coltan, the majority of which is exported to China for processing into electronic-grade tantalum powder and wiring.
China’s unprecedented economic transformation has relied not only on consumer markets in the United States, Australia and the EU – but also on Africa, as a source for a vast array of raw materials. As Chinese economic and cultural influence in Africa expands exponentially with the symbolic construction of the new $200 million African Union headquarters funded solely by Beijing, the ailing United States and its leadership have expressed dissatisfaction toward its diminishing role in the region. During a diplomatic tour of Africa in 2011, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton herself has irresponsibly insinuated China’s guilt in perpetuating a creeping “new colonialism.”
At a time when China holds an estimated $1.5 trillion in American government debt, Clinton’s comments remain dangerously provocative. As China, backed by the world’s largest foreign currency reserves, begins to offer loans to its BRICS counterparts in RMB, the prospect of emerging nations resisting the New American Century appear to be increasingly assured. While the success of Anglo-American imperialism relies on its capacity to militarily drive target nations into submission, today’s African leaders are not obliged to do business with China – although doing so may be to their benefit. China annually invests an estimated $5.5 billion in Africa, with only 29 percent of direct investment in the mining sector in 2009 – while more than half was directed toward domestic manufacturing, finance, and construction industries, which largely benefit Africans themselves – despite reports of worker mistreatment.
China has further committed $10 billion in concessional loans to Africa between 2009 and 2012 and made significant investments in manufacturing zones in non-resource-rich economies such as Zambia and Tanzania. As Africa’s largest trading partner, China imports 1.5 million barrels of oil from Africa per day, approximately accounting for 30 percent of its total imports. Over the past decade, 750,000 Chinese nationals have settled in Africa, while Chinese state-funded cultural centers in rural parts of the continent conduct language classes in Mandarin and Cantonese. As China is predicted to formally emerge as the world’s largest economy in 2016, the recent materialization of plans for a BRICS Bank have the potential to restructure the global financial climate and directly challenge the hegemonic conduct of the International Monetary Fund in Africa’s strategic emerging economies.
China’s deepening economic engagement in Africa and its crucial role in developing the mineral sector, telecommunications industry and much needed infrastructural projects is creating “deep nervousness” in the West, according to David Shinn, the former US ambassador to Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. In a 2011 Department of Defense whitepaper entitled “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China”, the US acknowledges the maturity of China’s modern hardware and military technology, and the likelihood of Beijing finding hostility with further military alliances between the United States and Taiwan. The document further indicates that “China’s rise as a major international actor is likely to stand out as a defining feature of the strategic landscape of the early 21st century.” Furthermore, the Department of Defense concedes to the uncertainty of how China’s growing capabilities will be administered on the world stage.
Although a US military presence in Africa (under the guise of fighting terrorism and protecting human rights) specifically to counter Chinese regional economic authority may not incite tension in the same way that a US presence in North Korea or Taiwan would, the potential for brinksmanship exists and will persist. China maintains the largest standing army in the world with 2,285,000 personnel and is working to challenge the regional military hegemony of America’s Pacific Century with its expanding naval and conventional capabilities, including an effort to develop the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missile. Furthermore, China has moved to begin testing advanced anti-satellite (ASAT) and Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) weapons systems in an effort to bring the US-China rivalry into Space warfare.
The concept of US intervention into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Central African Republic and Uganda under the pretext of disarming the Lord’s Resistance Army is an ultimately fraudulent purpose. The LRA has been in operation for over two decades, and presently remains at an extremely weakened state, with approximately 400 soldiers. According the LRA Crisis Tracker, a digital crisis mapping software launched by the Invisible Children group, not a single case of LRA activity has been reported in Uganda since 2006. The vast majority of reported attacks are presently taking place in the northeastern Bangadi region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, located on the foot of a tri-border expanse between the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
The existence of the Lord’s Resistance Army should rightfully be disputed, as the cases of LRA activity reported by US State Department-supported Invisible Children rely on unconfirmed reports – cases where LRA activity is presumed and suspected. Given the extreme instability in the northern DRC after decades of foreign invasion and countless rebel insurgencies, the lack of adequate investigative infrastructure needed to sufficiently examine and confirm the LRA’s presence is simply not in place. The villainous branding of Joseph Kony may well be deserved, however it cannot be overstated that the LRA threat is wholly misrepresented in recent pro-intervention US legislation. An increasing US presence in the region exists only to curtail the increasing economic presence of China in one of the world’s most resource and mineral rich regions.
The Lord’s Resistance Army was originally formed in 1987 in northwestern Uganda by members of the Acholi ethnic group, who were historically exploited for forced labor by the British colonialists and later marginalized by the nation’s dominant Bantu ethic groups following independence. The Lord’s Resistance Army originally aimed to overthrow the government of current Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni – due to a campaign of genocide waged against the Acholi people. The northern Ugandan Acholi and Langi ethnic groups have been historically targeted and ostracized by successive Anglo-American backed administrations. In 1971, Israeli and British intelligence agencies engineered a coup against Uganda’s socialist President Milton Obote, which gave rise to the disastrous regime of Idi Amin.
Prior to declaring himself head of state after deposing Obote, Amin was a member of the British colonial regiment, charged with managing concentration camps in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion beginning in 1952. Amin conducted genocide against the Acholi people on the suspicion of loyalty toward the former Obote leadership, who later reclaimed power in 1979 after Amin attempted to annex the neighboring Kagera province of Tanzania. Museveni founded the Front for National Salvation, which helped topple Obote with US support in 1986, despite the fact that his army exploited the use of child soldiers. Museveni formally took power and was subsequently accused of genocide for driving the Acholi people into detainment camps in an attempt to usurp fertile land in northern Uganda.
The Museveni regime has displaced approximately 1.5 million Acholi and killed at least three hundred thousand people when taking power in 1986 according to the Red Cross. In addition to accusations of using rape as weapon and overseeing the deaths of thousands in squalid detainment camps, Museveni has been accused of exerting a campaign of state-sponsored terror onto the Acholi people in a 1992 Amnesty International report. During an interview with Joseph Kony in 2006, the LRA commander denies allegations of mutilation and torture and further accuses Museveni’s forces of committing such actions as propaganda against the Lord’s Resistance Army.
In a detailed report of Museveni’s atrocities, Ugandan writer Herrn Edward Mulindwa offers, “During the 22-year war, Museveni’s army killed, maimed and mutilated thousands of civilians, while blaming it on rebels. In northern Uganda, instead of defending and protecting civilians against rebel attacks, Museveni’s army would masquerade as rebels and commit gross atrocities, including maiming and mutilation, only to return and pretend to be saviors of the affected people.” Despite such compelling evidence of brutality, Museveni has been a staunch US ally since the Reagan administration and received $45 million dollars in military aid from the Obama administration for Ugandan participation in the fight against Somalia’s al Shabaab militia. Since the abhorrent failure of the 1993 US intervention in Somalia, the US has relied on the militaries of Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia to carry out US interests in proxy.
Since colonial times, the West has historically exploited ethnic differences in Africa for political gain. In Rwanda, the Belgian colonial administration exacerbated tension between the Hutu, who were subjugated as a workforce – and the Tutsi, seen as extenders of Belgian rule. From the start of the Rwandan civil war in 1990, the US sought to overthrow the 20-year reign of Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana by installing a Tutsi proxy government in Rwanda, a region historically under the influence of France and Belgium. At that time prior to the outbreak of the Rwandan civil war, the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) led by current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, was part of Museveni’s United People’s Defense Forces (UPDF).
Ugandan forces invaded Rwanda in 1990 under the pretext of Tutsi liberation, despite the fact that Museveni refused to grant citizenship to Tutsi-Rwandan refugees living in Uganda at the time, a move that further offset the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Kagame himself was trained at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College (CGSC) in Leavenworth, Kansas prior to returning to the region to oversee the 1990 invasion of Rwanda as commander of the RPA, which received supplies from US-funded UPDF military bases inside Uganda. The invasion of Rwanda had the full support of the US and Britain, who provided training by US Special Forces in collaboration with US mercenary outfit, Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI).
A report issued in 2000 by Canadian Professor Michel Chossudovsky and Belgian economist Pierre Galand concluded that western financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank financed both sides of the Rwandan civil war, through a process of financing military expenditure from the external debt of both the regimes of Habyarimana and Museveni. In Uganda, the World Bank imposed austerity measures solely on civilian expenditures while overseeing the diversion of State revenue go toward funding the UPDF, on behalf of Washington. In Rwanda, the influx of development loans from the World Bank’s affiliates such as the International Development Association (IDA), the African Development Fund (AFD), and the European Development Fund (EDF) were diverted into funding the Hutu extremist Interhamwe militia, the main protagonists of the Rwandan genocide.
Perhaps most disturbingly, the World Bank oversaw huge arms purchases that were recorded as bona fide government expenditures, a stark violation of agreements signed between the Rwandan government and donor institutions. Under the watch of the World Bank, the Habyarimana regime imported approximately one million machetes through various Interhamwe linked organizations, under the pretext of importing civilian commodities. To ensure their reimbursement, a multilateral trust fund of $55.2 million dollars was designated toward postwar reconstruction efforts, although the money was not allocated to Rwanda – but to the World Bank, to service the debts used to finance the massacres.
Furthermore, Paul Kagame was pressured by Washington upon coming to power to recognize the legitimacy of the debt incurred by the previous genocidal Habyarimana regime. The swap of old loans for new debts (under the banner of post-war reconstruction) was conditional upon the acceptance of a new wave of IMF-World Bank reforms, which similarly diverted outside funds into military expenditure prior to the Kagame-led invasion of the Congo, then referred to as Zaire. As present day Washington legislators attempt to increase US military presence in the DRC under the pretext of humanitarian concern, the highly documented conduct of lawless western intelligence agencies and defense contractors in the Congo since its independence sheds further light on the exploitative nature of western intervention.
In 1961, the Congo’s first legally elected Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with support from Belgian intelligence and the CIA, paving the way for the thirty-two year reign of Mobutu Sese Seko. As part of an attempt to purge the Congo of all colonial cultural influence, Mobutu renamed the country Zaire and led an authoritarian regime closely allied to France, Belgium and the US. Mobutu was regarded as a staunch US ally during the Cold War due to his strong stance against communism; the regime received billions in international aid, most from the United States. His administration allowed national infrastructure to deteriorate while the Zairian kleptocracy embezzled international aid and loans; Mobutu himself reportedly held $4 billion USD in a personal Swiss bank account.
Relations between the US and Zaire thawed at the end of the Cold War, when Mobutu was no longer needed as an ally; Washington would later use Rwandan and Ugandan troops to invade the Congo to topple Mobutu and install a new proxy regime. Following the conflict in Rwanda, 1.2 million Hutu civilians (many of whom who took part in the genocide) crossed into the Kivu province of eastern Zaire fearing prosecution from Paul Kagame’s Tutsi RPA. US Special Forces trained Rwandan and Ugandan troops at Fort Bragg in the United States and supported Congolese rebels under future President, Laurent Kabila. Under the pretext of safeguarding Rwandan national security against the threat of displaced Hutu militias, troops from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi invaded the Congo and ripped through Hutu refugee camps, slaughtering thousands of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu civilians, many of who were women and children.
Reports of brutality and mass killing in the Congo were rarely addressed in the West, as the International Community was sympathetic to Kagame and the Rwandan Tutsi victims of genocide. Both Halliburton and Bechtel (military contractors that profited immensely from the Iraq war) were involved in military training and reconnaissance operations in an attempt to overthrow Mobutu and bring Kabila to power. After deposing Mobutu and seizing control in Kinshasa, Laurent Kabila was quickly regarded as an equally despotic leader after eradicating all opposition to his rule; he turned away from his Rwandan backers and called on Congolese civilians to violently purge the nation of Rwandans, prompting Rwandan forces to regroup in Goma, in an attempt to capture resource rich territory in eastern Congo.
Prior to becoming President in 1997, Kabila sent representatives to Toronto to discuss mining opportunities with American Mineral Fields (AMF) and Canada’s Barrick Gold Corporation; AMF had direct ties to US President Bill Clinton and was given exclusive exploration rights to zinc, copper, and cobalt mines in the area. The Congolese Wars perpetrated by Rwanda and Uganda killed at least six million people, making it the largest case of genocide since the Jewish holocaust. The successful perpetration of the conflict relied on western military and financial support, and was fought primarily to usurp the extensive mining resources of eastern and southern Congo; the US defense industry relies on high quality metallic alloys indigenous to the region, used primarily in the construction of high-performance jet engines.
In 1980, Pentagon documents acknowledged shortages of cobalt, titanium, chromium, tantalum, beryllium, and nickel; US participation in the Congolese conflict was largely an effort to obtain these needed resources. The sole piece of legislation authored by President Obama during his time as a Senator was S.B. 2125, the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006. In the legislation, Obama acknowledges the Congo as a long-term interest to the United States and further alludes to the threat of Hutu militias as an apparent pretext for continued interference in the region; Section 201(6) of the bill specifically calls for the protection of natural resources in the eastern DRC.
The Congressional Budget Office’s 1982 report “Cobalt: Policy Options for a Strategic Mineral” notes that cobalt alloys are critical to the aerospace and weapons industries and that 64% of the world’s cobalt reserves lay in the Katanga Copper Belt, running from southeastern Congo into northern Zambia. For this reason, the future perpetration of the military industrial complex largely depends on the control of strategic resources in the eastern DRC. In 2001, Laurent Kabila was assassinated by a member of his security staff, paving the way for his son Joseph Kabila to dynastically usurp the presidency. The younger Kabila derives his legitimacy solely from the support of foreign heads of state and the international business community, due to his ability to comply with foreign plunder.
During the Congo’s general elections in November 2011, the international community and the UN remained predictably silent regarding the mass irregularities observed by the electoral committee. The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) has faced frequent allegations of corruption, prompting opposition leader Étienne Tshisikedi to call for the UN mission to end its deliberate efforts to maintain the system of international plundering and to appoint someone “less corrupt and more credible” to head UN operations. MONUSCO has been plagued with frequent cases of peacekeeping troops caught smuggling minerals such as cassiterite and dealing weapons to militia groups.
Under the younger Joseph Kabila, Chinese commercial activities in the DRC have significantly increased not only in the mining sector, but also considerably in the telecommunications field. In 2000, the Chinese ZTE Corporation finalized a $12.6 million deal with the Congolese government to establish the first Sino-Congolese telecommunications company; furthermore, the DRC exported $1.4 billion worth of cobalt between 2007 and 2008. The majority of Congolese raw materials like cobalt, copper ore and a variety of hard woods are exported to China for further processing and 90% of the processing plants in resource rich southeastern Katanga province are owned by Chinese nationals. In 2008, a consortium of Chinese companies were granted the rights to mining operations in Katanga in exchange for US$6 billion in infrastructure investments, including the construction of two hospitals, four universities and a hydroelectric power project.
The framework of the deal allocated an additional $3 million to develop cobalt and copper mining operations in Katanga. In 2009, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded renegotiation of the deal, arguing that the agreement between China and the DRC violated the foreign debt relief program for so-called HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) nations. The vast majority of the DRC’s $11 billion foreign debt owed to the Paris Club was embezzled by the previous regime of Mobuto Sesi Seko. The IMF successfully blocked the deal in May 2009, calling for a more feasibility study of the DRCs mineral concessions.
The United States is currently mobilizing public opinion in favor of a greater US presence in Africa, under the pretext of capturing Joseph Kony, quelling Islamist terrorism and putting an end to long-standing humanitarian issues. As well-meaning Americans are successively coerced by highly emotional social media campaigns promoting an American response to atrocities, few realize the role of the United States and western financial institutions in fomenting the very tragedies they are now poised to resolve. While many genuinely concerned individuals naively support forms of pro-war brand activism, the mobilization of ground forces in Central Africa will likely employ the use of predator drones and targeted missile strikes that have been notoriously responsible for civilian causalities en masse.
The further consolidation of US presence in the region is part of a larger program to expand AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command through a proposed archipelago of military bases in the region. In 2007, US State Department advisor Dr. J. Peter Pham offered the following on AFRICOM and its strategic objectives of “protecting access to hydrocarbons and other strategic resources which Africa has in abundance, a task which includes ensuring against the vulnerability of those natural riches and ensuring that no other interested third parties, such as China, India, Japan, or Russia, obtain monopolies or preferential treatment.” Additionally, during an AFRICOM Conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly declared AFRICOM’s guiding principle of protecting “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market,” before citing the increasing presence of China as a major challenge to US interests in the region.
The increased US presence in Central Africa is not simply a measure to secure monopolies on Uganda’s recently discovered oil reserves; Museveni’s legitimacy depends solely on foreign backers and their extensive military aid contributions – US ground forces are not required to obtain valuable oil contracts from Kampala. The push into Africa has more to do with destabilizing the deeply troubled Democratic Republic of the Congo and capturing its strategic reserves of cobalt, tantalum, gold and diamonds. More accurately, the US is poised to employ a scorched-earth policy by creating dangerous war-like conditions in the Congo, prompting the mass exodus of Chinese investors. Similarly to the Libyan conflict, the Chinese returned after the fall of Gaddafi to find a proxy government only willing to do business with the western nations who helped it into power.
As the US uses its influence to nurture the emergence of breakaway states like South Sudan, the activities of Somalia’s al Shabaab, Nigeria’s Boko Haram and larger factions of AQIM in North Africa offer a concrete pretext for further US involvement in regional affairs. The ostensible role of the first African-American US President is to export the theatresque War on Terror directly to the African continent, in a campaign to exploit established tensions along tribal, ethnic and religious lines. As US policy theoreticians such as Dr. Henry Kissinger, willingly proclaim, “Depopulation should be the highest priority of US foreign policy towards the Third World,” the vast expanse of desert and jungles in northern and central Africa will undoubtedly serve as the venue for the next decade of resource wars.
Nile Bowie is an independent writer and photojournalist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; he regularly contributes to Tony Cartalucci’s Land Destroyer Report and Professor Michel Chossudovsky’s Global Research Twitter: @NileBowie
1. Let me make a few changes to this article (Israel has a legal case for striking Iran) below put out by the Jewish Telegrahic Agency – clearly a criminal organization. My changes are in bold. I ask the wonderful readers of Mantiq al-Tayr to please answer any questions Shas Party Members may have about the words replaced by the words in bold [italics] below. Most other people, except Republicans, should be able to tell from context.
WASHINGTON (JTA) — In a world where nuclear weapons are in the hands of a rogue nation like Israel , an Iranian preemptive strike on Israel’s nuclear facilities would be fully justified. Despite its ban on aggressive war, Article 51 of the United Nations Charter clearly recognizes a state’s inherent right of self-defense. Thus, Iran has full authority to act unilaterally or collectively in its self-defense.
Yet Article 51 does not create the right to self-defense; it is an inherent right of all states under customary international law. Hence, determining when self-defense is appropriate lies, as it always has, with each state.
Under the charter, however, the U.N. Security Council is charged with lifting the burden of individual national self-defense and taking appropriate steps to restore international peace and security. One must recognize, however, that the muscular Security Council envisioned in the charter has never materialized. As such, threatened states are almost always required to make their own decisions and bear their own burdens.
Article 51 allows Iran to use aggressive force against Israel’s nuclear program if an “armed attack” occurs. Its plain language is satisfied when one state has used armed force to attack another state. Under customary international law, a preemptive strike is also permitted when an armed attack is imminent.
Thus an Iranian attack against Israel’s nuclear facilities would be legitimate for two reasons.
First, Israel already is conducting armed attacks under the plain meaning of Article 51 through Islamic terrorist surrogates such as the MEK so a de facto state of war exists between Israel and Iran.
Second, even if one questions whether armed attacks have occurred (by discounting Israel’s use of surrogates), Israel’s development of weapons of mass destruction constitutes an imminent, existential threat to Iran, all of Israel’s neighbors and the entire world.
Under customary international law, the Article 51 “armed attack” requirement that evokes a right of self-defense can occur when a state perceives that such an attack is “immediately impending and inevitable.” Thus, rather than waiting for an actual attack, a state may execute a preemptive strike on the hostile state.
Historically, two elements must be met to legitimize a preemptive strike: proportionality and necessity.
The necessity element is where attention is usually focused. The acting state must have exhausted all other alternatives of dealing with the problem, and the threat from the hostile state must be imminent. As with most preemptive strikes, imminence related to necessity will be the most contested issue in deciding the strike’s legality.
While the general rule in international law is that a state may not initiate aggressive war toward another state, an Iranian attack on Israeli nuclear facilities would not qualify as aggressive war; it would simply reflect Iran’s inherent right to self-defense.
Australia sends secret SAS Squadron to spy on Nigeria
A secret squadron of Australian SAS soldiers has been operating at large in Africa, performing work normally done by spies, in an unannounced and possibly dangerous expansion of Australia's foreign military engagement.
The deployment of the SAS's 4 Squadron - the existence of which has never been publicly confirmed - has put the special forces unit at the outer reaches of Australian and international law.
The Age has confirmed that troopers from the squadron have mounted dozens of secret operations over the past year in African nations including Zimbabwe, NIGERIA and Kenya.
They have been out of uniform and not accompanied by Australian Secret Intelligence Service officers with whom undercover SAS forces are conventionally deployed.
It is believed the missions have involved gathering intelligence on terrorism and scoping rescue strategies for Australian civilians trapped by kidnapping or civil war.
But the operations have raised serious concerns within the Australian military and intelligence community because they involve countries where Australia is not at war.
There are also concerns within the SAS that the troopers do not have adequate legal protection or contingency plans if they are captured. "They have all the espionage skills but without [ASIS's] legal cover" said one government source.
In a comment relayed to government officials, one soldier said: "What happens if we get caught?"
Australian National University professor Hugh White, a former deputy secretary of Defence, said: "Such an operation deprives the soldier of a whole lot of protections, including their legal status and, in a sense, their identity as a soldier. I think governments should think extremely carefully before they ask soldiers to do that."
Despite the dangers, then foreign minister Kevin Rudd last year asked for troopers from 4 Squadron to be used in Libya during that country's conflict. His plan was thwarted by opposition from Defence Minister Stephen Smith and chief of the Defence Force General David Hurley.
Both Mr Smith and General Hurley declined to be interviewed about this story.
SAS 4 Squadron is based at Swan Island, near Queenscliff, a high-security defence facility that has doubled in size over the past decade, in part to accommodate the new squadron.
The squadron was formally raised in 2005 by the Howard government, but The Age has learnt that its new intelligence-focused role was authorised in late 2010 or early last year by Mr Smith.
The SAS is also at the forefront of gender reform in the Australian military, with six female soldiers being trained in the United States for their work with 4 Squadron.
In the background, in this video, we can hear a degenerate rebel screaming in Arabic "“Eat the flag, you dog. Patience you dog, patience. God is Great”. We can also hear him referring to those people in the cage as Tawerghians. This clearly identifies them as residents of Tawerghia.
In other words, these people are actually black Libyans or lawful citizens/residents of Libya. Not mercenaries, as some would have us believe. Their city and homes, Tawerghia, have been taken over by these NATO groomed killers and emptied of all their life possessions. Their daughters and children have been raped and some killed as NATO's brand of 'freedom' arrives Libya.
This is what Obama and Co now wish for Syria; shock and awe, wrapped in a pretty flag around a bunch of missiles and hurled on defenceless Innocents from a distance, by a bunch of international gangsters.
Once again, the spotlight is on Africa as four Kenyans – three political leaders and a journalist – have been indicted at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Once again, the question that has never been answered is, why Africa? And why the speed? In Anglo-Saxon parts of the world, some leaders are treated with kid gloves when they commit ‘crimes against humanity’.
Others, like the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US President George Bush, go on to write memoirs defending their abuse of international laws.
Let us put this in context, in Ivory Coast, ex-President Laurent Gbagbo was ‘abducted’ (the words used by Jerry John Rawlings, former President of Ghana) at midnight and carted off to The Hague. In my view, his crimes remain unknown except to the French and his Ivorian adversaries. Charles Taylor (Liberia) remains in The Hague incarcerated.
Now we learn that all along, the former President of Liberia may have been a CIA agent. So we can guess why the leadership of the United States would like to see him remain in The Hague. He knows too much. In the case of Libya, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his sons were even indicted before the ICC could establish whether they had committed crimes ‘against humanity.’
Other Africans from the Democratic Republic of the Congo are also facing charges in The Hague. In the Sudan, a sitting head of state, President Omar Bashir, has also been indicted. The queue of Africans waiting to be hanged by this international court is endless.
Yet, a cursory glance at the world also tells of many crimes committed against ordinary citizens – from Palestine to Afghanistan, to Libya and, of course, Iraq. Who bears responsibility for these crimes? Are we suggesting that the lives of Iraqi, Libyan and Palestanian children and women do not matter? How come no one is facing so-called justice in The Hague?
This raises serious questions about the selective justice and double standards of the international systems of justice that is selectively applied to Africa and especially African leaders by the so-called ‘international community’.
It leaves me with no option but to conclude that the ICC has become a vehicle for enforcing neocolonial interest in Africa, which members of the UN Security Council can exploit. What is even more worrying is that the ICC has become a tool in the hands of vicious African elite/politicians fighting for the national cake.
All it takes is to convince the so-called international community that your opponent needs to go to The Hague. I will suggest in all seriousness that serious crimes against humanity have been committed in Libya by NATO forces, and by both sides in the post-election crisis in the Ivory Coast. But we are yet to see some action on that front.
The work of the ICC will make sense, and justice will be served, if the leaders who authorised the bombing of Tripoli under the guise of UN resolutions also face the same justice that the Kenyans are supposedly going to face.
In the case of Kenya, the facts should be separated from the chaff. There was post-election violence in which over 1,000 citizens died, some under gruesome conditions. Someone or some groups bear responsibility for this.
As usual, the international community, and a flaking Kenyan leadership, abdicated responsibility for punishing those responsible to a horde of international experts and UN rapporteurs with lengthy reports.
Maybe, these people did some good, but these reports are now gathering dust while all attention is paid to the antics of the chief prosecutor of the ICC Luis Moreno-Ocampo. The man now thinks he is a celebrity in Kenya. ‘Kenyans love me’, he is reported to have said.
Second, the Kenyan ruling class failed to set up a local tribunal to address cases of post-election violence and historical injustices, thereby fuelling the feeling among ordinary Kenyans that the ICC route was the only way to seek justice.
Third, the Kenyan elite, especially those in civil society, seem united in their view that to end ‘impunity’, they need the intervention of some foreign ‘knight in armour’ who should descend on Kenya to take out the bad guys (their leaders who are responsible for impunity).
I suggest that impunity is deep-seated in Africa, and its historical and structural causes should be addressed. Impunity has colonial and neo colonial roots. The ICC can only deal with the symptoms.
In Kenya, the ICC debate, like most debates, has become a lawyers’ paradise where people talk of ‘the Rome statute’ and similar words with arrogant recklessness and self-satisfaction. That African heads of states signed up to this ‘Rome statute’ is not in doubt, but for good reasons. Others refused. But this does not constitute a blood oath to which we are bound for life, as the juju takers in Nollywood movies suggest.
The debate about how to seek justice for the victims of the post-election violence in Kenya seems to have been relegated to a few campaigners. The internally displaced people (citizens) of Kenya are still living in IDP camps. Women who were abused have not been offered counseling or financial compensation or support to deal with the consequences of the abuse. Children of IDP families are not receiving quality primary education as their families are on the move and lack stability.
Kenya is yet to heal, as the ruling elite and the so-called international community engages in futile and sometimes endless debates about ‘impunity’ and the ICC. The nongovernmental organizations and civil society have been caught up in this maze as some seek publicity for themselves and their organizations at the expense of real justice for victims. Playing to the international gallery has become the endgame in Nairobi. Who speaks for the IDPs? Who speaks for the women who were abused?
This reminds me of Sierra Leone. When I visited Freetown after the civil war, there was a lot of talk about ‘impunity’ and justice, as we are hearing today. The UN Tribunal for Sierra Leone was set up in a huge compound in Freetown as a justice centre of some sort to deal with so-called perpetrators of the civil war, nothing about the victims.
It was full of young European and American lawyers recruited as ‘investigators’, with their fanciful laptops and mobile phones. All was set for justice. Down the road was an amputee camp, where amputees, real victims of the savage civil war, lived in unimaginable abject poverty. So the question I asked myself was: where is our sense of priority?
Are we condemning the living, young as they are, to a life of penury, so that some octogenarian leaders can be put on trial, and for what purpose? Millions of dollars were spent on this illusive justice while the youthful victims of the civil war – ex-combatants and their families – were abandoned by the same international system which has ripped off Sierra Leone for its diamonds.
Is that the African sense of justice? Many Sierra Leoneans and other West Africans had the same feeling; we could only shake our heads in disbelief. In the case of Sierra Leone, most of the so-called perpetrators died in jail awaiting trials.
I would suggest that Kenya is headed in that same direction. The broad sense of seeking social justice for victims has been pushed to the dustbin of history as people seek retribution, and settle petty political scores of a different nature. Whether the four indicted individuals deserve to be indicted by the ICC or not is for Kenyans to answer.
But some of us will never know, as only those with voices and access to Kenya’s media which is embedded with powerful interests, and positions that appeal to or support the marginalisation of Africa, and the abuse of African leaders in the international system get heard. But it would be churlish and ahistorical to separate what is happening to the Kenyan four.
It is part of a broader cat and mouse game of humiliating African leaders to serve the global imperialist interests of some countries, and to justify their continued plunder of the continent and its resources, a game in which Africa will always emerge as the loser.
In the case of the Kenyan four, I cannot help but feel that this is more about the impending election (2012 0or 2013), than about justice for victims. Some in the international community and their minions have suggested that some ethnic groups should be sidelined. A dangerous proposition for a country seeking to build a cohesive society.
In a contribution to Pambazuka News last year, I suggested that an international cabal of pan-African and global imperialist interests are combining forces to destabilize Africa. This is a continuation of that debate. The idea that shipping four Kenyans (Africans) to join the already high number in The Hague is somehow the best way to achieve justice does not appeal to me.
My position will be the same if these four were Libyan, Nigerian, Ghanaian or Ugandan. I believe that Africa has come of age to settle its own problems.
I believe that neither the US nor British governments will subject their citizens, especially, young, intelligent and committed politicians, to the sort of humiliation that the four Kenyans are being subjected to in the name of fighting impunity.
The ICC has time and time again proven that it is beholden to countries that are not even signatories to the Rome statute (for example the United States, as in the case of President Charles Taylor). Ocampo has proven that he is anti-African, that his interest is only in persecuting and prosecuting Africans because we have made ourselves vulnerable to this process.
This same court which acknowledges that African countries are signatories ignores the voice of the African Union leadership – those we have elected to represent our interest as Africans. Will the ICC ignore the leaders of France, the UK, the European Union and the United States?
Yet, the ICC ignored the AU in the case of Sudan, and ignored the pleas of Kenya’s Vice President who had the support of the majority of progressive thinking African leaders in the Africa Union. This underlines the contemptuous attitude towards African leaders by lower officials in international organizations. Why do we allow this to happen?
In the case of Kenya, what is even more worrying is the impact of this process on the national psyche. It destabilizes the country, creates unnecessary anxiety and fuels rumours of the dangerous type. Kenyans need closure to the post-election violence if they are to build a cohesive and progressive society based on the ethics of the 2010 constitution.
The intelligentsia is supposed to lead this struggle, but it is failing as they are devoid of any ideological leanings or clarity. ‘Human rights’ is treated as if it is value-free, with no ideological underpinnings. The debate about political transition in Kenya is being sidelined and made to look moribund as the country frets and is on tenterhooks awaiting decisions from the ICC.
In Kenya, the ICC has been elevated to a ‘god’ with the prosecutor as some sort of deity. Dissenting voices are silenced or seen as irrelevant to this debate.
However, it is important for Africans to realize that there is no alternative to nation-building and to local processes. Neither the US nor France will abdicate such awesome responsibilities to a foreign court or subject the whole nation to such unnecessary anxiety.
Africans must have the courage and steadfast belief in our ability to change the continent, to deal with abuses and seek justice on our own terms.
For me, the ICC will always remain an imperialist-led institution set up to hold back the forces of progress, while undermining African institutions and our ability to deal with forces of retrogression and ‘impunity’. It is time for African leaders to take charge and not hand over the continent to some faceless ‘judges’ of the international system.
"The Lord is slow to anger but great in power; the Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished. His way is in the whirlwind and the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet"-- Nahum 1:3
President Bush claimed that God told him to invade Iraq.
You all followed right along, cheering, screaming with joy at each fallen Iraqi body shown on the nightly news. Well, where is your God now? Seen any hurricanes strike Iraq? Or Iran? No? Or floods, like those hitting the Midwest and the US Northeast the last several years? Seen any equivalent disasters hitting Iran or Iraq?
Or tornadoes? The US has been hit with record-level tornadoes again and again and again. Entire towns vanished from the face of the Earth during this most recent storm even as Obama and Netanyahu scream for war with Iran.
See any significant number of tornadoes over Iraq?
See any significant number of tornadoes over Iran?
No? Makes you want to stop and think, doesn't it?
Despite the claims of Al Gore and his carbonazis, the US has suffered through several harsh winters in a row ...
... inevitably followed with massive flooding during the spring thaws.
In 2009 record cold hit the North American continent ... in MAY! Oklahoma has lost 90% of its wheat crop. Bread became a costly luxury, as the economy continued to crumble. It snowed in Wyoming, in June 2010!
Snow fell on the Grand Canyon in April 2011! The flooding from the massive snow pileup is once again over-topped the inadequate flood control systems along the Mississippi. The US Army Corps of Engineers is having to dynamite levees and flood food farms to save shopping malls.
How about wildfires? Humboldt County is still charred. There is a black scar running across Southern California from Los Angeles to San Diego from last year's fires. Texas just got toasted. Ever seen wildfires like that in the nations Bush tells you God wants destroyed? No? Major crop loss from freak cold snaps? No?
Hmmmmm.
Then there is that Gulf of Mexico thing, with all the oil and corexit, and have you noticed how much of the radiation from the nuclear melt down in Japan is hitting the US?
Hmmmmm again!
Better think this one through. Bush coveted the oil wealth of Iraq. In order to get that wealth Bush bore false witness to We The People, the Congress, and the world. Bush then stole that wealth, and killed a lot of people in the process. And by claiming that God told him to do all that Bush took the Lord's name in vain... So, he's batting 500 in terms of breaking the Ten Commandments... and all who support him are accessories to the crime. Including the current administration of Barack Obama, who campaigned on a promise of "Change" yet continues to pursue the same policies of coveting, bearing false witness, stealing, killing and waging war along ten fronts on two continents. But honestly, they claim, it was all the other guys fault. They made us invade them, Mummy! (There is another of those bearing false witness things I told you about.)
The United States stands exposed of torturing innocent people to coerce false confessions to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Innocent people were tortured to death.
Children were tortured.
Children!
And what is the result? Did the God that Bush, Robertson and Santorum claim loves America and wants it to conquer the world deliver a swift and easy victory to the USA by flinging The Wrath Of God onto the heathen?
No, the Wrath Of God is hitting the nation that invaded Iraq, based on that false witness thing I mentioned before, wages wars in Afghani8stan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. etc. and now prepares to invade Iran. Hurricane Katrina wrecked our largest seaport, through which America's war machine exports much of its cargoes of death around the globe. Katrina also savaged the oil infrastructure, and oil is the lifeblood of conventional warfare. The Midwestern floods cut rail lines into the west and have destroyed an entire corn crop, exacerbating an already critical food shortage. "Famine" is on the Wrath Of God menu, if I recall correctly. Now we cower in a record cold winter, yet despite the heavy snow pack in the mountains, drought is predicted for the western United States this year. "Drought" is on the Wrath Of God menu as well.
So are tornadoes sucking up entire towns. The largest tornadoes, the F-5s are nicknamed "The finger of God."
Then there is the cave-in of the coal mine and the gulf oil disaster. And the radiation from Fukushima was blown away from Japan and onto the United States.
The government's defenders have desperately tried to explain away hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, famine, freezing, drought and plagues as God's punishment against the gays or the blacks or the abortionists, but when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita bore down on those Texas refineries, the message, if there really was one, is clear. The hurricanes are not pointed at gays. The storms are aimed at the United States' capacity to fuel its war machine. The disasters are aimed at the food that feeds the soldiers. The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon is a scene right out of Dante's Inferno! Indeed the disasters all seem aimed at all those who supported this war based on false pretenses...
All the biblical signs of an angry God are directed at the United States and its allies. Storms, flooding, wildfires, famine, pestilence; the list goes on.
Bush lied when he said God was directing his actions, and those costumed child molesters holding those collection plates who cheered Bush along, well, they were lying too. They have broken 5 of the 10 commandments. And they have tricked you into breaking them as well. Because you can no longer pretend you don't know something is very wrong, and you can no longer pretend you don't know that Iraq (and soon to be Iran) is an unholy war. The Wrath Of God is aimed at the heartland of the USA, and the throttle is set to afterburner, full-tilt boogie rock and roll!
Then there is Israel's Operation CAST LEAD in which Israel broke the cease fire with Hamas and launched an attack into Gaza, killing mostly civilians, using inappropriate weapons such as white phosphorus. The United States paid for those weapons. Indeed, as Israel began to run out, the US Government sent even more. The canisters of white phosphorus that fell on a school full of children bore markings proving they were made in the United States.
And, funny thing, but recent genetic studies prove that the present-day Palestinians are direct descendants of the Biblical Hebrews, including presumably a certain carpenter turned Rabbi. So all that made-in-the-US white phosphorus has been falling on some of Jesus kinfolk. Think maybe the Boss's son holds a grudge? And maybe the Boss does as well?
It is a compelling set of facts, isn't it? If I were a believer, I would have no choice but to conclude that the Big Guy in the sky is really, REALLY, pissed off at the US and its allies for all this smiting going on.
So to all those who went along with these wars because you believed it when Bush and Robertson et. al. said this was God's will, you are all damned. Damned, damned, damned! Damned to hell. And there can be no redemption while the warmongers are still in power. There is no absolution if you know a war of conquest against an innocent people is going on and you do nothing at all to stop it. There is no absolution if you know torture of innocent people is going on and you do nothing at all to stop it. The priests cannot forgive your sins if they share those sins, no matter how expensive those beads are. Having worked so hard to trick you into sin, would they really be eager to get you out? Just whose side are they on? Which God is it they really serve?
(NaturalNews) After it was exposed that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic brainchild of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, purchased 500,000 shares in Monsanto back in 2010 valued at more than $23 million, it became abundantly clear that this so-called benevolent charity is up to something other than eradicating disease and feeding the world's poor (http://www.guardian.co.uk). It turns out that the Gates family legacy has long been one of trying to dominate and control the world's systems, including in the areas of technology, medicine, and now agriculture.
The Gates Foundation, aka the tax-exempt Gates Family Trust, is currently in the process of spending billions of dollars in the name of humanitarianism to establish a global food monopoly dominated by genetically-modified (GM) crops and seeds. And based on the Gates family's history of involvement in world affairs, it appears that one of its main goals besides simply establishing corporate control of the world's food supply is to reduce the world's population by a significant amount in the process.
William H. Gates Sr., former head of eugenics group Planned Parenthood
Bill Gates' father, William H. Gates Sr., has long been involved with the eugenics group Planned Parenthood, a rebranded organization birthed out of the American Eugenics Society. In a 2003 interview with PBS' Bill Moyers, Bill Gates admitted that his father used to be the head of Planned Parenthood, which was founded on the concept that most human beings are just "reckless breeders" and "human weeds" in need of culling (http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_gates.html).
Gates also admitted during the interview that his family's involvement in reproductive issues throughout the years has been extensive, referencing his own prior adherence to the beliefs of eugenicist Thomas Robert Malthus, who believed that populations of the world need to be controlled through reproductive restrictions. Though Gates claims he now holds a different view, it appears as though his foundation's initiatives are just a modified Malthusian approach that much more discreetly reduces populations through vaccines and GMOs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus).
Gates Foundation has invested heavily in converting Asian, African agricultural systems to GMOs
William Gates Sr.'s association with Planned Parenthood and continued influence in the realm of "population and reproductive health" is significant because Gates Sr. is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (http://www.gatesfoundation.org/leadership/Pages/william-gates-sr.aspx). This long-time eugenicist "guides the vision and strategic direction" of the Gates Foundation, which is currently heavily focused on forcing GMOs on Africa via its financing of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
The Gates Foundation has admittedly given at least $264.5 million in grant commitments to AGRA (www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Documents/BMGFFactSheet.pdf), and also reportedly hired Dr. Robert Horsch, a former Monsanto executive for 25 years who developed Roundup, to head up AGRA back in 2006. According to a report published in La Via Campesina back in 2010, 70 percent of AGRA's grantees in Kenya work directly with Monsanto, and nearly 80 percent of the Gates Foundation funding is devoted to biotechnology (http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_21606.cfm).
The same report explains that the Gates Foundation pledged $880 million in April 2010 to create the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), which is a heavy promoter of GMOs. GAFSP, of course, was responsible for providing $35 million in "aid" to earthquake-shattered Haiti to be used for implementing GMO agricultural systems and technologies.
Back in 2003, the Gates Foundation invested $25 million in "GM (genetically modified) research to develop vitamin and protein-enriched seeds for the world's poor," a move that many international charities and farmers groups vehemently opposed (http://healthfreedoms.org). And in 2008, the Gates Foundation awarded $26.8 million to Cornell University to research GM wheat, which is the next major food crop in the crosshairs of Monsanto's GM food crop pipeline (http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_21606.cfm).
If you control agriculture, you control the populations of the world
The Gates Foundation's ties with Monsanto and corporate agriculture in general speak volumes about its real agenda, which is to create a monopolistic system of world control in every area of human life. Vaccines, pharmaceuticals, GMOs, reproductive control, weather manipulation, global warming -- these and many other points of entry are the means by which the Gates Foundation is making great strides to control the world by pretending to help improve and save it.
Rather than promote real food sovereignty and address the underlying political and economic issues that breed poverty, Gates and Co. has instead embraced the promotion of corporately-owned and controlled agriculture and medicine paradigms that will only further enslave the world's most impoverished. It is abundantly evident that GMOs have ravished already-impoverished people groups by destroying their native agricultural systems, as has been seen in India (http://www.naturalnews.com/030913_Monsanto_suicides.html).
Some may say Gates' endeavors are all about the money, while others may say they are about power and control. Perhaps it is a combination of both, where Gates is still in the business of promoting his own commercial investments, which includes buying shares in Monsanto while simultaneously investing in programs to promote Monsanto.
Whatever the case may be, there is simply no denying that Gates now has a direct interest in seeing Monsanto succeed in spreading GMOs around the world. And since Gates is openly facilitating Monsanto's growth into new markets through his "humanitarian" efforts, it is clear that the Gates family is in bed with Monsanto.
"Although Bill Gates might try to say that the Foundation is not linked to his business, all it proves is the opposite: most of their donations end up favoring the commercial investments of the tycoon, not really "donating" anything, but instead of paying taxes to state coffers, he invests his profits in where it is favorable to him economically, including propaganda from their supposed good intentions," wrote Silvia Ribeiro in the Mexican news source La Jornada back in 2010.
"On the contrary, their 'donations' finance projects as destructive as geoengineering or replacement of natural community medicines for high-tech patented medicines in the poorest areas of the world ... Gates is also engaged in trying to destroy rural farming worldwide, mainly through the 'Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa' (AGRA). It works as a Trojan horse to deprive poor African farmers of their traditional seeds, replacing them with the seeds of their companies first, finally by genetically modified (GM)."
