Fact-esque

Food First, Interest Later

And Professor Doctor Correa is one tough character. He told George Bush to take the US military base and stick it where the equatorial sun don’t shine. He told the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which held Ecuador’s finances by the throat, to go to hell. He ripped up the “agreements” which his predecessors had signed at financial gun point. He told the Miami bond vultures that were charging Ecuador usurious interest, to eat their bonds. He said ‘We are not going to pay off this debt with the hunger of our people. ” Food first, interest later.  Much later.  And he meant it.

And to the west east

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

“As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food,” Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have.”

And so why not watch this part of one of my favorite Christmas movies again:

Give These Stoves for Christmas Gifts

From the Hunger Site:

The Berkeley Darfur Stove is only five small pieces of bent metal, but its impact is too great to measure.

Since 2003, hundreds of thousands of African Sudanese have been killed in Darfur and another 2.2 million people — mostly women and children — are crowded into camps surrounded by a barren landscape. Venturing outside these boundaries in search of fuel to cook their meals often ends in violence.

But what if these women didn't have to leave the safety of the camp as often? What if they had a stove that required up to 75% less firewood?  They do: It is the Berkeley Darfur Stove, and it is changing lives.

The Berkeley Darfur ultra high-efficiency cook stove:

• Can be built in Sudan by locals, enabling them to earn extra income and become part of the solution    
• Is suited to local high-temperature and high-wind outdoor cooking methods    
• Emits less smoke than other stoves, minimizing smoke inhalation    
• Uses up to 75% less fuel, enabling women to minimize the dangerous 7-hour treks outside the camps to gather wood    
• Helps the denuded environment recover from severe overharvesting

$20.00 will purchase a Berkeley Darfur Stove for a family living in the Darfur refugee camps.

Promises, Promises

What a surprise:

Rich Countries Not Keeping Their Promises For Africa

“In spite of the promises made in 2005 during the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, the amount granted to development programs for many African countries remained virtually unchanged. Rich countries are not keeping their promises with respect to aid to Africa and the opening of their markets to African exports, stated World Bank Chief Economist for the Africa Region, John Page, on Sunday, in an official statement. …” [Le Monde (France, 06/04)/Factiva]

AFP writes that “… ‘Many donor countries have increased support for special humanitarian assistance and debt reduction over four decades, but, unfortunately  this does not translate into additional resources for African countries to rebuild their infrastructure, train teachers and combat HIV/AIDS and malaria,’ he emphasized. However, for their part, African countries are pushing improved governance, and in many case a significantly more hospitable environment for investment. ‘The question is less whether the Africa partners are delivering on their promises, but whether the wealthy industrial nations are honoring theirs’,’ he said.” [Agence France Presse (06/03)/Factiva]

Xinhua reports that “… With Africa's economic prospects high on the G8 agenda, the World Bank noted that despite the 2005 Gleneagles Summit, resulting in pledges to increase Africa's development aid to $50 billion by 2010, foreign assistance for development programs in many African countries remains essentially flat. Meanwhile, the faltering trade talks under the World Trade Organization's Doha Round have been another disappointment. …

While donor aid is lagging, the World Bank said that progress in lowering debt burdens for Sub-Saharan Africa has moved ahead somewhat faster.   Multilateral debt relief undertaken by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank will bring about the full cancellation of $50 billion of debt over 40 years.   Beginning in July, 2006, when the initiative took effect, 16 African countries have benefited. Another 17 will become eligible once the completion of debt reduction programs under the World Bank's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative. …”   [Xinhua (China, 06/03)/Factiva]

What's especially upsetting though is the talk of "significantly more hospitable" environments for investment.  That probably means cleaning up some of the famous African corruption we always here detractors of aid to Africa screaming about but it also means gutting political and economic rights for Africans as well as trashing environmental standards all of which are much more of a threat to first world investment than a corrupt leader.   After all, we all know that the worst corruption a leader can be party to is the corruption of ideals that leads him/her to believe that human beings should share in the wealth they create and deserve to live in clean and safe environments.

More here.

Preliminary Peace Document Outlined in Sudan

So who knows what's going to happen but Save Darfur is reporting that there is some movement toward peace in Darfur.  From the announcement:

The promises from President Bashir in this agreement are encouraging. They include commitments to:

 

• A 60-day ceasefire with an international peace summit to be held before March 15, 2007.
• Sudan's cooperation to work with the African Union and United Nations on the deployment of a hybrid peacekeeping force in Darfur.
• Ensuring "zero tolerance" policies for gender-based violence in Darfur.
• Free access for humanitarian aid workers and journalists.

The entire press release is in the extended entry.   Gov. Bill Richardson figures prominently.  Everyone should run for president every year.

Make a Decision

I'm listening to the Radio Times interview of Wangari Maathai.  Ms. Maathai just described the circumstances that allowed her to go to school as a child.  Her brother innocently asked her mother why his sister didn't go to school with her brothers.   To Maathai's eternal gratitude, her mother made the decision that she should go to school, where she excelled.  When high school rolled around, another decision had to be made so that Maathai could continue her education.  The family decided that she should continue and so she did and she continued to excel.  That was the time of Kennedy's Airlift Africa program, in which Maathai took part.  As she described it, another decision was made by people in power that affected her life dramatically.

You can make a decision right now that will help a child go to school.  The Hunger Site has a few opportunities for you.  For fourteen dollars, you can buy shoes for a girl in Africa.  For one hundred thirty dollars, you can send an African girl to school for a year.  Twenty dollars sends two girls to school in Afghanistan.   Fifty dollars buys school supplies for a class of fifty children for a month.

If you're looking for opportunities closer to home, volunteer to mentor at you local school or community center.  I've seen those programs work close up and the difference a dedicated mentor can make to a child is nothing less than amazing. 

Who knows?  Maybe one day the child you help will be interviewed on a radio show telling about the person in power who made a decision that changed his/her life.

Intractable

Thomas Nephew is brilliant and he isn't afraid not to have all the answers, which are just two of about a million qualities that make him an outstanding blogger.  He's been on the Darfur story consistently for a long time now.  Today he's writing about Darfur again sharing information about an ad that will run in Dear Leader's hometown paper while he repairs to his prop ranch in Crawford for the month of August:

Dear President Bush,

The situation in Darfur is dire. The government-sponsored genocide has killed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, displaced millions of innocent civilians from their homes and put many more individuals at risk. And the growing danger recently forced key humanitarian organizations to halt operations in large parts of Darfur.

Your efforts to help broker the Darfur Peace Agreement deserve praise.  But the genocide continues and we must act now -- with conviction -- to ensure more innocent lives are not lost.

That is why we, the undersigned, call on you to:

1. Push for the urgent deployment of a strong UN peacekeeping force to protect civilians.
2. Appoint a Presidential Special Envoy to coordinate U.S. policy and help ensure that the Darfur Peace Agreement is faithfully implemented.

Sincerely,
Your signature here

SAVE DARFUR NOW
www.savedarfur.org

Thomas added the links.  If you want your name on the ad, contribute $50 or more  by 9pm tonight.

I'm a coward.  I'm all for the special envoy but when I hear "peacekeepers from the UN,"  I get very nervous.  They aren't helping in Haiti according to reporting I trust.   I worry what an armed international force is going to do in Sudan.   But then I remember this from the Frontline documentary, Ghosts of Rwanda:

NARRATOR: While observers like Captain Mbaye were saving hundreds of lives, General Dallaire had a plan to save tens of thousands by creating more safe havens like the few his troops were already protecting in Kigali.

MARK DOYLE: Dallaire had a plan, which was basically to secure football stadiums in every town around Rwanda. Football stadiums were particularly defendable areas because they had large concrete stands. And if you have 50 soldiers with guns on the top of those stands, you can stop people coming in to kill people, basically. So it was-- I think it was very doable, if there had been a much bigger U.N.-- not that much bigger, a few-- a few thousand well-armed U.N. soldiers.

REPORTER: General, you do say that people are being killed, taken out of [unintelligible] What can the U.N. do about it?

Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE: Send me troops.

REPORTER: Will you-- send troops?

Gen. ROMEO DALLAIRE: Well, what more do you want me to say? I'm waiting here. So send me troops.

Of course, Sudan isn't Rwanda.  China is deeply involved.  Oil, arms, genocide, status quo.  China is on the side of the Sudanese government, which is supporting the genocide.  And the Sudanese government says that they are simply putting down a rebellion.  Right to self-defense and all that. 
Would China allow the UN to deploy peacekeepers?  They and the rest of the world seem to want the African Union troops to handle the problem.   I really don't know how that's working but if Save Darfur Now is still calling for UN peacekeepers, then it can't be going too well. 

I don't have the $50 to sign the ad.  I probably would sign it if I had the money, but I would be being dishonest because I don't think that UN troops are the way to go.  I also don't think that there's a possibility for them to be called up.  By calling for them, I'd be saying that something has to be done because whatever is happening now isn't working - just don't ask me what that something should be.

Related:  If you want to immerse yourself further in tragedy of the African variety, read this BBC report about failing peace talks in Uganda. 

Why Not Put Her in Charge of NASA Next?

When will BushCo fan, Nick Kristof, write about this BushCo dividend in the fight against AIDS? (via King of Zembla)

Crushing news out of Uganda last week. The Bush administration's $1 billion experiment in using abstinence messages as the basis of HIV prevention has born its first fruit: In a public speech on May 18, Uganda's AIDS Commissioner Kihumuro Apuuli announced that HIV infections have almost doubled in Uganda over the past two years, from 70,000 in 2003 to 130,000 in 2005.  And despite this chilling wake-up call, Bush has empowered Christian right activists to continue to push their abstinence-only agenda at a UN Special Session on HIV/AIDS, to begin next week.  According to a State Department email I obtained, the official U.S. delegation is stacked with some of the very people who contributed to the debacle in Uganda.

Esther Kaplan breaks down the US delegation to the UN's special session on AIDS.  This is her conclusion:

In previous administrations, delegations to these high-level UN meetings typically included mainstream public health experts such as the American Public Health Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Nurses Association. Now we have abstinence advocates peddling fake science, New York socialites, and professional evangelizers.

And not just NY socialites either.  Read the whole post to find out which BushCo Twin had the experience to be included in the delegation as well.

In Case You Missed It ...

Al Franken letting Ann Coulter have it.  Much better than throwing a pie at her.

$16M not enough to stop Canada from killing Harp seals, but that's not the big story, which is buried by the BBC:

Some 90,000 seal pups are expected to be culled in the Gulf of St Lawrence, before the hunt moves on to Newfoundland, where thousands more will be culled.

But the hunters have been frustrated by a huge fall in the number of seals they have taken in comparison to previous years because of thinning ice caused by warm weather.

Stupid Canadians.  Take the $16M while the taking is good.  It's not getting any cooler.

The Center for Media and Democracy has an excellent round-up of some fake news.

Send Beads to BushCo to ask him to fully fund the $6B cost of rebuilding the NOLA levees correctly.

Pharyngula explains why the wingnuts hate Plan B and how it works.  The comment thread is good too.  A few people mention what I thought to be the case, which is that we aren't 100% sure how Plan B works. 

Elizabeth Rubin, writing in the NYT Sunday Magazine  looks at what will happen when the genocide in Sudan (and Chad?) finally winds down. 

This week in Darfur has a grab bag of good and bad news.  On the list, Dear Leader cheerleads for a Week of Prayer and Action on Darfur.  Well, he's half right.

More righteous Republican support of our troops:  Force them to use substandard body armor sold to the army by a Republican fund raiser and made man.

Nearly a year after Katrina, a Times-Picayune editor looks back at the story. 

 

Malarial Roulette

I watched a PBS report about Malaria last night with the kids.  It started out focused on Africa (Kenya), where Malaria is a plague - and developing resistance all the time - and moved to the United States, where we are seeing the disease pop up.  The public health challenge in Africa is to stop the transmission of the bug and improve treatment efficacy and rates.  The challenge in America is find the disease when it strikes.  We really don't know how many people get Malaria in a given year. 

The show was painful to watch, as you would expect.  It's hard to know which segments were worse though: the ones that showed the dead and dying children and their broken, resigned parents or the segments that showed Jeffery Sachs trying to break through a wall of cold indifference as he explained how paying to solve this problem benefitted not only the poor of Africa (that wouldn't be enough, you see) but people all over the world.  Sachs is a saint.  I don't know how he manages to stay civil with some of the people he talks to.  One man at a breakfast Sachs hosted for some group of muckety mucks could barely stay in his seat or wipe the smirk off of his face while Sachs spoke about a local hospital that had no running water.  I would have had to stab him with a fork.

The main point of the show was easy to grasp for even the dullest American:   New strains of Malaria in Africa can show up anywhere in the world where there are mosquitos.   There are mosquitos all over America.   So even if you're like that guy in Sachs' breakfast and you don't care particularly about Africans dying needlessly, maybe you'd rather not find yourself with a brand of Malaria that can't be cured. 

Why not buy something fair trade from Kenya?  (search for "kenya")  And contact your congressperson to see if s/he was part of the crew that did this:

Last week, the House cut funding that would have helped fight global AIDS and extreme poverty. More than 160,000 ONE supporters across the United States called their Congressmen and asked them to support the President's budget request to fund the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty - but they didn't do it.

Under the leadership of Congressman Jim Nussle (R-IA), Chairman of the Budget Committee, the House stripped more than $2 billion from the President's proposed plan to provide life-saving assistance to the world's poorest countries. And Representative Jeb Bradley (R-NH) introduced and passed an amendment that cut $800 million from the President's budget request to fund the fight against AIDS and poverty.

Welcome to the Land of Opportunity

There are persistent labor shortages in China.  From the NYT:

A few years ago, "people would just show up at the door," said Liang Jian, the human resources manager at Well Brain. "Now we put up an ad looking for five people, and maybe one person shows up."

For all the complaints of factory owners, though, the situation has a silver lining for the members of the world's largest labor force. Economists say the shortages are spurring companies to improve labor conditions and to more aggressively recruit workers with incentives and benefits.

It's the invisible hand at work!  Pay no attention to the workers behind the curtain.  But if you insist on looking at them, then China Labor Watch is the place to go.  And then there's this related story from the World Socialist Website:

As for the Chinese authorities, they have accommodated the profit drive by dismantling state-run industries and driving millions of workers and peasants out of the countryside and into the cities. Government bureaucracies, both national and provincial, accept and police unbearable conditions knowing that increased labour costs will only cause the employers and their clients to flee to even greener pastures in other regions and countries.

An article in the official Chinese People’s Daily last December registered concern that things were not going as well as the factory owners would like and agonised about uncertain profits because of falling orders leading up to the Christmas period. From January to November, Guangdong’s toy shipments overseas totalled $US4.25 billion but showed only an annualised growth of 2.5 percent.

The shocking conditions of Chinese toy workers bring to mind the life of the working class of the nineteenth century, at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The astounding advances in technology, science, education and communication that have made globalised production possible could vastly improve the lives of working people in China and internationally but instead are doing the opposite.

Because unlike America in the nineteenth century, we're talking global markets now and there is enough of a market for the stuff they make in the west and increasingly in places like China.  The  captains of global industry, the same people who run this country,  are looking at the world market and deciding who will be the winnners and who will be the losers.  America is definitely a loser in this game, which is okay with them.  A falling tide lowers all boats is their motto. 

With Africa not even on the radar in any meaningful way yet, there are decades of corporate country hopping ahead to drive down wages and working conditions before that Invisible Hand so loved by the NYT has a chance of doing any real good.  Of course, that's assuming a frictionless world where, for instance, war isn't considered a good business plan and oil isn't running out.

I wonder what will happen  when in the very near future oil starts to get more scarce and shipping this stuff all over the world, or even making it, isn't the relatively free ride it is now.  That's a fixed cost that can't be dealt with by enabling dictatorships, busting unions or moving to some impoverished State.  They'll just start shoveling the poor directly into whatever furnaces keep the whole miserable enterprise running.