USA/Africa: “Pro-Death” Health Agendas Advance

worker | May 30, 2017 | 8:36 pm | Africa, Health Care | Comments closed

USA/Africa: “Pro-Death” Health Agendas Advance

AfricaFocus Bulletin May 30, 2017 (170530) (Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“3.3 million more abortions. 15,000 more mothers dying. 8 million more unplanned pregnancies. … Those grim numbers from the Guttmacher Institute show the potential real-world impact of the Trump administration’s unprecedented proposed cuts to global family planning efforts; the budget the White House released Tuesday would basically eliminate those programs.” – Sarah Wildman, Vox, May 24, 2017

The headline (my wording) may seem alarmist, but detailed examination of the health agendas being advanced by the Trump administration and right-wing Republicans leaves little doubt of the consequences should they be fully implemented. There will indeed likely be millions of deaths resulting both from the House domestic healthcare plan, which would remove 23 million from health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and from the provisions for global health in the administration’s new budget. That wouldÂ eliminate funding for family planning, threaten funding for HIV/AIDS and famine relief, and impose massive cuts on institutions such as the Center for Disease Control which are vital to protection against epidemics.

One may withhold judgment on the motivations of the policymakers, including the relative weight of ideology, indifference, lack of human empathy, and greed. And most observers say the full package is unlikely to survive Congressional scrutiny, even among many Republicans. But much of the damage, such as the Global Gag Rule cited above, comes from executive decisions already being implemented, such as the new version of the Global Gag Rule. The proponents of this agenda, it is clear by their explicit statements, reject the universal right to health, and give little or no value to the lives of those who are not wealthy and white.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin continues two summary articles on the Global Gag Rule and the Trump budget, as well as a reflection on the pressures facing progressive health advocates stretched by the attacks on both domestic and global health.

A few additional short articles highlight the threat:

SiobhÃ¡n O’Grady, “How teen moms in Nigeria could wind up hurt by Trump’s U.N. Cuts,” Washington Post, May 5, 2017 http://tinyurl.com/y9dn2odb Documents effects of cutting support for the U.N. Population Fund.

Los Angeles Times, “Editorial: Trump’s new global gag rule will devastate healthcare in poor countries,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2017 http://tinyurl.com/n6kprqw “The rule was bad enough in its earlier form [under previous Republican administrations], when it barred aid to family planning organizations that offered abortion or abortion counseling. … But the new Trump administration incarnation of the rule is far more expansive. … it will now cover approximately $8.8 billion in funds given out to healthcare providers of all sorts.”

Nurith Aizenman, “Trump’s Proposed Budget Would Cut $2.2 billion from Global Health Spending,” National Public Radio, May 25, 2017 http://tinyurl.com/y9xgbc87 “Overall, Trump would cut the annual global health budget by about 26 percent, or around $2.2 billion in the 2018 fiscal year that begins October 1, decreasing it from about $8.7 billion in the current fiscal year budget to less than $6.5 billion.”

Emily Baumgaertner, “Proposed Cuts Alarm Bioterrorism Experts,” New York Times, May 29, 2017 http://tinyurl.com/yavxmskg The CDC’s budget would be cut by 17%. At the NIH, a program training foreign medical professionals in pandemic response would be eliminated.

For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on health, visit http://www.africafocus.org/intro-health.php

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The Trump global gag rule: an attack on US family planning and global health aid

By Ann M. Starrs, Guttmacher Institute

The Lancet, February 4, 2017

http://www.thelancet.com â€“ Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/ya8ngh4h

On Jan 23, 2017, on his fourth day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing the global gag rule, an anti-abortion policy that under other conservative presidential administrations has caused serious disruptions to US overseas family planning efforts. Alarmingly, Trump’s order goes even further than in the past, with potentially devastating effect.

Credit for graphic: Human Rights WatchÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â

The global gag rule, also known as the Mexico City policy, was devised in 1984 by the administration of Ronald Reagan to impose a draconian set of anti-abortion rules on US overseas family planning programmes. This policy banned US family planning funds from going to foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that provide abortion services, counselling, or referrals, or advocate for liberalisation of their country’s abortion laws–even if they use non-US government funds for these activities. In 1984, and every time the global gag rule has been imposed since then, foreign governments were exempt for diplomatic reasons, as were US-based NGOs on constitutional grounds.

To be clear, legislation was already in place in 1984, and is still in place now, that bans the use of US funds under the Foreign Assistance Act from paying “for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning”. But for anti-abortion activists this Helms Amendment, passed in 1973, did not go far enough; they wanted to limit any activity that could possibly enable or promote abortion. Hence, the global gag rule.

Under Trump’s order, the gag rule now applies not only to US bilateral family planning assistance (US$575 million for fiscal year 2016), but also to all “global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies”–encompassing an estimated $9.5 billion in foreign aid. Foreign NGOs that receive US funding to work on a broad range of health programmes in about 60 low-income and middle-income countries–including on HIV/AIDS, the Zika virus, malaria, tuberculosis, nutrition, and maternal and child health, among others–will potentially be subject to the same ideological restrictions that have hampered family planning aid at points in the past. Thus, President Trump’s version of the global gag rule represents a wider attack on global health aid writ large.

Adding to the widespread concern among US government agencies, global health NGOs, and advocates is the Trump administration’s failure to provide any guidance on the interpretation or application of the new policy.

Those details may emerge in the coming weeks and months. But we already know that, when last in effect, the gag rule crippled family planning programmes. Many foreign NGOs, as a matter of principle and out of dedication to the patients they serve, refused to let the US Government muzzle their abortion advocacy efforts or dictate what services or counselling they provided using their non-US funds. These health providers were forced to reduce staff and services, or even shut clinics. As a result, many thousands of women no longer had access to family planning and reproductive health services from these clinics–sometimes the only provider of such services in the local community. Various actors, including the governments of Canada and the Netherlands, are mobilising to compensate for at least some of the damage that will be done by the gag rule. But the US is the largest funder of global health programmes worldwide, and the disruption this aid effort will suffer is massive.

Moreover, there is no evidence that the global gag rule has ever resulted in its stated aim of reducing abortion. The first study to measure the effect of the gag rule showed that this policy could actually have resulted in an increase in abortions. Another study assessed the gag rule in Ghana and found that because of declines in the availability of contraceptive services, both fertility and abortion rates were higher during the gag rule years than during non-gag rule years in rural and poor populations. This is consistent with anecdotal data that the gag rule’s main effect has been to reduce women’s access to quality contraceptive services, thereby increasing the probability of unintended pregnancy and making recourse to abortion more likely.

But the harmful effects of Trump’s order are likely be even greater. NGOs in lowincome settings often provide integrated health services; for instance, they offer patients contraceptive care, HIV prevention or treatment, maternal health screenings, immunisations, and information on safe abortion care all under one roof. By expanding the gag rule to the full scope of US global health aid, hundreds more national and local NGOs will be forced to choose between drastic funding cuts (if they decline to sign the gag rule) or denying their patients the information and services that are their right (if they sign, and can no longer provide or discuss abortion). Millions of women living in low-resource settings may now be unable to obtain the care they need, when they need it.

The unprecedented scope of the Trump global gag rule validates the fears of many observers: reproductive health and rights worldwide will face a sustained attack in the next 4 years of the Trump Administration. This assault will almost certainly include defunding the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), as well as potentially drastic cuts to US overseas family planning aid. It will be mirrored domestically by efforts to restrict abortion access–for instance, by banning all private and public insurance coverage of abortion or prohibiting the most commonly used method for second-trimester procedures–and to shred the nation’s family planning safety net, including by defunding Planned Parenthood.

It is becoming clearer with each Trump executive order that not only reproductive health but also global health programmes and overall foreign assistance supported by the US Government are in grave jeopardy, as indicated by President Trump’s repeated promises to “put America first”. The social conservatives driving this agenda–who now control the US Presidency and both Houses of Congress–are showing complete disregard for the millions of women, men, and children who will suffer the consequences, intended or not, of these regressive policies.

Trump’s budget eliminates US funding for global family planning and famine relief

by Sarah Wildman

Vox, May 24, 2017

http://www.vox.com â€“ Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/lrtqf72

3.3 million more abortions. 15,000 more mothers dying. 8 million more unplanned pregnancies. Up to 26 million fewer women and couples acquiring contraception and family planning advice.

Those grim numbers from the Guttmacher Institute show the potential real-world impact of the Trump administration’s unprecedented proposed cuts to global family planning efforts; the budget the White House released Tuesday would basically eliminate those programs.

It also calls for gutting a key US famine relief program, slashing half the budget for the USAID’s internal disaster relief organization, and cutting $222 million from funds allocated to fight HIV, AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The justification listed in the budget is a simple hope for others to fill the shortfall:

The United States has been the largest donor by far to global HIV/AIDS efforts, providing over half of global donor funding in recent years to combat this epidemic. The Budget reduces funding for several global health programs, including HIV/AIDS, with the expectation that other donors can and should increase their commitments to these causes.

If Congress were to agree to those cuts (and that’s a big if), advocates say the global impact of America’s abrupt departure from world health and disaster relief would be immediate — and devastating.

“The family planning elimination is the headline here,” said Rachel Silverman, a senior policy analyst on global health at the Center for Global Development. “It will have the most impact on people’s lives.”

But Trump’s proposed cuts to food aid and disaster relief would also deal a major blow to some of the world’s neediest and most desperate. Marilyn Shapley, a top official at the aid group Mercy Corps, said some 70 million people need emergency food assistance, while 20 million more are in famine-like conditions.

“This is going to take away food assistance from 33 million people in a year when famine risk is higher than in decades,” she said in an interview. “Before today I wouldn’t have thought it possible.”

Funding family planning actually makes economic, not just moral, sense

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has taken aim at global family planning and women’s health.

In January, Trump reinstated the “Mexico City Policy,” also known as the global gag rule, which literally bars family planning providers from mentioning abortion in their work. (The United States has long banned funds for abortion services.)

The policy is one that changes depending on the party of the president in power. Obama immediately rescinded the policy when he moved into the White House; Trump, like other Republican presidents before him, immediately reinstated it when he came into office. As I wrote in January, the policy has traditionally limited the ability of global family planning providers to give women and families comprehensive care if in any aspect of their work they recommend, discuss, or even mention abortions to clients, let alone provide abortion services.

But Trump went further than his predecessors. Previous Republican administrations limited the policy to family planning providers; the Trump administration extended the gag rule to all global health providers. That meant health care providers working on everything from maternal and child health to malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and vaccinations were now at risk of losing all US funding if they discussed abortion in their work.

The NGO PAI estimated that the extended gag rule would affect about 15 times more US funding than the gag rule had in the past. In mid-May, when the new rule went into effect, Suzanne Ehlers, president and CEO of PAI, said Trump’s move would do “unspeakable damage to integrated care efforts.”

That’s a problem. With integrated care, a woman can come to a single clinic for, say, vaccines for her children, then see a physician about her own contraceptive needs, and finally seek advice, or refill prescriptions. In other words, she can meet all her family’s health care needs in one spot. For families traveling long distances, an all-in-one clinic makes far more sense than one clinic for maternal health and another for child care and still another for other medical services.

The Trump administration spent the first quarter of 2017 signaling plans to undermine that sort of integrated care by reinstating the gag rule and beginning to reduce US funding for maternal and infant health around the world.

In April, the administration announced it would strip the United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA), which works on reproductive health, family planning, HIV/AIDS, and infant and maternal mortality in more than 150 countries, of all US funding. The putative reason was a specious one.

“This decision is based on the erroneous claim that UNFPA â€˜supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization’ in China,” a statement on the UNFPA website read. “UNFPA refutes this claim, as all of its work promotes the human rights of individuals and couples to make their own decisions, free of coercion or discrimination.”

A State Department memo obtained by the Associated Press found no evidence that US money had supported forced abortion or sterilization in China.

The decision costs the UNFPA $32.5 million in funding from the 2017 budget; the United States was the fourth-largest donor to the organization.

The new budget would hit global health even harder.

Silverman noted that there’s a “dissonance” between White House messages on women and families. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, has claimed to be championing the idea of women’e economic empowerment. That sort of program, Silverman says, would be completely undermined by stripping global family planning from the budget.

“There is a lot of evidence that family planning contributes to women’s empowerment,” says Silverman, ticking off a list of things that planning, delaying, and spacing pregnancies allow women to do — like receiving an education, or even simply advancing at work. “When women have control over fertility, they have control over their lives.”

Silverman points out that USAID directly funds 28 percent of contraceptives and distribution in the developing world.

“If you cross-reference that with the number of women using contraceptives in those countries — a back-of-envelope calculation — that suggests that 10 million women are directly relying on USAID for contraceptives,” she said, adding that enormous numbers of women will “see a major disruption in their lives if this goes through and other donors don’t step up in a major way.”

But there aren’t other donors looking to step in. Jonathan Rucks, who runs PAI’s advocacy efforts, says there is no other donor government that can make up the shortfall, and even major private family foundations, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, simply cannot replace the US on family planning. In February, Bill Gates told the Guardian that Trump’s proposed reinstatement of the global gag rule could “create a void that even a foundation like ours can’t fill.”

“If you are cutting maternal health funding, then you don’t care about survival of women,” Rucks says bluntly. “We are also going to be really frank and say this is not pro-life. This is undermining all your pro-life credentials.”

Global Health in the Trump Era: Reflections on the Backlash

by Michelle Morse

Praxis, May 17, 2017

https://www.kzoo.edu/praxis/global-health-backlash/

Over the past thirty years, American medicine has witnessed an unprecedented expansion in global health engagement amongst its trainees and faculty, partially, if not largely, fueled by the health care injustices lived so dramatically by patients in resource-limited countries around the world during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Initially seen as disruptive, the interventions in the health sectors of Global South countries by American health professionals were eventually accepted as essential acts in the movement towards achieving global health equity. As America experiences the Trump era, endless questions have arisen amongst global health professionals about the implications of Trump’s “America first” platform on global health. Will Trump’s nationalist agenda eliminate funding for life-saving global health programs, cause progressive health professionals engaged in global health to make a reactionary turn towards the fire at home, and even force global health practitioners to more closely examine their own prejudices?

It is no secret that American physicians leading the guard in global health tend to be part of the political left. Global health tends to attract left leaning physicians because of the global health movement’s belief that every human being has a right to receive high quality health care. Asserting that Global North countries have a responsibility to contribute towards strengthening health care systems in the Global South (a redistribution of resources, of sorts), global health offers the opportunity to practically address urgent health care access inequities in the Global South. Considering these principles, global health professionals like myself are deeply frustrated by the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut global health spending at USAID and other similar programs. Though many of us are rightfully drawn towards activism in the USA to resist these moves by the new administration, I worry that the health and health systems of the Global South will suffer if the majority of global health professionals shift to focus domestically without continuing their engagement in global health.

While some would say that the current neoliberal structure of development aid is already ineffective, especially since so many of the aid resources are actually directed back to the country where the aid comes from, what would it mean if global health funding was eliminated, and American global health professionals suddenly focused exclusively on domestic health? Would it allow Global South countries to assume stronger leadership, decision-making, and self-directed problem solving? Or would it mean that Global South communities would be even more deprived of much needed resources and health care access? Post-earthquake Haiti, where I have worked for seven years and lived for two of those years, is one compelling example of both the peril and the potential of aid. Of the $8 billion US funds provided in aid after the earthquake, less than 1% went to the Haitian government who was ultimately responsible for rebuilding the country. Yet, as appalling as this statistic is, it does not adequately describe the individual impact of short- and long-term global health engagement by American health professionals in response to the earthquake. Take EqualHealth for example, the organization I co-founded. EqualHealth is a nongovernmental organization focused on bringing light to the socially determined root causes of illness and creating equity in opportunity for Haitian health professionals whose talent and vision are often overshadowed by negative media narratives about Haiti, weaknesses in the Haitian public health system, and limited opportunities for professional development. All things considered, the reality is that countries like Haiti rely on the shrinking aid from global health programs such as PEPFAR to keep their health systems running despite fluctuations in attention from the donor world. Where Global South countries would find themselves without USAID, or partnership with Global North health professionals, or other mechanisms to ensure more adequate resources for pressing health concerns is as predictable as where Americans, who rely on the Affordable Care Act for health insurance, will find themselves when it is repealed and replaced with a market-based solution.

What I have witnessed in my academic institution is an exciting and growing interest amongst trainees in building infrastructure to resist the new administration’s domestic health care and civil rights policies. To mount a harmonized response, they are looking into establishing indivisible chapters and partnerships with community based organizations, learning and using direct action methods such as bird-dogging, non-violent protest, and holding teach-ins on community organizing. These are often the very same trainees that are also interested in global health. Though many of them are considering careers in global health, opportunities for long-term global health engagement with clear career paths and mentorship are often limited, and may now become even more limited given the policies of the new American administration. On the other hand, recent significant increases in donations to organizations like Planned Parenthood could mean new opportunities for engagement for these trainees, shaping careers focused on domestic health care. This is occurring at a time when structural competency and social medicine are emerging as key areas of focus in medical school and residency curricula, and trainees are being encouraged to engage in activism as a professional obligation rather than aspiration. Health professionals often hesitated to engage in activism as it was not an explicit part of their training, and opportunities to act were difficult to identify, but these barriers seem to be evaporating under the new administration.

In response to mounting evidence documenting how health care provider prejudice impacts health, American medical schools are also developing competencies in which trainees and faculty alike are encouraged to reflect on their personal biases. These competencies are even more relevant now as the policies of this new administration threaten the rights and livelihoods of people of color, women, Muslims, and immigrants. Efforts to establish global health competencies, while laudable, have often been silent on addressing the issues of racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice amongst global health professionals. The social and cultural power and privilege clash that occurs when predominantly white global health professionals from Global North countries descend on countries in the Global South to work hand in hand with local health professionals who are predominantly people of color is a tinderbox for racism and prejudice in all its forms. The global health movement can learn from the new light being shed on the old problem of racism, as a result of the racist policies and messages coming from the Trump administration in its first 100 days. The global health movement needs to take the necessary steps to explicitly address racism and other forms of prejudice amongst its members, and ask honest questions about why more Americans of color are not currently a part of it. The far too common assumption that being left leaning, progressive, or engaged in global health is incompatible with being racist is simply incorrect.

As communities and countries in the Global South continue to suffer the consequences of neoliberalism-induced fragile health systems, some global health professionals may decide to deepen their engagement outside the USA, attempting to flee the nationalist, racist, and sexist trends of the new administration by moving and working abroad. Other global health professionals may decide to engage domestically to resist the actions of the new administration, seeing the battle for health care access and civil rights at home as more urgent and compelling. Ideally, all progressive global health professionals, whether choosing a domestic or globally focused path, will begin to address their own prejudices in new action-oriented ways.

There is a delicate but important balance between advocating for ongoing American engagement in addressing global health inequities, while also addressing domestic health care threats. One shouldn’t be prioritized over the other or at the expense of the other, as they represent two parts of the same global battle for health as a human right that culminated in the Alma Ata Declaration, lost its way, and is reemerging. Perhaps the real test will lie in America’s response under the Trump administration to the next Ebola, the next Zika, or the next HIV/AIDS epidemic.

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AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

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The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the “dumbing down” of America

worker | May 24, 2017 | 8:17 pm | Analysis | Comments closed

The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the “dumbing down” of America

Ray Williams
psychologytoday.com
Sat, 07 Jun 2014 14:57 UTC

Â© reddit.com

There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It’s the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.

Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, “Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.”

There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science have been infused into America’s political and social fabric. Famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Mark Bauerlein, in his book, The Dumbest Generation, reveals how a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital “crap” via social media.

Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America, adds another perspective:

“The rise of idiot America today represents – for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power – the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert.”

“There’s a pervasive suspicion of rights, privileges, knowledge and specialization,” says Catherine Liu, the author of American Idyll: Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique and a film and media studies professor at University of California. The very mission of universities has changed, argues Liu. “We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs.”

Part of the reason for the rising anti-intellectualism can be found in the declining state of education in the U.S. compared to other advanced countries:

After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place. The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50% of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries;
The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs commissioned a civic education poll among public school students. A surprising 77% didn’t know that George Washington was the first President; couldn’t name Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence; and only 2.8% of the students actually passed the citizenship test. Along similar lines, the Goldwater Institute of Phoenix did the same survey and only 3.5% of students passed the civics test;
According to the National Research Council report, only 28% of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13% of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or “intelligent design;”
18% of Americans still believe that the sun revolves around the earth, according to a Gallup poll;
The American Association of State Colleges and Universities report on education shows that the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the proportion of the population aged 35-64 with a college degree, but 19th in the percentage of those aged 25-34 with an associate or high school diploma, which means that for the first time, the educational attainment of young people will be lower than their parents;
74% of Republicans in the U.S. Senate and 53% in the House of Representatives deny the validity of climate change despite the findings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and every other significant scientific organization in the world;
According to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 68% of public school children in the U.S. do not read proficiently by the time they finish third grade. And the U.S. News & World reported that barely 50% of students are ready for college level reading when they graduate;
According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important;”
According to the National Endowment for the Arts report in 1982, 82% of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later only 67% did. And more than 40% of Americans under 44 did not read a single book–fiction or nonfiction–over the course of a year. The proportion of 17 year olds who read nothing (unless required by school ) has doubled between 1984-2004;
Gallup released a poll indicating 42 percent of Americans still believe God created human beings in their present form less than 10,000 years ago;
A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.

In American schools, the culture exalts the athlete and good-looking cheerleader. Well-educated and intellectual students are commonly referred to in public schools and the media as “nerds,” “dweebs,” “dorks,” and “geeks,” and are relentlessly harassed and even assaulted by the more popular “jocks” for openly displaying any intellect. These anti-intellectual attitudes are not reflected in students in most European or Asian countries, whose educational levels have now equaled and and will surpass that of the U.S. And most TV shows or movies such as The Big Bang Theory depict intellectuals as being geeks if not effeminate.

John W. Traphagan, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas, argues the problem is that Asian countries have core cultural values that are more akin to a cult of intelligence and education than a cult of ignorance and anti-intellectualism. In Japan, for example, teachers are held in high esteem and normally viewed as among the most important members of a community. There is suspicion and even disdain for the work of teachers that occurs in the U.S. Teachers in Japan typically are paid significantly more than their peers in the U.S. The profession of teaching is one that is seen as being of central value in Japanese society and those who choose that profession are well compensated in terms of salary, pension, and respect for their knowledge and their efforts on behalf of children.

In addition, we do not see in Japan significant numbers of the types of religious schools that are designed to shield children from knowledge about basic tenets of science and accepted understandings of history – such as evolutionary theory or the religious views of the Founding Fathers, who were largely deists – which are essential to having a fundamental understanding of the world, Traphagan contends. The reason for this is because in general Japanese value education, value the work of intellectuals, and see a well-educated public with a basic common knowledge in areas of scientific fact, math, history, literature, etc. as being an essential foundation to a successful democracy.

We’re creating a world of dummies. Angry dummies who feel they have the right, the authority and the need not only to comment on everything, but to make sure their voice is heard above the rest, and to drag down any opposing views through personal attacks, loud repetition and confrontation.

Bill Keller, writing in the New York Times argues that the anti-intellectual elitism is not an elitism of wisdom, education, experience or knowledge. The new elite are the angry social media posters, those who can shout loudest and more often, a clique of bullies and malcontents baying together like dogs cornering a fox. Too often it’s a combined elite of the anti-intellectuals and the conspiracy followers – not those who can voice the most cogent, most coherent response. Together they foment a rabid culture of anti-rationalism where every fact is suspect; every shadow holds a secret conspiracy. Rational thought is the enemy. Critical thinking is the devil’s tool.

Keller also notes that the herd mentality takes over online; the anti-intellectuals become the metaphorical equivalent of an angry lynch mob when anyone either challenges one of the mob beliefs or posts anything outside the mob’s self-limiting set of values.

Keller blames this in part to the online universe that “skews young, educated and attentive to fashions.” Fashion, entertainment, spectacle, voyeurism – we’re directed towards trivia, towards the inconsequential, towards unquestioning and blatant consumerism. This results in intellectual complacency. People accept without questioning, believe without weighing the choices, join the pack because in a culture where convenience rules, real individualism is too hard work. Thinking takes too much time: it gets in the way of the immediacy of the online experience.

Reality TV and pop culture presented in magazines and online sites claim to provide useful information about the importance of The Housewives of [you name the city] that can somehow enrich our lives. After all, how else can one explain the insipid and pointless stories that tout divorces, cheating and weight gain? How else can we explain how the Kardashians, or Paris Hilton are known for being famous without actually contributing anything worth discussion? The artificial events of their lives become the mainstay of populist media to distract people from the real issues and concerns facing us.

The current trend of increasing anti-intellectualism now establishing itself in politics and business leadership, and supported by a declining education system should be a cause for concern for leaders and the general population, one that needs to be addressed now.

Comment: Professor Patrick Deneen explains how kids have become a generation of know-nothings

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.

Africa/Global: Whose Energy?

worker | May 18, 2017 | 9:43 pm | Africa | Comments closed

AfricaFocus Bulletin May 17, 2017 (170517) (Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“We, the undersigned representatives of African civil society, express our deep concern regarding efforts by the European Union and France to hijack the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), an African-owned and African-led initiative endorsed by all 55 African Heads of State to scale up renewable energy on our continent.” April 6 statement by Pan African Climate Justice Alliance and over 200 civil society networks and groups from 34 African countries.

In light of the threats to the climate coming from the new U.S. administration, it is tempting to look to other leading powers, including those in Europe and Asia, to provide positive examples ofÂ international action on climate change. Yet it is also clear that these actions fall short of what is needed. African activists are taking theÂ lead in pointing out these inconsistencies.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin includes documents and links illustrating that point, both on the continent-side statement cited above and on current mobilization in Kenya against plans for a major new coal plant in Lamu.

For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on energy-related issues, see http://www.africafocus.org/intro-env.php

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

NET hearings ongoing in Lamu

Proceedings of court hearings, 11â€“12 May 2017

deCOALonize: the anti-coal, pro-renewable, pro-community, pro-sustainable development campaign in Kenya

[Excerpts only: for full report with links and photos, see https://medium.com/@deCOAL/ – Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/l3k9xax]

[For additional background see http://www.decoalonize.org/ and http://www.savelamu.org/]

From 11 to 12 May 2017, Kenya’s National Environmental Tribunal (NET) held hearings in Lamu County to consider community groups’ objections regarding the insufficiency of the proposed Lamu coal plant’s Environmental and Social Impact Assessment. They visited the site and heard from witnesses pertaining to the proposed site, local community, and its ecosystem.

NET commissioners on site visit to Lamu

The objections were filed by a handful of residents, Save Lamu, and Natural Justice, in response to the granting of a license for the ESIA by the National Environmental Management Authority. Following this week’s site visit, NEMA will hold a second hearing in Nairobi later this month.

Media coverage of hearings (to date)

Mainstream media coverage of the 11â€“12 May National Environmental Tribunal meetings has been thus far limited to a handful of articles.

A second round of allegations by the County Commissioner Kanyiri accusing anti-coal plant activists of being “used by cartels” appeared in The Star, despite citing no evidence. The Star further reported that Lamu Women Representative Shakila Abdalla pledges to take the matter to High Court (which the community groups already intend to do).

Meanwhile, the Business Daily reported on the anti-coal demonstrations, a silent march through Lamu town, and community views:

Protestors accused the Lamu County government, the National Environment and Management Authority (Nema) and the Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC) of trying to force the project on them. “We will continue fighting till the end. The project is harmful and that’s why it has been rejected in Kitui and other places in this country. We will not allow such kind of a project unless they come up with an alternative and environmental friendly project rather than coal. We are for green energy,” Ishaq Abubakar, a resident opposed to the project said.

[continued at http://tinyurl.com/l3k9xax]

As the World Cuts Back on Coal, a Growing Appetite in Africa

New coal plants in Africa are largely being paid for by China and developed countries that are turning away from the technology at home. Here’s why.

By Jonathan W. Rosen

National Geographic, May 10, 2017

[Excerpts only. For full article see http://news.nationalgeographic.com – Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/lwtqs7g]

Lamu, Kenya – Few places in the world exude a sense of timelessness as Lamu, an island off of Kenya’s northern coast home to the oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa. Lamu’s old town, a UNESCO World Heritage site and an epicenter of Indian Ocean trade for centuries, is a maze of narrow winding streets that cut through neighborhoods of limestone and coral houses, past elaborately carved mahogany doors and several dozen mosques and churches. Only a handful of motor vehicles are allowed on the island; transportation is mainly the domain of donkeys or men pushing wooden carts thorough the tropical swelter.

Yet Lamu Island’s 24,000 residents are faced with what many here call an existential crisis. Some 15 miles north of town, on a sparsely populated seaside area of the mainland formerly used for growing maize, cashews, and sesame, a Kenyan company known as Amu Power is preparing to erect a $2 billion coal power plant, the first of its kind in East Africa.

Financed with Chinese, South African, and Kenyan capital, and built by the stateowned Power Construction Corporation of China, the plant is intended to add 1,050 megawatts of capacity to Kenya’s national grid and power operations of an adjacent 32 berth deep-water port. Both are part of an ambitious government plan to transform Kenya into a newly industrializing, middle-income country by 2030.

The project is controversial in part due to the risks it poses to Lamu’s delicate marine environment, which many fear will harm its two most vital industries: fishing and tourism. Yet it is also emblematic of Africa’s growing appetite for coal, the most polluting form of power generation, which until now has existed in significant quantities only in the continent’s most industrialized country, South Africa.

According to data compiled by CoalSwarm, an industry watchdog, more than 100 coalgenerating units with a combined capacity of 42.5 gigawatts are in various stages of planning or development in 11 African countries outside of South Africaâ€”more than eight times the region’s existing coal capacity. Nearly all are fueled by foreign investment, and roughly half are being financed by the world’s largest coal emitter: China.

This comes at a time when China and India, which accounted for 86 percent of global coal development over the last decade, are putting coal projects on hold at record rates due to existing overcapacity, the lowering cost of renewables, and crippling pollution that is thought to kill more than a million people a year in the case of China alone. Many of the world’s more developed countries are also in the process of phasing out the fuel as a power source.

“So many states are now withdrawing coal because of its emissionsâ€”because of its environmental destruction,” says Walid Ahmed, a member of Save Lamu, a local coalition that’s trying to stop the Amu Power project. “So we don’t see why they should bring it here.”

[for more see http://tinyurl.com/lwtqs7g]

EU, France accused of hijacking ‘Africa-led’ clean energy scheme

April 27, 2017

African head of $10bn programme quits, saying French environment minister SÃ©golÃ¨ne Royal intervened to impose EU-preferred projects

By Megan Darby

http://www.climatechangenews.com – Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/l3t9su7

[For May 10 amd May 17 updates from Climate Change News, see http://tinyurl.com/ka63foh and http://tinyurl.com/mwktayd Notably, French environment minister Royal has moved ahead with her own plan for a replacement for the former director.]

A $10bn clean energy programme launched at the Paris climate talks “by Africa, for Africa” is in turmoil after interventions by the EU and France.

Youba Sokona saw the African Renewable Energy Initiative as a chance for Africans to take control of climate finance. In a resignation letter obtained by Climate Home, the top official of the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), Youba Sokona, accused donors of a deliberate strategy to “railroad” Africans into rubber-stamping projects selected by Europeans.

Matters came to a head in Conakry, Guinea, on 4 March, where the board approved 19 projects worth â‚¬4.8 billion ($5.2bn). By Sokona’s account, the Europeans present “managed to effectively force through” the list, overriding “a string of reservations” expressed by some African members.

“There was evident contempt for, and abandonment of, the AREI principles,” he wrote.

Youba Sokona (Pic: Flickr/Heinrich-BÃ¶ll-Stiftung/Stephan RÃ¶hl)When launched, the AREI was vaunted as a scheme to bring clean power to the continent, on African terms. But many of the projects chosen by European Commission representatives are neither new, renewable nor owned by Africans.

Sokona announced his resignation on the spot and leaves the post at the end of April, with no replacement lined up.

French environment minister SÃ©golÃ¨ne Royal and EU commissioner for international development Neven Mimica led the non-African delegation at the meeting. Mimica’s EU officials chose the projects, but according to Sokona’s letter, Royal asked him to present them to the AREI board. He refused, on the basis he had not seen the list until two days earlier.

High-level representatives from Egypt, the African Development Bank â€“ which hosts the AREI staff â€“ and the African Union expressed concerns at the board meeting about bypassing the AREI screening process. But the presidents of former French colonies Chad and Guinea, Idriss DÃ©by and Alpha CondÃ©, aligned with the Europeans in urging members to give the go-ahead, Climate Home understands.

Two officials from Royal’s private office acknowledged there had been disagreement, but denied Royal had exerted undue influence. President CondÃ© convened the meeting, they said, and Royal was there to “facilitate”.

“Our minister was very keen to help him push forward quickly and efficiently. It was important for everybody to jump-start the initiativeâ€¦ and not have it bogged down by governance issues,” said Royal’s advisors.

This was an “exceptional process”, they added. “The decision was made by the Africans to select the projects as soon as this meeting because they considered that the projects were ready to be moved forward â€“ despite the fact that the governance is not fully set up and finalised.”

A spokesperson confirmed that the European Commission had identified 14 of the projects, at the request of the AREI board. Five that had been first presented at UN climate talks in Marrakech were then added to the list. Minutes of the meeting have yet to be published, nearly two months later.

The incident is a fracture in the solidarity that allowed rich and poor countries to reach a climate agreement in Paris. Under the UN deal, many developing countries put forward their first ever pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Those commitments hinge on financial support from the developed world. But where the money comes from and who controls where it goes remain fraught questions.

In this case, donors â€“ which include Canada, the US and Japan as well as EU member states â€“ pledged to “mobilise” $10 billion by 2020. This is to install 10GW of “new and additional” clean power capacity across the continent.

But while the African technical team expected this to mean new climate finance, the developed countries argued for old money to count towards meeting the 10GW goal. In their joint statement from Paris, they said the money would flow “through a variety of mechanisms”, including a list of existing finance programmes.

The resulting first tranche comes from various development banks and involves only one euro of public funding to 15 of private investment. Critics say the minimal public input indicates the projects were already commercially viable. That suggests the initiative has relabelled business-as-usual, not driven the access to clean energy Africans need.

The list presented by the EU to Africans includes four large grid infrastructure projects, which support clean and dirty energy alike1. An interconnector planned for west Africa will facilitate “large-scale development” of hydropower and natural gas resources, according to the World Bank.

At least one of the initiatives â€“ the Tendaho geothermal project in Ethiopia â€“ got funding approval before the AREI launched.

This was all agreed by the African board, Royal’s advisors stressed. “A lot of these projects, they don’t come out of a bag just like that, a lot of them have been in the pipeline for a long timeâ€¦ If it was not for AREI, maybe these projects would still be in limbo.”

Western private investors stand to benefit from the deals. For example, the privately-owned 30MW Djermaya solar plant in Chad is being developed by a group of companies headquartered in London, Paris and Toronto. Whatever the side-benefits, Chadians will pay for this clean energy and the profits end up in Westerners’ pockets.

This was not the programme Sokona, a Malian with four decades’ experience in energy policy and sustainable development, had in mind.

He laid much of the groundwork for AREI unpaid before being officially appointed to lead the independent delivery unit from August 2016. In a video on the AREI homepage, he explains his intention to “reverse the dynamic” whereby aid donors typically set the agenda. Under his vision, African countries would put forward proposals to be screened by African technical experts and approved by African leaders.

“It is not energy per se. It is how to change the life of the people, how to give to them better conditions, better situation and better future.1 The technology is only a pretext to do that,” Sokona said in the video.

By January 2017, Sokona’s team had identified a pipeline of 442 projects across Africa, but not filtered them through AREI criteria. An AREI report on the list of projects notes the “over-whelming dominance of plans for large regional projects” rather than “transformative” programmes for energy access and capacity building.

At the same time, Royal was taking matters into her own hands. She had assumed the presidency of COP21, the historic 2015 Paris climate summit, after the event. This was a chance to start putting the Paris Agreement into practice. It may also have bolstered her credentials for an (ultimately unsuccessful) bid to lead the UN development programme.

A report presented on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in September 2016 put Royal’s name above the AREI logo. It includes more than 20 photos of her touring African countries and glad-handing leaders. In the foreword, she hails the “extraordinary potential” of the initiative. “Weâ€¦ need Africa to be able to make a real difference with its own solutions,” she writes.

Yet in the end, Africans were left out of the loop. Hearing of the Conakry row, nearly 200 African civil society organisations signed an open letter objecting to the EU “hijacking” the initiative.

Tasneem Essop, founder of the Energy Democracy Initiative in South Africa, described the European players’ behaviour as “absolutely shocking”. “[AREI] was one of the most inspirational initiatives emerging from Africa. We were so desperate for this kind of leadership,” she told Climate Home.

Far from the focus on community access to clean energy Essop hoped for, the EU list represented “business as usual”. And the way it was imposed was all too reminiscent of the history of development finance being dictated by the rich. “We thought we had passed those ways, but this is such an explicit and crude grab, it is mind-boggling that this could have happened now.”

Essop argued that the developed world, which bears most responsibility for causing global warming, has a duty to support Africa in clean growth. “They [donors] think it is charity. It is not charity. This is very much part of the obligations under the UN climate convention.”

The civil society letter calls on the EU and France to surrender any aspiration to board membership and respect the initiative’s autonomy. “AREI must be run by Africans for Africans. Interference in African governance belongs to another era,” it says.

Asked how France would rebuild trust in the process, Royal’s advisors said: “It is an African-led initiative and it is really for the Africans to discuss this and make sure [the process] is inclusive. What our minister can do is mention this to President CondÃ© and she will work to that effect, as a facilitator.”

Stop European Hijacking of the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative

Statement by African Civil Society

April 7, 2017

http://www.pacja.org – Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/kvbysco

We, the undersigned representatives of African civil society, express our deep concern regarding efforts by the European Union and France to hijack the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), an African-owned and African-led initiative endorsed by all 55 African Heads of State to scale up renewable energy on our continent.

AREI (http://www.arei.org) was launched by the African governments with the support of African citizens during COP21 in Paris, with the goal to provide at least 10 billion watts (10GW) of new and additional renewable energy to Africa’s peoples by 2020, and put the continent on course to add at least another 300 GW and achieve universal access to energy for all Africans by 2030. It was supported by $10 billion in pledges for 2015-2020 by developed countries in Paris.

AREI as defined in its framework, principles and work plans is a unique initiative. It is aligned with our values of people-centred approaches, community rights, equity and a bold vision of Africa taking a global lead towards flourishing societies powered by clean, renewable energy.

Since Paris, an Independent Delivery Unit was set up to deliver in accordance with AREI’s people-centred principles and approaches. The expectation was that a Board with Heads of State representing each African sub-region would be established, supported by a technical committee involving broad representation and participation by civil society.

AREI’s integrity and promise of bringing light and energy to Africa’s people is now being gravely threatened by the efforts of the European Union and France for premature, undue approval of ‘their’ projects and seeming attempts to co-opt the initiative to serve their ends, supported by a small handful of Africans. At a Board Meeting convened in Conakry on 4 March, we understand the European Union and France have:

Publicly “announced the preparation of 19 new renewable energy projects, with a total potential investment of â‚¬4.8 billion” (EU press release 4 March – http://bit.ly/2mLxiqG) â€“ when they are actually claiming to provide a mere 1/16th or â‚¬0.3 billion of this amount, not all of which is for “new projects” or even for “renewable energy”, and with no clarity whether any of these are “additional'” efforts.
Managed to have rammed through the Board for adoption these partly EU-funded projects, despite the express objections from some African countries and institutions, and contrary to the principles of African ownership that would expect project priorities and proposals to stem directly from African countries
Ignored and bypassed AREI’s own evaluation process in accordance to its criteria ( http://bit.ly/2mwiMDr) â€“ developed with African and northern government, civil society and otherstakeholder inputs. These require all projects be assessed in line with AREI social, environmental, gender and other principles and safeguards before any approvals can be made
Claiming Board memberships when they seem to have only been invited to the meetings (AREI minutes of the first inaugural board on 29 January – http://bit.ly/2mY6b82) and contrary to the idea there should be one developing and one developed non-African country in the Board.
Pushed for the imposition of EU technical experts to supposedly take control of AREI core documents to be consistent with European interests

All the above seems to have caused the Head of the Independent Delivery Unit, a prominent and well- respected African, to declare his resignation.

These actions have been enabled by one or two African states while the interests of the majority of States, and of Africans, have been set aside.

While we acknowledge that the EU has scaled up support for African renewables since COP21 in Paris, these most recent behaviors are completely unacceptable. Recycling existing projects as “new” ones for AREI virtually ensures it will fail to meet its goal of 10 billion watts of “new and additional renewable energy generation capacity by 2020”, leaving Africans in the dark.

Listing projects in numerous African countries without their consent means these countries may miss out on genuinely new and additional resources from AREI in the future, undermining the legitimate expectations of those countries and their people.

These carefully staged interferences in Africa’s institutions threaten not merely the potential of AREI to deliver new renewable energy, they call into question the independence and sanctity of African governance arrangements, including the African Union.

Based on these concerns, we call on all African States, leaders and people to demand genuinely people- centred renewable energy for Africa, building on the great model set out by AREI and endorsed by all African countries.

We demand:

That the European Union and France step aside and abandon any aspirations to have seats as Board members, and ensure AREI remains African-led and African-owned. AREI must be run by Africans for Africans. Interference in African governance belongs to another era.
Full accountability, transparency and participation must be provided for African states and for civil society in all aspects of AREI. The Initiative cannot and must not become a tool for one or two African States to benefit themselves or their European counterparts.
That any ‘endorsement’ by the Board of the 19 existing EU projects is indefinitely suspended until a thorough review against AREI Criteria, environmental and social safeguards, prior informed consent by the States and citizens concerned, and active civil society participation are undertaken. It must be for individual African states and people, not the EU, to propose projects to AREI.
That all further funding and projects through AREI be genuinely “new and additional” to ensure the delivery of real outcomes for our people, with no more accounting tricks, and to ensure that developed countries are accountable and meet their financial obligations.
That active participation by all civil society constituencies is ensured at all levels of AREI including its governing bodies, its workplan and project development, and project implementation on the ground.
That African countries immediately take action to put AREI back on track and ensure full independence for the Independent Delivery Unit from donors, the African Development Bank and other third parties, and the reinstatement of its Head

We call for all partners in government, academia, faith-based, labour, gender, environmental, community-based organizations, national coalitions and regional and international networks to join us in championing a truly African-led and peoplecentred approach to renewable energy on our continent. AREI needs to succeed.

We hereby sign on to this statement:

Regional Groups & Networks

Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) Kenya [Full list includes almost 200 civil society groups and networks from Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Chad, Djibouti, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe

[Note: an statement of support for the African civil society demands was circulating as this AfricaFocus was prepared, and will be available on-line later today. AfricaFocus will post a link to that statement in the web version of this Bulletin as soon as possible.]

Key excerpts from a semi-final draft of this international letter to the European Union/European Commission and France, are as follows:

“We, the undersigned organizations, are writing to express our dismay at the actions of France and the EU regarding the governance of the Africa Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), and to show our support for the demands of African civil society to reverse these developments.”

“For all these reasons, we fully support the demands of African civil society to reverse recent developments and put the AREI and its leadership and governance back on track, as outlined in their recent statement.”

“The AREI is an African-led initiative that, with proper governance, has the potential to address the energy needs of African peoples and the planet’s climate challenges. Only by respecting the initiative’s African sovereignty, ensuring projects are aligned with AREI criteria, and providing genuine support can the EU and France help to meet these goals.”

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

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Michael Parenti lecture (1986)

worker | May 15, 2017 | 8:20 pm | class struggle, Imperialism, Michael Parenti, political struggle | Comments closed

Michael Parenti: “Globalization and Terrorism”

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Africa: World Bank Financing Land Grabs

worker | May 8, 2017 | 9:09 pm | Africa | Comments closed

AfricaFocus Bulletin May 8, 2017 (170508) (Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“The World Bank Group has indirectly financed some of Africa’s most notorious land grabs, according to a report by a group of international development watchdogs. The World Bank’s private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), is enabling and profiting from these projects by outsourcing its development funds to the financial sector.” – Oakland Institute

This new investigative report, from five international development watchdog organizations, focuses particularly on the role of the World Bank in fueling land grabs in Africa through its financing of private sector investments, for both mining and agriculture. While the problem of appropriation of land by both national elites and financial interests around the world is pervasive in many African countries, these particular projects are notable because they are promoted by a global organization ostensibly dedicated to addressing poverty. The evidence is that the result is the opposite.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a press release from the Oakland Institute and excerpts from the full report, which has references to additional case studies and additional documentation.

In addition to the organizations involved in this report, cited below, other international organizations actively involved in these issues include ActionAid International (see http://www.actionaid.org/land-for for case studies and for campaign materials); Oxfam International (https://www.oxfam.org/en/tags/land-grabs and Global Witness (http://tinyurl.com/k39spqg).

For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on agriculture and related issues, see http://www.africafocus.org/intro-ag.php

On land grabbing in particular, see particularly http://www.africafocus.org/docs12/wb1205.php, http://www.africafocus.org/docs12/sl1205.php, http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/ag1010a.php, http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/ag1010b.php, and http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/ag1010c.php

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

World Bank Fuels Land Grabs in Africa Through Shadowy Financial Sector Investments

Oakland Institute

May 1, 2017

http://www.oaklandinstitute.org – direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/l3dz69p

[full report available at http://tinyurl.com/n2g9b7r]

Oakland, CA — The World Bank Group has indirectly financed some of Africa’s most notorious land grabs, according to a report by a group of international development watchdogs. The World Bank’s private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), is enabling and profiting from these projects by outsourcing its development funds to the financial sector.

Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â AngloGold Ashanti mine in Siguiri in eastern Guinea. Â Â Â Â The mine produces about 300,000 ounces of gold each year.

The report, Unjust Enrichment: How the IFC Profits from Land Grabbing in Africa, was released today by Inclusive Development International, Bank Information Center, Accountability Counsel, Urgewald and the Oakland Institute.

“Pouring money into commercial banks that are driven only by profit motivations is not the way to foster sustainable development,” said Marc Ona Essangui, Executive Director of Brainforest and winner of the Goldman environmental prize in 2009. “In Gabon, this development model has instead enabled a massive expansion of industrial palm oil, which threatens our food security and the ecological balance of Congo Basin’s ancient rainforests.”

“Tens of millions of hectares of land on the African continent have been grabbed by foreign investors in recent years. This has led to loss of life, land, and livelihoods for millions, and threatened the very survival of entire communities and indigenous groups,” commented Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute. “The World Bank must acknowledge that this is not development. It is not poverty reduction. These are investments for corporate profits that exploit and displace people.”

The report is based on a yearlong investigation conducted by Inclusive Development International, which found that IFC-supported commercial banks and private equity funds have financed projects across the world that have forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of people and caused widespread deforestation and environmental damage. In Africa, the investigation uncovered 11 projects backed by IFC clients that have transferred approximately 700,000 hectares of land to foreign investors.

The projects include agribusiness concessions in the Gambela region of Ethiopia that were cleared of their indigenous inhabitants during a massive forcible population transfer campaign in the area; oil palm plantations in Gabon that have destroyed 19,000 hectares of rainforest and infringed on the customary land rights of local communities; and a gold mine in Guinea that led to the violent forced eviction of 380 families.

“These projects are antithetical to the World Bank’s mission of fighting poverty through sustainable development,” said David Pred, Managing Director of Inclusive Development International. “They also make a mockery of the IFC’s social and environmental Performance Standards, which are supposed to be the rules of the road for the private sector activities that the IFC’s intermediaries support.”

The report is the fourth of the investigative series Outsourcing Development: Lifting the Veil on the World Bank’s Lending Through Financial Intermediaries, which follows the trail of IFC money and examines at how it impacts communities around the world.

Inclusive Development International’s yearlong investigation uncovered 134 harmful or risky projects financed by 29 IFC financial-sector clients. These projects are found in 28 countries and on every continent except Antarctica. A database of the findings can be found here (https://goo.gl/UZ90PI).

In response to the concerns raised in the Outsourcing Development investigation and by the IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, IFC Executive Vice President Philippe Le HouÃ©rou recently acknowledged the need for the World Bank Group member to re-examine its work with financial institutions. In a blog post from April 10, Le HouÃ©rou wrote that the IFC would make “some important additional improvements to the way we work,” by scaling back the IFC’s high-risk investments in financial institutions, increasing its oversight of financial intermediary clients and bringing more transparency to these investments, among other commitments.

The IFC has also exited investments in banks highlighted by the Outsourcing Development investigation, including ICICI and Kotak Mahindra in India and BDO Unibank in the Philippines.

“We welcome the IFC’s new commitments to encourage a more responsible banking system by increasing its oversight and capacity building of financial sector-clients moving forward,” said Pred. “However, rather than simply divest, we want to see the IFC work with its clients to redress the serious harms that communities have suffered as a result of the irresponsible investments that we have brought to light.”

“IFC’s collusion in land-grabbing in Africa is deeply shocking, so its pledge to reduce high risk lending to banks is welcome, said Kate Geary, Forest Campaign Manager for Bank Information Centre Europe. “But how can we be sure when there is no disclosure of where over 90 per cent of IFC’s money invested through third parties ends up? The IFC’s financial sector clients must come clean about projects they are financing so they can be held accountable to their commitments to invest responsibly.”

Financial-sector lending represents a dramatic shift in how the IFC does business. After decades of lending directly to companies and projects, the World Bank Group member now provides the bulk of its funds to for-profit financial institutions, which invest the money as they see fit, with little apparent oversight. Between 2011 and 2015, the IFC provided $40 billion to financial intermediaries such as commercial banks and private equity funds. Other development finance institutions have followed suit.

The Outsourcing Development series is available at: http://www.inclusivedevelopment.net/outsourcing-development

A database of IFC Financial Intermediary sub-Investments with serious social, environmental and human rights risks and impacts is available at:

https://goo.gl/UZ90PI

For more information, please contact:

David Pred, Managing Director of Inclusive Development International: +1 917-280-2705; david@inclusivedevelopment.net; Twitter: @preddavid

Kate Geary, Forest Campaign Manager at BIC Europe: +44 7393 189175; kgeary@bankinformationcenter.org

Moritz SchrÃ¶der, Communications Director at Urgewald: +49 17664079965, moritz@urgewald.org

Kindra Mohr, Policy Director at Accountability Counsel: +1 202-742-5804, kindra@accountabilitycounsel.org, Twitter: @AccountCounsel

Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute: +1 510-469-5228; amittal@oaklandinstitute.org, Twitter: @MittalOak

Unjust Enrichment: How the IFC Profits from Land Grabbing in Africa

[Excerpts from full report. Full report available at http://tinyurl.com/n2g9b7r]

On November 7, 2015, Sira BÃ©rÃ©tÃ© was walking home from high school. It was a hot, dry after- noon in remote northeastern Guinea, one of West Africa’s poorest countries.

As BÃ©rÃ©tÃ© approached her village, she heard soldiers shouting. The situation in her community, Kintinian, had been tense for a while, and government security and defense forces had become a regular presence. The commotion alarmed the ninth grader, but she needed to get home. So she kept walking.

BÃ©rÃ©tÃ© heard gunshots. She didn’t have time to react. She felt an immense force slam into her from behind. Her body hurled forward. A bullet entered her back, to the left of her spine, just below her shoulders. It tore through her and exited through the front of her neck.

She remembers the pain. She remembers starting to run. Then she lost consciousness. She doesn’t remember much else.

She found out later that a bystander had rushed her to the hospital. The medical staff saved her life. She spent three months recovering â€” nearly 90 days of agony and trauma â€” before being discharged. Her life has not been the same since.

BÃ©rÃ©tÃ© has dropped out of school. She has lost functional use of her left arm. She is in constant pain. It grips her head, neck and arm, and moves down to her hand and fingers.

She carries more than the pain from that day. She worries that the terror will never leave. “I’m still afraid,” said BÃ©rÃ©tÃ©, her eyes pooling with tears. ” Those soldiers came to brutalize us. They came to take our land.”

Before the shooting, BÃ©rÃ©tÃ© had lived with her father, who maintained a small plum orchard. Their lives were modest. “We always had enough to eat,” she said. But they and approximately 380 other families lived on valuable land.

There was gold under that land, and a mining company wanted it. The firm, called Societe Anglo- Gold Ashanti de Guinee, or SAG, has held a concession since 1998 to mine a 1,500-square-kilometer area that encompassed BÃ©rÃ©tÃ©’s village. In 2015, SAG announced that its existing mines in the concession had been depleted. The company needed new land to mine.

According to numerous community members interviewed for this report, the company moved in with government security and defense forces and compelled the families to sign inventories of their possessions, often at gunpoint. The mixed forces included members of the notorious Presidential Guard, known as the Red Berets, an elite unit that massacred and raped hundreds at a political rally in the capital in 2009.

“I signed over my land with a soldier pointing a gun at me. I had no choice,” said Bassy Camara, 42, a small-scale gold buyer who lost his home and his business. “If you had a man standing over you with a gun, what would you do?”

SAG is a subsidiary of AngloGold Ashanti, a South African gold mining company with operations on three continents. The sole purpose of SAG, a joint venture with the Guinean government, is to mine the concession in Guinea.

AngloGold Ashanti is the world’s third-largest gold mining company. The company generated $4.25 billion in revenue in 2016.

In 2015, the year before BÃ©rÃ©tÃ© and her neighbors were evicted, AngloGold Ashanti received a loan worth 1.4 billion South African rand (approximately $102 million) from two commercial banks located in South Africa. The loan was general in nature, meaning the company could use the money as it chose, including funding its mining operations around the world.

One of those lenders, Nedbank, is a financial-intermediary client of the International Finance Corporation (IFC). The World Bank’s private-sector arm provided Nedbank with $140 million for “cross-border lending across Africa, including capital-intensive projects.” An IFC press release announcing the deal noted that the funding was designed to increase lending for “resource-extraction projects” in Africa, among other goals. Support for AngloGold Ashanti’s gold mine in Guinea falls squarely within the purpose of the IFC’s loan to Nedbank.

Through this financial relationship, IFC money could be used by AngloGold Ashanti to operate and expand the mine in Guinea. Moreover, profits from AngloGold Ashanti and the mine have moved up through Nedbank and on to the IFC, in the form of interest from the loans.

In other words, the IFC, whose mission is to fight poverty and support sustainable private-sector-led development, is both indirectly financing and profiting from a project that is harming and further impoverishing the poor.

The IFC’s exposure to the mine fits a pattern. An ongoing investigation by Inclusive Development International has found that the IFC is indirectly funding some of the most harmful invest- ment projects in the world. The World Bank Group member is doing this by channeling the bulk of its funding through shadowy investments in financial intermediaries, such as commercial banks and private equity funds. The IFC poured over $50 billion between 2010 and 2015 into the financial sector, where it has little control over or even knowledge of how that money is used.

Although the IFC’s financial-sector clients are required to implement the institution’s social and environmental Performance Standards, the evidence suggests that this is not happening in practice, contributing to headline-grabbing abuses. And since the IFC does not publicly disclose the end use of such funds, the World Bank Group can frame the deals in terms of job creation and poverty reduction â€” when in fact the funds often flow to projects that undermine these goals.

When the Nedbank loan was announced, IFC official James Scriven praised the deal. “IFC, the [AfÂ rican Development Bank] and Nedbank share the objective of increasing social and environmental awareness in the financial sector, helping to contribute to more sustainable economic development across Africa,” Scriven said. (The African Development Bank provided a concurrent $140 million loan to Nedbank.)

Yet in Guinea, the IFC’s support for Nedbank has created anything but sustainable development. Deprived of their land and livelihoods, and given paltry compensation by AngloGold Ashanti, the relocated families have spiraled into destitution. “We don’t have enough food for our children,” said Lala CondÃ©, a mother who lost her home.

The mine’s impacts extend far beyond those evicted. Approximately 150,000 people are believed to be living in AngloGold Ashanti’s concession area. They are in danger of being forcibly evicted in the future.

The mine has also caused serious environmental damage. AngloGold Ashanti uses cyanide, a deadly toxin, to wash the gold in preparation for refining. During rainstorms, which occur frequently in tropical Guinea, residual cyanide has flowed into the area’s water sources, killing fish and livestock and poisoning drinking water, according to community members.

AngloGold Ashanti has made a number of promises to the people whose lives it has upended. It has pledged to provide jobs, irrigation, drinking water and electricity to those it evicted. Yet community members say that the company has kept few of those promises.

” The company took everything from us. We’ve been left with nothing. No trees. No water. No jobs,” said Balla Camara, an elected representative of the affected community.

“At this moment, we prefer death to life,” he said.

…

Africa is in the grips of a land-grabbing epidemic. Nearly a decade ago, in the wake of the global financial crisis, food and commodity prices soared, creating an unprecedented money-making opportunity for investors.

Large multinationals, in search of cheap land to grow crops and extract minerals, rushed to Africa to make deals. Huge swaths of land have been granted to these firms, mainly in the form of long-term leases for mining and agro-industrial projects.

Between 2008 and 2010 alone, investors acquired between 53 million and 61 million hectares of land on the continent, an area roughly the size of Ukraine, according to an academic analysis of media reports collected by the International Land Coalition.

National policy makers and international development institutions, including the World Bank, have enabled this trend by promoting large-scale land investments as a catalyst for rural development. Supporters contend that these projects increase the productivity of under-used land and create jobs in countries rich in natural resources but poor in capital.

Yet by encouraging foreign investment in land that was deemed “idle” or “empty,” these policies have enabled the seizure of land that local people have sustainably used and managed according to their traditions for centuries. To those affected, these deals have been nothing more than land grabs, resulting in dispossession and displacement on a massive scale.

The World Bank Group has been at the center of this storm. Through its advisory services, the IFC has encouraged governments to make land easily available to investors by setting up land banks and similar one-stop investment shops. Acknowledging the environmental and social risks of large-scale land deals, the bank’s leadership has argued that these can be managed and minimized through the adoption of voluntary codes of conduct, to which investors and governments could be persuaded to adhere.

The IFC has also provided direct financial support for companies to develop largescale industrial plantations. These investments have, however, been limited since 2009, when the bank’s then president, Robert Zoellick, instituted a temporary moratorium on lending to the palm oil sector, following a damning investigation by the IFC’s ombudsman into complaints of land grabbing and deforestation by an IFC client in Indonesia. While the palm oil moratorium was lifted in 2011, the IFC has been hesitant to invest directly in large-scale land projects because they inevitably â€” and visibly â€” run afoul of its environmental and social standards.

But IFC money is still flowing to these projects in Africa â€” through the murky back channel of financial intermediaries. By following this trail of money, Inclusive Development International has revealed that the IFC has contributed to some of the most notorious land grabs on the continent.

In Ethiopia, the IFC indirectly financed the Indian agribusiness company Karuturi Global through ICICI, a top Indian bank that the IFC provided with $150 million in 2006. In 2010, with financing from ICICI, Karuturi signed long-term leases for 111,000 hectares of land to develop sugarcane, corn and oil palm plantations in the Gambella region. Thousands of indigenous Anuak and Nuer people were forcibly displaced from the area that was simultaneously offered to foreign investors, including Karuturi, under the government’s “villagization” program, according to the Oakland Institute.

In Gabon, Ecobank Transnational, an IFC financial-sector client, has financed oil palm plantations and processing facilities operated by the Singaporean company Olam. The project is being developed on a 300,000-hectare concession that local and international environmental groups warn threatens to destroy large areas of the Congo Basin rainforest, harming biodiversity and the liveli- hoods of thousands of people.

Export-oriented industrial sugarcane plantations in Sierra Leone and Zambia, funded by multiple IFC financial intermediaries, have been accused of grabbing small-holder farmland and displacing thousands of people, leading to declining incomes and food security.

The IFC’s exposure to these projects demonstrates the risks of financial-sector lending. Yet the World Bank Group member has doubled down on the practice in recent years. The institution’s outstanding commitments to commercial banks, private equity funds and other financial intermediaries have risen by 45% since 2010. According to the IFC’s own data, between 2013 and 2015, its lending to financial intermediaries categorized as “high-risk” jumped by 300%, from $450 million to $1.3 billion.

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Joseph V. Stalin- Address to the people on May 9th 1945 (Victory Speech)

worker | May 8, 2017 | 6:50 pm | Fascist terrorism, J. Stalin, political struggle, USSR | Comments closed

Monday, May 8, 2017

Joseph V. Stalin- Address to the people on May 9th 1945 (Victory Speech)

https://communismgr.blogspot.com/2017/05/joseph-v-stalin-address-to-people-on.html

Speech by the Marshal of the Soviet Union

Joseph V. Stalin.

May 9, 1945.

Comrades! Fellow countrymen and countrywomen!

The great day of victory over Germany has arrived. Fascist Germany, forced to her knees by the Red Army and the troops of our Allies, has admitted defeat and has announced her unconditional surrender.

On May 7 a preliminary act of surrender was signed in Rheims. On May 8, in Berlin, representatives of the German High Command, in the presence of representatives of the Supreme Command of the Allied troops and of the Supreme Command of the Soviet troops, signed the final act of surrender, which came into effect at 24 hours on May 8.

Knowing the wolfish habits of the German rulers who regard treaties and agreements as scraps of paper, we have no grounds for accepting their word. Nevertheless, this morning, the German troops, in conformity with the act of surrender, began en masse to lay down their arms and surrender to our troops. This is not a scrap of paper. It is the actual capitulation of the armed forces of Germany. True, one group of German troops in the region of Czechoslovakia still refuses to surrender, but I hope the Red Army will succeed in bringing it to its senses.

We now have full grounds for saying that the historic

day of the final defeat of Germany, the day of our people’s great victory over German imperialism, has arrived.

The great sacrifices we have made for the freedom and independence of our country, the incalculable privation and suffering our people have endured during the war, our intense labours in the rear and at the front, laid at the altar of our motherland, have not been in vain; they have been crowned by complete victory over the enemy. The ago-long struggle of the Slavonic peoples for their existence and independence has ended in victory over the German aggressors and German tyranny.

Henceforth, the great banner of the freedom of the peoples and peace between the peoples will fly over Europe.

Three years ago Hitler publicly stated that his task included the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and the severance from it of the Caucasus, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic and other regions. He definitely said: “We shall destroy Russia so that she shall never be able to rise again.” This was three years ago. But Hitler’s insane ideas were fated to remain unrealized — the course of the war scattered them to the winds like dust. Actually, the very opposite of what the Hitlerites dreamed of in their delirium occurred. Germany is utterly defeated. The German troops are surrendering. The Soviet Union is triumphant, although it has no intention of either dismembering or destroying Germany.

Comrades! Our Great Patriotic War has terminated in our complete victory. The period of war in Europe has closed. A period of peaceful development has been ushered in.

Congratulations on our victory, my dear fellow countrymen and countrywomen!

Glory to our heroic Red Army, which upheld the independence of our country and achieved victory over the enemy!

Glory to our great people, the victor people!

Eternal glory to the heroes who fell fighting the enemy and who gave their lives for the freedom and happiness of our people!

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Joseph V. Stalin- Address to the people on May 9th 1945 (Victory Speech)

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Joseph V. Stalin- Address to the people on May 9th 1945 (Victory Speech)

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