China’s Unaddressed Mental Health Problems

Cesar Chelala

China has a complex history in the treatment of the mentally ill. In 1849, the first mental institutions in the country were founded by Western missionaries. One of them, Dr. John G. Kerr, instituted some principles which are even valid today. Among those principles were the following: mentally ill patients shouldn’t be blamed for their actions; those that were hospitalized were not in a prison but in a hospital and should be treated as human beings, not as animals.

During the Cultural Revolution there were changes that lead to strong political control, over-diagnosis and treatment, a change that overshadowed patients’ real needs. Many mentally-ill patients were sent to labor camps because of their ‘counterrevolutionary behavior’. Western models of treatment were gradually introduced only after the reforms advocated by Den Xiaoping. Today, however, serious problems remain such as the high number of untreated mentally ill patients, inadequate services, and lack of trained personnel.

The spectrum of mental illness is broad, and includes minor conditions such as anxiety to depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and other problems that may lead to drug addiction and serious crimes. In 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated that mental illness –which affected seven percent of the population- had overtaken heart disease and cancer as the biggest burden on China’s health care system.

According to a study by The Lancet, roughly 173 million Chinese suffer from a mental health disorder. 158 million of those have never received professional help for their disease. Despite this high number, China averages only one psychiatrist for every 83,000 people –approximately one twelfth the ratio in the United States and other industrialized countries. This led one professional psychiatrist to remark, “We are like pandas. There are only a few thousand of us.”

The need for psychiatrists, however, is growing. According The Lancet, the incidence of mental disorders had increased more than 50 percent between 2003 and 2008. Although some of these cases can be due to improved diagnosis, most cases can result from more stressful life conditions. These conditions may be one of the causes for the increasing number of individual who commit violent crimes.

Depression is China’s second most commonly diagnosed disease, and has a huge economic cost in terms of lost work days and medical expenses. In recent years, depression has replaced schizophrenia as the most common mental disease at China’s top mental health facility, Beijing’s Anding Hospital.

According to some estimates, more than 260 million people were struggling with at least mild depression in 2011, and depression-related deaths such as suicides even exceed traffic fatalities. In 2007, China’s Medical Association estimated that two-thirds of depression sufferers had harbored suicidal thoughts at least once, and 15 to 25 percent ended their lives on their own.

As the number of mentally ill people increase in China, efforts to expand insurance coverage haven’t kept pace. According to some statistics, in recent years only 45,000 people have been covered for free outpatient treatment and 7,000 for free inpatient care. This is a vastly inadequate response to a most serious problem. In Beijing, almost 90 percent of mental patients do no receive inpatient treatment, either because it is too expensive or because hospitals do not have enough room for them.

Huge needs in the treatment of the mentally ill have led to an increase of unregistered and inadequately trained psychologists who are unable to provide proper diagnosis and treatment to the patients. As a result, many patients end up with a worsening of their symptoms.

The lack of professionals in medicine and psychology should be urgently addressed. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security is now expanding the country’s professional ranks by modifying criteria to certify mental health counselors. These counselors can treat patients suffering from minor depression symptoms and thus alleviate the work of psychologists and medical doctors who could address more severe cases.

Additional steps should be taken, however. They include bringing foreign doctors to help train local students on mental health’s most pressing issues and sending more Chinese students for specialization overseas. At the same time, the government should build more mental health facilities and improve insurance policies to help those patients in greater need. The Chinese government should treat mental health needs as the emergency it truly is.

The Global Elite’s Crimes Against Humanity

Colin Todhunter

For thousands of years, people have been writing about happiness. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus concluded that happiness lies in the pursuit of external pleasure. Others, from Antisthenes to Buddha, have stressed that looking inwards and leading an ascetic life based on virtue, simplicity and inner peace is the route to happiness. And then there are those like Schopenhauer who seem to think that we can only be occasionally happy in what is essentially a miserable world: life only oscillates like a pendulum, back and forth between pain and boredom.

Happiness is, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “a state of well-being and contentment: a pleasurable or satisfying experience.”

For some, happiness runs much deeper than merely being content. Aristotle held that being virtuous was only one aspect of happiness. In the absence of say wealth and intelligence, virtue could only bring about a form of contentment.

But sometimes that’s not enough. Certain people strive to achieve an ongoing state of bliss, of feeling at one with the universe and everything in it. Through years of meditation, self-reflective practice or consciousness development, they can learn to transcend the illusion of existence and live life on a higher reality. A case of ignoring reality while striving to live out an illusion?

However, let’s not get too caught up in cynicism here. Illusion is all around us – both on a personal level and on a wider political level. The type of society we live in has a huge bearing on happiness or well-being.

From Bernays to Albright: ‘their’ happiness, our misery

Virtually every government in the world creates an illusion for its people. Take economic policy. Government policies might hurt us in the short term, but we are all on a one way route to the ‘promised land’ of happiness, or so we are told by the politicians, the corporate media and spokespersons for the ones who make us suffer to ensure they never have to – the privileged elite, the ruling class.

Western governments set out to con ordinary working folk by bringing us war in the name of peace, austerity in order to achieve prosperity and suffering to eventually make us happy. Is there any room for truth? Politicians never like to tell the public the truth. The feel-bad factor is never a vote winner. Best to keep the public in the dark and rely on positive spin. If people knew the truth, they just wouldn’t be happy.

And selling the feel-good factor is all pervasive. In this age of irretrievable materialism, the route to happiness is more goods, better goods, newer goods. A never-ending smorgasbord of commodities to be craved for. In league with private corporations, governments have learnt to play on our desires to create a one-dimensional type of happiness based on consumerism.

In part, Edward Bernays is responsible for this. The father of modern public relations and propaganda, he was expert in manipulating human perceptions of pain and pleasure, misery and happiness. Tap into or shape people’s desires in a certain way, and you can sell virtually any notion of happiness (or reality), regardless of how bogus it may be.

Whether it was whipping up mass fear in the US about the bogeyman of communism or selling the ‘American Dream’ of happiness through consuming goods, Bernays and the advertising industry, which took its cue from him, were able to marry misery and happiness together – if you do not buy into consumer capitalism, the alternative will be misery; if you do not buy this or that product, life will be terrible; if you do not join in the celebration of capitalism, those awful Soviets will take over and impose a fundamentally unhappy system of equality on each and every one of us.

Under US capitalism, the lie was that everyone would all live happily ever after because of, not in spite of, gross inequality, massive privileges and disadvantages and exploitation of labour, which all went under the notion of meritocracy and a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.

Bernays’ propaganda techniques set the stage for con-trick of ‘liberal democracy’.

The US government quickly learned that angels and demons could be manufactured out of thin air and, from Guatemala, Congo and Vietnam to Iraq wars and destabilisations could be built on packs of lies – lies about evil-doers about to kick down the door, lies about the impending misery they would inflict on the US and on far away countries and lies about the government delivering us from impending doom.

Of course, it is best to arm ourselves to the teeth with nuclear weapons to ensure no one imposes their miserable regimes or awful ways of life on us. And to prevent us all shuddering with the fear of the threat of nuclear Armageddon on a daily basis, it’s a case of don’t worry, be happy, forget about it and watch TV. Even the very real danger of near-instant annihilation of the species is shoved to one side for the sake of a feel-good culture.

And the best way to instill that feeling is to have us endlessly treading around a wheel in a cage. Millions are locked into the pursuit of the Bernay’s model of happiness. They are locked into addiction. Addicted to the pursuit of acquisition, of hedonism, of chasing the dream. Addicted to the belief that there is a point to it all, where happiness is achieved by acquisitive materialism.

But, to paraphrase a sentiment from Buddhism: someone, somewhere, may well be suffering on our behalf for this happiness, this hedonism. There is no ‘may be’ about it.

So much blood has been spilled by those unfortunate enough to have been born in certain parts of the world on behalf of people in other parts of the world who deem the need to possess resources to be more worthy than the lives destroyed in order to grab them. Recall Madelaine Albright saying the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was a price worth paying for furthering the geo-political interests of US corporations. And yes, a drone attack here, some ‘collateral damage’ there, and those boys in the US control centres are happy with a hard days killing.

In the US Declaration of Independence, there is the phrase “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Freedom and happiness (or the pursuit of it) is central, albeit built on the misery of others.

‘Life’, ‘liberty’ and ‘happiness’ have become debased. Fed to the masses, happiness has been confused with excessive individualism and the never-ending pursuit of material goods. It became hijacked by the likes of Bernays. With his knowledge of psycho-analysis (Sigmund Freud was his uncle), he knew it was relatively easy to manipulate desires and get people hooked on indulging in certain behaviour, even if ultimately they don’t really want or need those consumer products, those ‘false needs’, they strive to acquire. Getting them hooked is what really counts.

You have no time to think about the disillusionment because you are all too busy buying the next quick-fix for happiness product. It’s called retail ‘therapy’ for good reason. A therapy that has no long-term benefit. It’s a feel-bad, feel-good then feel bad again spiral.

But who needs this form of ‘happiness’, this type of ‘liberty’, ultimately underpinned by an Albright-esque view of life and death? No one. Yet the masses are encouraged to swallow the lies. The propaganda is pervasive.

Look no further than all those feel-good Hollywood trash films, passed off as ‘blockbusters’, that gloss over or usually ignore all the mundane, miserable aspects of life in working class ‘America’. Little wonder half the world seems to want to live in the US. The need to portray a bogus notion of happiness has served to kick reality into touch. The Hollywood propaganda machine has seen to that.

The ‘wealth creators’ and their crimes against humanity

The great ‘American Dream’ was built on craving and propaganda. It was built on stripping the environment bare, on the unsustainable raping of nature to fuel profits, perpetual war and misery and suffering. The sociologist C.Wright Mills noted the existence of a post-war power elite in the US back in 1956. An integrated power elite of big corporations, the military and the political establishment. Fast forward 57 years and it is responsible for a body count of ten million dead and counting, a statistic, a dirty secret that Hollywood will never tell. Ten million slaughtered in US-backed wars and by death squads, covert ops and destabilisations (see this). Drug-running and the exporting of terror and murder, glorified by countless Hollywood icons, commentators and politicians under the banner of championing freedom and democracy.

The system in place exists to benefit not the majority, but small a minority of just 6,000 to 7,000 people, according to David Rothkopf. These are the extremely wealthy of the world who have cemented their position on the back of their ancestors and hundreds of years of capitalism. These are the people setting the globalisation and war agendas at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO. They are from the highest levels of finance capital and transnational corporations. These billionaires, this transnational capitalist class, dictate global economic policies and decide on who lives and who dies and which wars are fought and inflicted on which people. Although they are having a bit of difficulty in kick-starting it right now, with their see-through lies and hypocrisy, Syria is a case in point.

Their crimes against humanity are never mentioned as such. Instead, these people are called ‘wealth creators’. They are the self-anointed role models and captains of industry. The high flyers who have stolen ordinary people’s wealth, who have stashed it away in tax havens, who have bankrupted economies because of their reckless gambling and greed and who have imposed a form of globalisation that results in devastating destruction and war for those who attempt to remain independent from them, or structurally adjusted violence via privatisation and economic neo-liberalism for millions in countries that have acquiesced.

Little wonder then that attempts to redress the balance, to snatch control away from this criminal class, have been brutally suppressed over the decades. From democratic leftist organisations to any government pursuing a socialist alternative, this class has used intelligence agencies or military might to attempt to subvert or annihilate any opposition.

From El Salvador and Chile to Egypt and India’s tribal belt, ordinary folk across the world have been subjected to policies that have resulted in oppression, poverty and conflict. But this is all passed off by politicians and the corrupt mainstream media as the way things must be. And anyone who stands up to this lie is ridiculed at best or spied upon, tortured and killed at worst in order to prevent the truth from emerging. And that truth is that many of us know what ‘happiness’ really is, the type of society necessary to establish it – based on communality and economic equality – and that the immensely wealthy people who stand in its way do all things necessary to prevent us from having it. Socialism is not a dirty word.

Various well-being surveys indicate that happier societies invest heavily in health, welfare and education, are more equal and live within the limits imposed by the environment. Many less wealthy countries (and wealthy) do well in such surveys because cultural priority is placed on family and friends, on social capital rather than financial capital, on social equity rather than corporate power. It’s no coincidence that people in places like Britain and the US appear to be less happy than they were 40 years ago.

Karl Marx knew that self-actualisation was to be truly achieved in a society that makes it possible for someone to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as he has a mind. Being ‘happy’ is state of being, a state of worthwhile endeavour freely chosen and not imposed. It is not achieved through the pursuit of an ultimate unattainable elusive goal on a never ending treadmill of drudgery, a never ending treadmill of control. Not a fixed end point to be achieved by possessing a hundred latest, cutting edge consumer gadgets and indulging in the individualised competition of conspicuous consumption that proclaims ‘look at me, I’m better than you, I’m elevated from the crowd’. And by elevating oneself in such a way, the gregarious human animal is cut off from the wider group and may ultimately become rather unhappy.

And yet it is ordinary working class men (and women) who sign up to join the military and support this system on behalf of these immensely wealthy people. Such people have however always been adept in manipulating the masses to rally around flag and nation, evoking an emotive misplaced sense of patriotism to pursue their militarism or justify their exploitation.

In his book ‘A People’s History of England’, The Marxist academic AL Morton documented how ordinary people, over many hundreds of years, set out to challenge these rulers and often paid with their lives. Nothing ever came for free and ordinary working people fought tooth and nail for any rights that they managed to obtain

Such a travesty then, that today, ordinary people are denied economic opportunities because this class has sold their jobs to the lowest bidder in India, China or elsewhere. This class and its ‘think tanks’ were determined to shatter the post-war Keynesian consensus based on a robust welfare state and government intervention in the economy to help secure full employment. Any notions of ‘fairness’ and the benefits to be derived from the welfare state were to be substituted for positive notions about the free market and individual responsibility in order to justify the real intention of shifting the balance of power towards elite interests.

With workers’ wages having been depressed over a period of decades, demand having thus been propped up by debt and bankers demanding to be bailed out, how convenient that the lie of ‘austerity’ is being used as a battering ram to finish off what the likes of Reagan and Thatcher did in the 80s with their pro-big business, pro-privatisation, anti-union, anti-welfare policies.

And we are supposed to thank ‘them’ for this? To vote for ‘their’ politicians, to join in a media circus to celebrate the birth of another royal parasite, to support their killing in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere?

Yes, we are supposed to back them and take in the poisonous lie that ‘we are all in it together’. And ordinary young men (and women) are supposed to sign up to fight their wars.

The working classes, the great, great grandchildren of the cannon-fodder ‘heroes’ sacrificed en masse on the blood-soaked battlefields of countless other wars that have gone before can now join up to fight again. For what? Austerity, powerlessness, imperialism, propping up the US dollar. For whom? Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, BP, JP Morgan, Black Rock, Boeing and the rest.

The US economy has been hollowed out. Much of manufacturing has been shipped abroad. For those who benefitted, the US can go to hell in a handbasket, and it has. Meanwhile, for them, record profits ensue. It’s the ability to maximise profit by shifting capital around the world that matters to them, whether on the back of distorted free trade agreements which open the gates for plunder, or through coercion and militarism which merely tear them down.

In places like India, it cuts both ways. ‘Free’ trade and a state enforced militarism that both result in countless deaths and the forced removals of hundreds of thousands of the nation’s poorest folk from their lands and villages for the benefit of powerful corporations and a bogus notion of development. “I love my India” well-off ordinary urban dwellers often say. Patriotism has always been a distraction, a tool to be ignited by the oppressors at will among the masses.

As societies become hollowed out, with empty echoes of patriotism ringing out, they increasingly resemble boxes. The only thing inside however is a giant, brutal mechanical hand. There is nothing else apart from it. And it’s only function is to pull the lid shut if anyone ever dares to tear it open and shed light into the box. If successful, they will see the immorality, the lies, the hypocrisies. The social control based on the subversion of life, liberty and happiness.

Praying for Peace While Waging Permanent War?

Bill Quigley

Memorial Day is, by federal law, a day of prayer for permanent peace.   But is it possible to honestly pray for peace while our country is far and away number one in the world in waging war, military presence, military spending and the sale of weapons around the world?

Permanent War

Since 1980 the US has engaged in aggressive military action in 14 countries in the Islamic world alone, according to research published in the Washington Post: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-), Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. In this hemisphere, US military forces invaded Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989), and landed 20,000 military forces in Haiti (1994).

US Global War Machine

The US has 1.3 million people in the military and another million serve in the military reserves. The US has over 700 military bases in 63 countries across the world deploying over 255,000 US military personnel there. The Department of Defense officially manages over 555,000 buildings on 4400 properties inside the US and in over 700 properties across the globe.   The US has over 1500 strategic nuclear warheads, over 13,000 military aircraft, dozens of submarines, many of which carry nuclear weapons, and 88 huge destroyer warships.

Global Harm

Nearly 7000 US military people died as a result of the wars waged by the US since 9/11. Just as important, in Iraq over 216,000 combatants, most of them civilians, have died since the 2003 invasion.  No one even counted civilian deaths in Afghanistan for the first five years of our war there. Our drone attacks have murdered hundreds of children and hundreds of civilian adults in Pakistan and dozens more in Yemen.

World Leader in War Spending

US military spending is about the same as the total of military spending by the next eight largest countries combined, that is more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, UK, India and Germany combined.

Since 9/11 US spending on our military cost well over $3 trillion. Direct combat and reconstruction costs for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11 have officially cost US taxpayers $1.6 trillion dollars according to the Congressional Research Service.   Additional trillions have been spent on growing the Pentagon budget and for present and future increased health and disability benefits for veterans.

The US military captures 55 percent of our national discretionary spending and spending on veterans benefits is another 6 percent. Since 9/11 military spending has increased by 50 percent while spending on other discretionary domestic spending increased by 13 percent according to the National Priorities Project.

Corporate War Profiteers

With these trillions being spent on war, there are legions of corporations profiting.

The number one war profiteer is Lockheed Martin, according to USA Today, with annual arms sales of $36 billion. Not surprisingly Lockheed Martin spends over $14 million a year lobbying the people who make the decisions about how much money is spent on weapons and which weapons will be purchased. Their CEO is paid over $15 million,according to their 2015 shareholder report, and on their board is James Ellis, a former Admiral and Commander in Chief of US Strategic Air Command, who gets paid over $277,000 for the part time work and James Loy, former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, who gets over $260,000 for his part time work. Lockheed receives substantial government contracts amounting, by one calculation, to over $260 from each taxpaying household in the US. They are so entitled that a 2014 special investigation by the US Department of Energy found Lockheed used taxpayer funds to lobby for more taxpayer funds.

Number two war profiteer is Boeing with annual arms sales of $31 billion. Boeings spends over $16 million a year lobbying. The rest of the top ten corporations profiting from war include BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Raytheon, EADS, Finmeccanica, L-3 Communications, and United Technologies. You can track their corporate contributions to members of Congress, especially the politicians on the Appropriations Committees of the House and Senate on Open Secrets.

While most of the lobbying money has gone to Republicans, all the arms merchants hire lobbyists who can influence Democrats and Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

And these war profiteers do not just sell to the US government. The US sold more than $26 billion in weapons to foreign nations and has been number one for a long time though recently that title has been going back and forth with Russia as to which is the world biggest international arms merchant.

What To Do

On April 4, 1967, in his famous Riverside Church address, Martin Luther King Jr. said the US government was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. In response he called for a true revolution of values. This revolution calls us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies including war and the contrast of wealth and poverty in our own country and across the world.

Former US President and General Dwight Eisenhower warned citizens as he left office of the growing military industrial complex. He saw the influence of the war machine and urged all citizens to be alert and force “the huge industrial and military machinery of defense” to respond to democracy and the peoples’ desires for peace.

What must we do? First, we must learn the facts and face the truth that the US is the biggest war maker in the world. Second, we must commit ourselves and organize others to a true revolution of values and confront the corporations and politicians who continue to push our nation into war and inflate the military budget with the hot air of permanent fear mongering. Third, we must admit what our country has been doing wrong and we must make amends for the violence the US has waged on countries all over our world. Fourth, we must withdraw our military from all other countries, dramatically downsize our military, disarm our nuclear weapons, and truly stick to defending our own country. Fifth, we must work for peaceful, just solutions for conflict here at home and across our world. Only when we work for the day when the US is no longer the world leader in war will we have the right to pray for peace on Memorial Day.

Africa’s Second Liberation

Garikai Chengu

On Monday many African Government offices, businesses and banks grind to a halt in order to commemorate Africa Day. In schools up and down the continent, little children are taught that heroic Africans liberated the continent from racist white colonial regimes and various events and parades are held to celebrate the occasion.

Colonialism in Africa is remembered as one of the worst crimes against humanity of the modern era. The exploitative economic system that underpinned colonialism remains alive and well today.

Africa’s liberation was from racist, colonial government. If this was to be the first stage of liberation, than the second stage must involve freeing Africa from the current white minority, who controls the majority of African land and resources.

True African liberation involves three stages: first, the redistribution of land and natural resources from the white minority to the black majority; second, the rejection of the IMF and World Bank’s counter-developmental neoliberal policies; and third, development of mineral refinement capacity.

Under Gaddafi, Libya was a shining example of how Africans can liberate themselves from Western exploitation and enrich its own people.

In 1967 Colonel Gaddafi inherited one of the poorest nations in Africa; however, by the time he was assassinated, Gaddafi had used the three stages of true African liberation to turn Libya into Africa’s wealthiest nation. Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.

Gaddafi practiced the redistribution stage of liberation by nationalizing oil wealth to sustain progressive social welfare programs for all Libyans. Prior to Colonel Gaddafi, King Idris let Standard Oil essentially write Libya ‘s petroleum laws. Mr. Gaddafi put an end to all of that. Money from oil proceeds was deposited directly into every Libyan citizen’s bank account. Under Gaddafi’s rule, Libyans enjoyed not only free healthcare and free education, but also free electricity and interest-free loans.

Gaddafi’s greatest crime, in the eyes of NATO, was his desire to put the interests of local labour above foreign capital by adhering to the second stage of liberation and rejecting IMF and World Bank neoliberal policies. In fact, in August 2011, President Obama confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of the African IMF and African Central Bank.

Gaddafi was assassinated by the West at a time when he was embarking on a continental mineral refinement program that would have dramatically shifted the economic balance between Africa and the West.

Gaddafi was willing to financially support any African governments that desired to undergo the redistribution stage of liberation.

The World Bank estimates that a staggering 65 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa’s best arable land is still controlled by white settlers or multinational corporations. The World Bank also estimates that as much as 70 percent of the net wealth in Sub-Saharan Africa is owned by non-indigenous Africans or foreigners.

Nowhere is this racial disparity more acute than in Africa’s richest nation. South Africa is the continent’s most powerful nation, however, it is also the continent’s most economically colonized nation.

The American investment bank, Citigroup, recently ranked South Africa as the world’s richest country, in terms of its mineral reserves, worth an estimated $2.5 trillion. South African Whites and Western foreigners own a staggering 80 percent of this wealth.

Zimbabwe is a prime example of how redistributing African wealth and land is not only desirable in theory but also possible in practice.

At Independence, a staggering 42 percent of Zimbabwe’s land area was owned by just 4,000 white farmers. Today, that land has been divided and redistributed amongst 413,000 Black households. This economic and political shift benefits over 1,000,000 people.

Land redistribution is now possible in all African countries after Zimbabwe’s successful example.

African ownership of African resources is important but exposing and dismantling the financial imperialism, which prevents African economies from thriving is the crucial second stage of African liberation.

Financial imperialism involves Western capitals using the IMF and World Bank to overburden African economies with debt and force their governments to enact neoliberal, counter-developmental policies, such as privatization, austerity and structural adjustment that put the interests of foreign capital over local labour.

Through debt and neoliberalism, the IMF and World Bank exert de-facto control over the economies of many African States. The World Bank and IMF control most African currencies, determine macro-economic policy, and national budgets. The indebted African State is thus left with just its judicial functions and above all, the maintenance of internal public order. This is one crucial State function the Western creditors want nothing to do with.

As Ghana’s founding father Kwame Nkrumah, pointed out, the essence of financial imperialism is that, “the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”

According to a recent UN Africa Progress Report, Africa loses 63 billion dollars, each year, through foreign multinational corporations’ illegal tax evasion and exploitative practices. This figure surpasses all the money coming into the continent through Western aid and investment.

In Africa, poverty and underdevelopment are the symptoms; debt and neoliberalism are the cancer. The cure is a long-sustained dose of industrialization through mineral refinement.

Mineral refinement is the final stage of true liberation and the much-needed bridge between poverty and industrialization, and therefore, it has the capacity to transform Africa into a developed continent.

Africa is being systematically underdeveloped and over-exploited by the West. From oil to gold and diamonds to tobacco, the Western scramble for Africa’s resources has always caused problems rather than created prosperity. Minerals taken from African soil by Western-owned corporations are shipped to Europe or America, where they are turned into manufactured goods, which are then resold to African consumers at value-added prices.

Nigeria imports almost all of its fuel needs; however, it sells its crude oil to “developed” nations, only earning $9 per barrel on their mere royalty fees. Then, Nigeria imports refined gasoline, diesel and kerosene made from its own oil resources for hundreds of dollars per barrel.

Nigeria is the African continent’s largest oil producer. At least $400 billion of oil revenue has been stolen or misspent by Western multinationals, since Independence in 1960, according to estimates by the former World Bank vice president for Africa, Oby Ezekwesili. That is 12 times the country’s national budget for 2014. Nigeria should be wealthy, and its people the envy of Africa; if not the envy of the entire developing world. Instead, 90 percent of Nigerian people live on less than $2 per day.

Zimbabwe is known for producing the best quality tobacco in the world and last year it earned $650 million from the sale of raw tobacco. Industry experts illustrate how Zimbabwe could have earned $6,5 billion instead of $650 million if they had processed the crop into cigarettes, rather than exporting tobacco as a raw good.

The nation earned on average $3,50 per kilogram of raw tobacco but could have achieved $7,30 per kilogram had the tobacco leaf been threshed or processed into cut rag.

If Zimbabwe had further processed the tobacco into cigarettes, it would have earned between $30-60 per kilogram.

Another example of neocolonial resource exploitation of Africa is that of the diamond industry.

Africa produces the bulk of the world market for rough diamonds, which is currently valued at $19 billion annually; while the retail diamond jewelery industry, based in Europe, is estimated to be worth $90 billion.

A rough diamond mined in Africa costs about $40 per carat, and a diamond cut and polished in Europe increases to $400 per carat. The same stone fetches around $900 per carat when it reaches the consumer.

The global value chain of the diamond industry includes exploration, mining, sorting, polishing, dealing, jewelery manufacturing, and ultimately retail. Africa is able to conduct the first three stages but Western multinationals do their upmost to systematically prohibit African nations from mastering the other four value addition stages.

Clearly, Africa is not under-developed; she is over-exploited. From slavery to colonialism to present day neo-colonialism, Western policies have always been that of aggression and exploitation towards Africa. The African continent needs a second liberation to economically empower its indigenous majority who have been marginalized by Western capitals and corporations for centuries.

The Emblem of the Outlaw in America

Eoin Higgins

The cultural trope of the young black man as a fearsome criminal is almost as reductive and misleading as the trope about biker gangs in the US being American Ronin. Both are of course highly racialized perceptions, based on an imaginary reality. But they’ve come together in odd ways in the past few days.

When the average American thinks of a young black man in conflict with the police, it’s a safe bet the first image that comes to mind is a criminal element. It’s the result of insidious subtextual conditioning that pervades our culture from our news to our entertainment. Every day, Americans are inundated with a constant undercurrent of news media driven fearmongering setting black men up as the ever present prevalent threat to civil society. Every night, Americans see black men presented as the enemy on television and on film.

The image of the outlaw biker in America today is quite different. Due to the huge popularity of Kurt Sutter’s soap opera Sons of Anarchy, the American public now imagines a doe-eyed Leif Erikson type when they think of a biker. The noble white outlaw that Charlie Hunnam portrayed with vacant sincerity and earnest whispering over seven seasons has spawned a new love affair with the idea of motorcycle clubs.

As a practical matter, these two tropes don’t have too much to do with one another. Until recently.

On Thursday, May 20, at 1 AM, two men were accused of attempting to shoplift beer in Olympia, Washington. The police shot the perpetrators. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that the victims were young black men. Although the incident is now being framed as a response to an assault with a skateboard, the facts don’t appear to back this up- and at the very least any “assault” had negligible effects on the officer in question and left the skateboard intact.

As anyone who has ever lived in Olympia can tell you, the shooting of two unarmed young black men in that city by a police officer was bound to provoke protest. Olympia’s beautiful, quirky, radical, leftist community loves nothing more than to stand up for justice. So it was no surprise that within twelve hours of the shooting, there was a movement on the streets of the city in support of the victims.

And, people being people, it was no surprise that there was a counter demonstration in support of the police officer who shot two unarmed young men in the chest for allegedly trying to steal a case of beer. The makeup of this counter demonstration is the point of interest. Observe.

The insignias on the backs of the shirts worn by the counter protesters (who are attacking the anti-police demonstrators with no repercussions) are modeled after motorcycle club patches. They read Black Top Demon and are not an MC but rather a rockabilly band local to the Olympia area.

A cursory glance at the band’s social media presence reveals the usual angry white guy rock band imagery. One picture shows the band’s leader burning his guitar, another involves the band’s skull insignia (blatantly ripped off from The Punisher comics), another still shows the frontman drinking and driving. Oblivious to privilege and full of their own self image, Black Top Demon fits the mold of every single big fish small pond rock band that will never go anywhere and never shut up about the big break right around the corner.

Where they’re different than most bands is in their appropriation of MC symbolism. The band members all wear a patch on their clothing representing their allegiance to Black Top Demon. This patch style, which is known as three piece, is generally used by outlaw motorcycle clubs. Interestingly, the appropriators of this style in Black Top Demon are using it to protect the police.

Obviously this band is just using the situation in Olympia for attention, and obviously it does a disservice to the demonstrators there in particular and to fans of music in general to bring them any more attention. But they do serve the purpose of showing the difference in our cultural understanding of symbolism and the representation of criminal elements in the zeitgeist.

When two unarmed young men are shot by police officers, our societal reaction should be to demand justice. When two unarmed young black men are shot by white police officers, the latest in a long line of such incidents, our societal reaction should be to not only demand justice but demand a cultural and social shift to address the deep problems with a system that perpetuates such actions in the name of the law.

As the people of Olympia make their voices heard to try and shake the institutionalized racism that pervades law enforcement and the culture as a whole, they should be supported. The counter actions of those who want to maintain the status quo are typical. And their appropriation of the symbols of actual criminality in the name of protecting the police from the consequences of murdering alleged criminals only shows how predicated on race our culture’s emblems of the outlaw have become.

The Other One Percent

Ralph Nader

As a high school student, I came across an observation by Abraham Lincoln who said that “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” Today “public sentiment” would be called “public opinion.”

Over the years, I have been astonished at how less than one percent of the citizenry, backed by the “public sentiment,” have changed our country for the better by enacting reforms to protect the people from abuses of power, discrimination and deep neglect.

Specifically, if – one percent or less – were to dedicate a modest amount of their time and money working together for much-needed changes that are overwhelmingly supported by public opinion in each congressional or state legislative district, they would prevail against the government and corporate power structures.

There are obstacles, such as a corporate influence over City Hall and wavering politicians who insincerely pledge support, but defer and delay action. But, if people work together, almost any problem can be solved.

History shows that it only takes a dedicated few to gain the momentum from many more to enact change. The major drives to give women the right to vote, workers the right to form unions and secure numerous protections, and farmers regulation of railroads and banks did not require more than one percent of seriously active champions. Those in power understood that there was overwhelming support for these reforms by affected populations.

Even the abolition movement against slavery was well under way in our country before Ft. Sumter and did not involve more than one percent of the people, including the slaves who fled via the Underground Railroad. By 1833, the British Empire, including Canada, had already brought slavery to an end.

More recently, the breakthrough laws in the late sixties and early seventies regarding auto and product safety, environmental health and occupational safety drew on far less than one percent of seriously engaged supporters. The air and water pollution laws were supported by widespread demonstrations that did not require a large burden of time by the participants. These air and water pollution laws, not surprisingly, were very popular when introduced and the public made its support known to lawmakers with numerous phone calls and letters. Other reforms (auto safety, product safety and occupational safety measures) were pushed through with far less than one percent of engaged citizens, as was the critical Freedom of Information Act of 1974.

Along with the small full-time advocacy groups, a modest level of visible activity around the country aroused the media. The more citizen power the media observed, the more reporting, and this in turn led to greater public awareness.

Lately, this pattern can be seen in the efforts to enact civil rights for the LGBTQ community and to pass a substantially higher minimum wage for tens of millions of workers being paid less now than workers were paid in 1968, adjusted for inflation. The latter has become a front burner issue at the city, state and congressional levels with picketers in front of McDonald’s, Burger King, Walmart, and other giant low-pay chains over the past two years. Those pushing for higher wages number less than the population of Waterbury, Connecticut (approximately 110,000). TheService Employees International Union

(SEIU), some think tanks, organizers, writers and economists rounded out this less than one percent model of action for justice.

It is important to remember that the active one percent or less, with the exception of a handful of full-timers, are committing no more time than do serious hobbyists, such as stamp and coin collectors, or members of bowling leagues and bridge clubs, or birdwatchers.

Why is all this important? Because in a demoralized society full of people who have given up on their government, on themselves and are out of the public civic arena, learning that one percent can be decisive, can be hugely motivational and encouraging, especially with emerging Left-Right alliances. Prison reform, juvenile justice, crony capitalism, civil liberties, unconstitutional wars, and sovereignty-shredding and job-exporting trade treaties that threaten health and safety protections are all ripe for Left-Right action (see my recent book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State).

Youngsters grow up exposed to numerous obstacles that tell them they “can’t fight City Hall” or the big corporate bosses. Unfortunately, they are not taught to reject being powerless because they learn myths, not reality, and they graduate without civic skills and experience. Small wonder why so many of them could easily be members of a Society of Apathetics.

But lawmakers want to retain their jobs. Companies want to keep their customers. On many issues that could so improve livelihoods and the quality of life in America, it is important to bring to everyone the history and current achievements of the one percent who stood tall, spoke and acted as the sovereign people our constitution empowers them to become.

The Morsi Death Sentence

Binoy Kampmark

“The crackdown against the opposition is only intensifying and the judiciary is very much at the forefront of this crackdown.”

-Shadi Hamid, Brookings Centre for Middle East Policy, YNet, May 23, 2015

It stands not merely as a stark obituary but a broader death sentence of the Arab Spring. The message is fundamental: whoever is voted in the aftermath of enthusiastic protest against authoritarian regimes in the North African and Middle East will be dealt a terrible blow. They will be condemned as fundamentalist refuse and usurpers, or liberal lackeys, while the old guard will be favoured and lauded.

On May 16, Morsi and 105 other defendants were condemned to death for their role in a mass jailbreak in 2011 that took place under the regime of the ousted Hosni Mubarak. This was the surest sign that a vicious frost had issued forth to kill any buds from the spring.

Not content with that outcome, Morsi has again been placed on trial: for insulting the judiciary. As with so many things being done in Egypt by the revanchist authorities, he is not alone in being accused. There is Alaa Abdel Fattah, a person one would be reluctant to call a fundamentalist of any description or colour. There is the human rights lawyer Amir Salem. Then there is the political science academic Amr Hamzawy.

They all share one common thread, tenuous at points but otherwise clearly marked. They were all opponents of the Mubarak regime, and all that it entailed. But the issue goes deeper than that. All this constitutes an effort on the part of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to reclaim, and submerge, history. No rival narrative will be countenanced.

A good deal of hypocrisy met the announcement of Morsi’s death sentence. The US position was stated as one of alarm, with a State Department spokesman noting that the decision was “not in line with Egypt’s obligations under international law”. “We are deeply concerned by yet another mass death sentence handed down by an Egyptian court to more than 100 defendants, including former president Morsi.”

But Morsi’s continued existence was never deemed in the interest of Washington – at least when he was elected. On Morsi coming to power through elections in June 2012, the Obama administration expressed its disapproval with the freezing of its annual military aid portion of $1.3 billion. The Egyptian people may have expressed a view, but it wasn’t their view, ill-directed as it supposedly was. General Mubarak had been a monster of some weight, but he was one you could do business with. The fundamentalist genie had to be put back into the bottle, and the Muslim Brotherhood muzzled.

The grand mask of legal propriety is thereby being applied to the verdict. What the judiciary says, goes and by implication, what the state decides, goes. Human rights activists in Egypt are, in that sense, divided. The human element is ebbing out of the debate, and being replaced by tactical and strategic appraisals about how the law should be applied.

Some, among them the deputy head of the National Council for Human Rights Abdel Ghufar Shukr, fear that the sentence should only be carried out when matters have cooled – to kill Morsi now would be an open invitation to revolution, stoking the flames of the next overthrow (Middle East Eye, May 24). You can’t subjugate history – it eventually comes back to drown you.

Others, such Mahmoud Kubbaysh, vehemently disagree. There was no room for “these kind of statements.” Accordingly, “We must work within the law – there is nothing that prevents the judgment being carried out.” Such totemic capitulation to the phantom credibility of the law has not been unusual.

The announcement of the death sentence has produced a round of protests in several countries. It prompted thousands of Arab Israeli followers of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement to protest on Saturday in the village of Kafr Sana. Egypt’s president was accused by Sheikh Raed Salah as “acting in the place of the Israeli and American occupation to strengthen the siege against the Gaza Strip” (Jerusalem Post, May 23).

There were protests in Turkey mounted by various NGOs and members of the Islamist Huda-Par, deemed an extension of Turkish Hezbollah, resulting in reported injuries to police and twenty arrests (AFP, May 23). Eleven are said to have been injured in the aftermath of clashes in the Kurdish-majority southeast in Diyarbakir province. Even the Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan had stated on record that, “Egypt is turning back into ancient Egypt.”

There were hundreds protesting in the French capital in the Place de la Republique, chanting such slogans as “We want justice” and “Silence kills.” Similar sentiments were expressed in Khartoum in Sudan.

All of these will not necessarily help Morsi, who still has to await the confirmation of his sentence at the hands of the Grand Mufti. There is also some room for appeal, however small it may be seem.

The death sentence is not so much a deterrent of anything as an expression of bloody sovereignty. Those receiving it will leave supporters who will remember to encourage its use when they, in turn, win power. At the end of every noose is the suggestion that the law of the vengeful jungle is the only one that counts.

Ireland: Out of the Darkness and Into the Light

Robert Bolton

Irish veteran broadcaster Vincent Browne almost reduced me to tears with his heartfelt conclusion to his gay marriage referendum TV special in the iconic The George Bar. Amidst the audience’s tears of joy and celebration following the official confirmation of a win, Vincent reminded us on its significance: “gay Ireland had to hide away for so long and felt abandoned and alone and sad and degraded… I’m proud to be here.” The credits rolled with the crowd singing a cheery Irish chant sung even by Vincent himself. This was and is indeed, as openly gay Irish Health minister put it, “a social revolution.”

This referendum takes us a step further beyond the darkness and into the light. The path to change began decades ago. People who knew they were different got together and formed pockets of resistance. Through their conversations and shared pains, they formed connections that eventually become political. In 1982, Declan Flynn was beaten by a group of young people between 14 and 19 simply because he was gay. He was left to die on the path, and protests followed. Change is incremental, and many have lost their lives through suicide along the march to freedom, but this result is a monumental turnaround.

Irish Catholic history is a dark and grisly legacy of shame, snide and bitterness. Rather than being an institution of love and acceptance, the church’s brutal attitudes, disdain for those who defied its teachings, and narrow-minded visions can only be described as evil. I have often overheard conversations amongst the elderly reminiscing the sneering and gossiping directed at those who missed Sunday mass even if they were sick. Within the language of these stories, there is little talk of resistance and of turning against the tide. It was all discipline and punish. It was all conformity and confinement. Women who were raped or seen as disobedient were sent to the infamous Magdalene Laundries to work long hours, sometimes never to see their families again, had their hair shaven and mattered little.

The supposed loss of community within Irish society is lamented and regretted. It’s a cliché but so true: in the past we knew our neighbours profoundly, gave them bread when they needed it and trusted each other so much so our doors did not need locking.

Still, Ireland is better off now. In the past, vicious homophobia and soul destroying shame probably lead to many suicides that would be subsequently slapped with the deceitful label of ‘accident’ to hide the truth. Reading the history books, one gets a sense that Irish society was a chokingly repressive place. I was born in 1992 and glad it was no earlier. My little country faces enormous challenges ahead: child homeless, a housing crisis, growing inequality, mental health and an ailing health service. Many of these issues are not known to the public. Indeed, much more debate and decisions need to be made in the years ahead.

Today however, we have taken one more step out of the darkness and into the light. ‘Proud’, ‘thankful’, ‘recognised’. Ireland’s message to its LGBT community was ‘We love you too’. Though we may not even know our neighbours, we have not become so atomised so as to abandon compassion, decency and concern for minorities. This was a stunning repudiation of discrimination. Rainbows appeared over Ireland’s capital and over my own city of Cork. Ireland’s support of same sex marriage is a declaration of secular independence. Today Ireland did not just go against the tide, it turned the tide around.

Crucifying Axact Won’t Change Pakistan

S. Mubashir Noor

All of Pakistan now wants a piece of the Axact pie. Altaf Hussain, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) leader, demands that company CEO Shoaib Shaikh be tried for treason, while Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Ch. Nisar Ali, rues another ding to the country’s “good image.” Popular opinion suggests that Shaikh be made an example of, but the question is to what end? “Scruples” and “morals” are worthy ideals, but in the poor third-world, money always trumps philosophy. A case in point is Pakistan’s 2007 National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO). This legislation pardoned, albeit temporarily, a scarcely believable 8000-plus corrupt politicians and bureaucrats. You wonder if there is an honest soul left in the country.

In 2011, the International Cricket Council (ICC) banned three Pakistani cricketers for spot-fixing, in a clear message against corruption. Yet in 2013, two Indian cricketers were indicted and sentenced for the same crime; their lust for wealth obviously exceeding the fear of getting caught. Shoaib Shaikh may be a crook, but he is also a financial genius. If convicted, Pakistan should liquidate his assets, reimburse the victims, and give Shaikh the option to work for the government, or go to jail for a very long time. Casting him into the correctional system willy-nilly would be a gross waste of talent.

There are international precedents should Pakistan choose this route, most obviously in America. Frank Abagnale.Jr, a master forger and impostor, and subject of the Hollywood film Catch Me If You Can, eventually became a Federal Bureau Of Investigation (FBI) consultant. Similarly, the U.S Department of Defense has a long history of hiring hackers to combat their ilk. As recently as March 2015, the Pentagon sought “cyber-security personnel” with “unique skills”: a codename for white-hat hackers. Pakistan has an “informal” economy almost the size of the real one, so a repurposed Shoaib Shaikh adds value in chasing white-collar crime.

Regardless of Axact’s shady nature, you have to admire the singular game-plan. From scratch, Shoaib Shaikh built an empire awe-inspiring in its villainous scope, cloaked in multilayered secrecy, and highly litigious to face down interference. Whether you are peddling a pencil or an airplane, the sales methodology is the same. Creating a multimillion dollar bottom-line takes a lot more than two-bit hustling, it takes real business skills. Also, unlike Bernie Madoff, Shaikh did not have a looting list of rich potential targets to get started.

It is curious that, considering the scale of the allegations, Axact managed to stay off the radar for this long. Part of the answer lies in institutional failure. In a May 20 editorial, the whistle-blowing New York Times (NYT) accused the Pakistan government of willful ignorance. Local commentators were quick to point that the NYT is not God’s word, but it sure felt that way. Within a day of the original story, Pakistan’s red-taped Federal Investigation Agency (FIA)  had mobilized with unseen rapidity to shut down the company offices.

Theoretically, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has jurisdiction to tame corporate fraud, or at least will once it stops being a political tool to harass opponents. The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), and the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP) have been similarly inept. Going by recent reports, both were aware of Axact’s financial misdeeds, but sat on the evidence until Declan Walsh shamed them into action. With the FBI focused on domestic terrorism, America is happy to let Pakistan do the legwork for now. Forgery and impersonation are both federal crimes, and Axact won’t get a free pass once the legal fog lifts.

The remaining answer lies with the company’s clients and employees. Axact’s use of legal muscularity to shut down criticism is well documented. However, it is inconceivable that a majority of the fake degree holders did not understand the business model. Whether for professional or personal reasons, these individuals willingly took an educational short-cut. Anyone half-serious about learning, and an internet connection, would have immediately spotted the discrepancies. More worrisome is the ignorance of the Axact-affiliated BOL Television staff. Journalistic stalwarts like Kamran Khan and Iftikhar Ahmed have made careers out of uncovering scams, yet they could not smell the con right under their noses?

Nothing screams diligence in an investigation like the FIA using rickshaws to haul away Axact assets. In a recent interview with ARY television, Shoaib Shaikh presented a compelling defense in between mock-hysterics. In short, Axact provided information technology support to the degree-mills, but had no knowledge of how such support featured in their sales practices. It all comes down to Declan Walsh, and fellow NYT reporter Griff Palmer, who made the original connection. If their material evidence is not ironclad, then Axact will chug along on stay orders like every other wrongful enterprise in Pakistan.