One year on -Why Obama has failed Afrika Vol. 1
Author: Dr. Kwame Osei
One year ago "history" was made when the 44th president of the United States was sworn in. That president happened to be the "first" Afrikan American to be given the realms of the most powerful man in the world.
However unlike the vast majority of Afrikans on the continent and Afrikans in the Diaspora, I was not jumping up and down when Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as US president.
Many Afrikans both at home and abroad were of the wrong and naive impression that Obama's secession to the White House would mean that Afrika's time had come and that Obama with his Afrikan ancestry would be more of a servant to Afrika then any other US president.
However what many Ghanaians and Afrikans as a whole are not aware of is that first and foremost Barack Hussein Obama is a freemason and given the importance of freemasonry in America it is for readers to understand that if Obama had not been a freemason he would have NEVER been president.
Secondly the readers have to be aware that every American president since John Fitzgerald Kennedy have ALL been freemasons including William Jefferson Clinton, George Herbert Walker Bush and his son George Walker Bush.
Again what readers have to understand is that Barack Obama is an agent of the secret world government called the Illuminati who actually, call the shots and tell American presidents what policies to implement and how to implement them. And if you are familiar with US internal politics one would be aware that it is the illuminati who actually select every American president before the public votes for that person.
Suffice to say that the illuminati is made up of America's elite families who own/control some of the world's most powerful multi-national companies. Again, when elected every American president has to protect the interest of the elite by promoting the interest of corporate America and these multi-national companies.
Thirdly and more importantly Obama via his White/European mother has royal American aristocracy lineage/blood and this is very important when wanting to become US president and again if Obama were NOT from this royal American lineage, he would HAVE NOT become US president.
From the above, how is Obama going to help Afrika? - In actual fact when Obama was running for president not once did he mention any fresh and innovative policy/initiative towards Afrika. And more cogently when he ran for president Obama did not mention how he would help Afrikan-Americans who are the most impoverished racial group in America with huge problems relating to incarceration, crime, health, unemployment, employment, education and housing amongst many others.
Therefore if after his first year Obama's policies have failed the vast majority of 40 million Afrikan Americans who incidentally voted in huge numbers for him, what CAUSE IS THERE TO ASSUME THAT HE WILL HELP one billion Afrikans?
As we have seen during the recent "climate change" talks, Obama's main policy objective is to secure the interests of the America's corporate elite who enstooled him in the first place. The so-called deal at the "climate change" talks was nothing more than business as usual for America and the West who refuse to acknowledge their immense cause of "climate change" and take responsibility for their actions leaving Afrika vulnerable to its effects.
It is this that I lay claim to my premise that Obama has failed Afrika in his first year and there is nothing to suggest that the rest of his term will be any better for Afrika. This special feature seeks to point out to the readership where Obama has failed Afrika.
First Obama has failed Afrika in the area of trade. Afrika has only around 4% of world trade which is absolutely horrendous given that Afrika has about 70% of the world's resources. Given that America has enormous influence in the World Trade Organization, you would think that Obama would want to help Afrika in this vital area if Afrika is going to escape the chains of economic enslavement.
Wrong! Instead America under Obama has adopted a protectionist policy which as a result, many Afrikan producers of goods and services are excluded from the lucrative American market. This is despite the AGOA - Afrikan Growth and Opportunities Act that seeks to give Afrikan countries "favourable" conditions to enter the lucrative American market.
However, what the readers' must be aware of is that some of these "conditions" are very sinister - for example if an Afrikan country is to access the American market, they must liberalize their economy and allow western multi-national companies in particular American multi-national companies easy access to their markets, including enjoying tax holidays.
The stark reality is that only a handful of Afrikan countries have access to the American market and ALL who do have had to pay heavy prices for doing so - please read confessions of an economic hitman, John Perkins and the Profiting from Poverty article from New African Magazine, 1 November 2007 to learn more about this insidious form of economic enslavement.
This is an excerpt from this article:
'The UN estimates that unfair trade rules deny poor Afrikan countries $700bn every year, and 70% of that trade is controlled by multinational corporations.'
As the British journalist George Monbiot puts it: "Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Africa's problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people's lives."
It is well documented how International Financial Institutions (IFIs) were set up to provide financing to governments and private companies for social and human development, physical infrastructure projects, trade, investment, establishing new businesses, services delivery, etc. However, today many of these IFIs have taken on the mantle of main agents of economic globalization.
For example, although the core IFIs-also called multilateral development banks, i.e., World Bank, IMF and regional development banks such as the African Development Bank (ADB)-ostensibly provide loans, grants and technical support to developing countries for the purposes of national development and poverty reduction, significant portions of their operations are directed towards boosting the private sector.
According to writer Tony Iltis: "The lies and distortions of the power brokers ... [and how] they allow multinationals to exploit human and natural resources takes away freedom from people. D R Congo is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources, yet one of the poorest in terms of its population. This is because 32 Western corporations, mainly American, own the country's mineral wealth."
In a recent article published in Australia, Iltis revealed the length to which these corporations would go to protect their freedom of ownership. "This was demonstrated by an Australian company in the village of Kilwa, DR Congo?in October 2004," he wrote.
"To protect its silver and copper mines from impoverished locals, the company employed Congolese soldiers, transported in company vehicles, who killed and raped locals, leaving many dead."
The next area where Obama has failed Afrika is in the field of Agriculture. Agriculture is the mainstay of the Afrikan economy, in that 70% of Afrika's population lives in rural communities where agriculture is the biggest employer and safety net for many Afrikan families.
However agriculture in Afrika is beginning to fall victim to the new economic enslavement of which America is at the forefront. This is because the West and America in particular, subsidies their farmers to the hilt. In America, farmers like the rice and cotton farmers are subsidised billions of dollars' yearly.
Let us use the example of rice that is the staple food of many Ghanaians.
The American government subsidies rice farmers in America to the tune of billions of dollars a year. However as a result of unfair trade rules and regulations and conditions tied to receiving so-called aid or financial assistance, Afrikan countries like Ghana are not allowed to subsidize their farmers.
Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the U.S. Rice subsidies in the U.S. totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006. One producer alone, Riceland Foods Inc. of Stuttgart, Arkansas, received over $500 million dollars in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006.
The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. - with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015.
What the above scenario highlights is that it creates an uneven playing field as a result of which cheap subsidized American rice floods the Ghanaian/Afrikan market. Ghana alone imports around $500 million worth of rice a year, most of which come from America. Because this rice is heavily subsidized, it is relatively cheap compared to the local rice and because of the trendy advertising that goes along with it, Ghanaians prefer to patronize foreign imported rice rather than buy the local rice which in actual fact is much more healthier than the imported rice much of which is bleached with harmful chemicals and stripped of its nutritional value.
As a result of Ghanaians patronizing cheap foreign rice, the local rice farmer loses valuable income which that farmer could have used to send his/her children to school, pay health care bills and pay other expenses. The government also misses out because they lose out on vital revenue since Ghanaians are not buying local rice. This revenue could be used for schools, roads, hospitals, railways, improvement in electricity and water supply and other things to improve the Ghanaian quality of life.
However one of the most damaging effects of Ghanaians patronizing foreign and American rice is that it totally destroys the Ghanaian rice farmer, the land and even creates food shortages.
An example of how American rice has destroyed livelihoods in Black countries is in Haiti. Haiti is a country in the Caribbean whose population is vastly made from the descendants of enslaved Afrikans.
Thirty years ago, Haiti grew all the rice it needed. What happened?
In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million. It desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on his way out).
But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country's markets to competition from outside countries. The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.
Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. "Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called 'Miami rice.' The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of 'food aid,' flooded the market. There was violence, 'rice wars,' and lives were lost."
"American rice invaded the country," recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000. By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped tilling the land.
Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees. "In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it. Farmers lost their businesses. People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities. After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down."
So rather than cut US rice and other food subsides that would in itself benefit Afrika, Obama is now saying that the only way to deal with the food shortages in Ghana and other Afrikan nations is to introduce GM (genetically modified) food.
By the way, GM Food is extremely dangerous because what the West and their scientists are not telling Afrikans is that GM foods contain poisonous organisms that are dangerous to the body's immune system as they are made with a cross-breed of different species rather than made the organic and natural way. GM foods are even more deadly than food that is made using pesticides, DDT and other harmful chemicals.
Europe, as a result of these health concerns, has already banned the use of GM foods. In the UK, the heir to the British throne, His Majesty Prince Charles has been a vehement critic of GM foods citing that the science behind it is extremely alarming. Prince Charles has a team of advisors and scientists who are extremely knowledgeable on this issue.
Furthermore Prince Charles, aware of the dangers GM foods possess, has his own Organic farm in Gloucestershire, where he grows Organic food in accordance with nature and free from dangerous chemicals like pesticides, DDT, fertilizers and so forth. Please read the following article by His Royal Highness from last week's Daily Mail - a UK based paper.
Watch out for vol. 2
Source: Public Agenda
The kiss that caused chaos around the world: Man who shut airport for hours was giving woman a goodbye kiss
By Mail Foreign Service
It's the romantic finale to chick flicks everywhere.
Woman is leaving on a jet plane. Man realises love for woman at the very last moment. Man wreaks havoc in frantic dash to reach woman before she gets on plane, sprinting through security for one last kiss. Couple walk off screen hand in hand into the happy-ever-after.
Except in this case it had the very unromantic consequence of causing a security scare that shut down a major international airport and left thousands of passengers stranded for hours.
For, as video evidence has shown, it appears to have been a goodbye kiss that caused a man to slip through security at the Newark, New Jersey airport last Sunday.
Scroll down for video
The kiss: Security cameras catch the unidentified man and woman in an embrace after he ducked under barriers to greet her in the secure area of the airport
The lovers: The couple turn their faces to the camera as they walk away
The security guard: In a still from earlier in the video, the TSA official is seeng leaving his post at the security desk - giving the nameless Romeo, still offscreen, his chance to slip into the secure area
There are two versions of the video - a long, full version, which shows the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer abandoning his post; and a shorter version which just shows the kiss, below.
In the long version, theTSA officer is seen apparently asking the man to move away from the security cordons that guide arriving passengers out of the secure area and into the concourse.
The video then shows the TSA officer leaving his desk and walking toward the airport concourse.
As the short version of the video below shows, the nameless Romeo clearly saw the moment as an opportunity.
He slips underneath a security cordon to meet a departing female passenger clad in a white coat o who had already passed through a security checkpoint.
The man gives her what appears to be a goodbye kiss, the video showed.
The couple, who remain unidentified, then walk off screen hand-in-hand against the flow of passengers.
It is unclear if the woman got on to the plane. Some reports quoted witnesses who said they had spotted the man leaving the airport shortly after the incident, but it was unclear if the woman was with him.
The TSA officer, who has since been placed on administrative leave, returned moments later - but the damage had been done.
The consequences: The airport was promptly shut down and thousands of passengers left stranded for hours after the security scare
Other witnesses who saw the man slip through the checkpoint had grown concerned and spoke to authorities, sparking a security clampdown that closed the airport for hours.
Thousands of passengers had to go through security screening again.
The breach at Newark Liberty International Airport, one of three major airports serving the New York City area, rattled security officials so much because it came so soon after the botched Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner.
'It is unacceptable that the Port Authority (the agency in charge of the airport) took so long to produce this tape, but now that it is public we have a better chance of getting to the bottom of this major security incident,' Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, who released the video, said in a statement.
The long version of the video can be viewed on the Internet at http://lautenberg.senate.gov/assets/TSA-Video_1-7-10_EWR-SEC.wmv.
One of the planes hijacked in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States took off from the Newark airport.
That flight crashed into a Pennsylvania field after passengers confronted the hijackers.
Authorities shut down a California airport on Tuesday after a suspicious amber liquid in a passenger's bag tested positive for explosives - only to determine that the substance was merely a harmless container of honey.