My Beauty Best Teacher

Richard Dowden a Director of the Royal African Society writes "...As the momentum for Live 8 gathers pace and the pressure on international leaders to deal with Africa's problems mounts, Richard Dowden argues that aid is not the answer.Many argue that aid creates a situation of dependency When a tsunami hits or war creates refugees, the victims can do with some help to get back on their feet wherever they are.Humanitarian relief aid will always be needed when disaster strikes.But the evidence that aid can transform whole societies and lift millions out of poverty is unconvincing.It can only speed up a process that is already happening.When we see scenes of destitution from Africa we assume that we can change things by sending money.But if aid could make Africa prosperous, it would have done so by now.Despite nearly a trillion dollars of aid since independence in the 1960s, much of Africa is worse off now than it was then.Much of that aid was spent by outsiders without consultation with Africans and with little understanding of Africa's ways or needs.Today the continent is full of abandoned projects: wells in the wrong place, factories without a fuel supply, roads that were not maintained.Impoverished by politics But UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown are proposing to double aid to Africa, promising a Marshall Aid plan, like the help America gave Europe at the end of the Second World War.The comparison is false.In 1945 there was peace in Europe and armies of disciplined and skilled workers stood ready to rebuild. All that was needed was the cash.Africa has rich resources but has been impoverished by bad politics - including our own policies.Africa's nation states that crammed old societies into artificially created countries have not produced effective governments.
It is impossible to deliver education and better health to Africans without working through those governments.The African countries that are well run, South Africa and Botswana for example, do not need aid.At the other end of the spectrum are countries like Somalia and Democratic Republic of Congo which have collapsed as nation states and do not have any effective administration. It is impossible to use development aid there.Those in the middle that are not doing too badly, like Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda, are already receiving around 50% of their budgets from aid.That makes them more dependent on Western aid donors than they were in colonial times.Aid creates and sustains unequal relationships. Talk of partnerships is false.As one western diplomat in Africa put it to me recently: "We like it when they take ownership of the programme but we mean our programme. We don't like it if they start having their own ideas."No shortcut the aid business is an industry with its own dynamic.Much of it is spent in the donor countries in the form of consultancies and goods.For the recipient it creates dependency, undermines self-reliance and ultimately breeds resentment.There is no short cut to development. Only Africans themselves can bring change to Africa.States have to raise taxes and spend them productively in order for their countries to develop.Aid creates and sustains unequal relationships When state institutions are functioning in support of the people and the economy, there may be a case for helping with specific short term assistance but unless and until the local systems are in place and there is real commitment, aid will be wasted.At present lack of capacity and corruption prevent even basic services being delivered in most of Africa.Outsiders can run one-off projects like immunisation programmes but development has to be done by the people themselves.
Better alternatives Giving aid feels good but there are better ways to help Africa.We must pursue policies that create a fairer system of trade. Current policies and practices in Europe and America damage Africa's chance of earning its living in the world.We must end agricultural subsidies that distort prices allowing cheap food to be dumped in Africa and ruining farmers there. We must lower tariffs and trade barriers to allow Africa to trade more processed goods.We must stop encouraging Africa's brain drain, luring the best educated and talented out of the continent to fill jobs in the West.The British government could also do something about arms flowing into Africa.Weapons that kill in Africa's wars may not be made in Britain but arms dealers base their operations in London and are largely unregulated.
And London has become the laundry of choice for money laundering because Britain applies one of the weakest banking scrutiny systems in the world.We need to start treating money stolen by corruption in the same way as drug money or terrorism funds..."

We have railed against the dependency syndrome in the past. China's reappraisal of their Africa trading relationship bolsters that stance. Lydia Polgreen in the NYTimes writes:

With a no-strings-attached approach and a strong appetite for risk, China seemed to offer Africa a complete economic and political alternative to the heavily conditioned aid and economic restructuring that Western countries and international aid agencies pressed on Africa for years, often with uninspiring consequences. Rising China, seeking friends and resources, seemed to be issuing blank checks.

Today, China’s quest for commodities has not stalled. State-owned companies are bargain-hunting for copper and iron ore in more stable places like Zambia and Liberia. But Chinese companies are now driving harder bargains and avoiding some of the most chaotic corners of the continent. African governments facing falling revenues are realizing that they may still need the West’s help after all...[continue reading]

Bhekinkosi Moyo writes about new institutions like the Africa Womens Development fund and TrustAfrica that seek to break the dependency syndrome in Philanthropy :

The concentration of power and resources in particular organisations and individuals affects the way they view those that they support. In the quest to address issues of social change, traditional philanthropic institutions, like venture philanthropists and other types of philanthropist, have failed to change the status quo. It is too early to tell whether the new African institutions will at last transform social relations and tackle head-on the supremacy embedded in all forms of philanthropy. It is worth noting one thing however. The very emergence of these new institutions in Africa is a step towards developing a different and unique philanthropy in the continent that also shares in the universality of other philanthropies...[continue reading]

Read George Soros's tips on how to become a philanthropist.
via Pambazuka

Demba Moussa Dembele critiques Aid dependency, "...So aid is an instrument, not a gift. For many Western countries and institutions, it plays a key role in their overall strategy to maintain and even expand their influence in Africa...the money disbursed as aid goes mainly to foreign-controlled enterprises and aid flows are used to buy goods and services from donor countries...the cost of complying with conditions imposed by donors and lenders and subsidies on domestic produce by OECD countries – help explain, among other things, the worsening of the debt crisis, which in turn has meant greater dependency on foreign aid...much of the so-called aid given by Western countries and the loans made by multilateral institutions are not based on developing countries’ real needs, nor on any performance criteria, but primarily on the interests of ‘donors’. It’s time, now, to consider some possible alternatives..."

Mired in grinding poverty and social destitution, Africa cries for help. A cacophonous galaxy of rock stars, anti-poverty activists, and heads of state are calling on the G-8 countries to cancel Africa’s $350 billion crippling foreign debt and double aid to the continent. British Prime Minister Tony Blair will make aid to Africa the centerpiece in Britain's presidency of the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland in July. Live 8 is planned for July 2. After meeting with President Bush on June 10, modalities are being worked out to cancel at least $34 billion in debt of 27 of the world’s poorest nations, mostly African. Will this African Marshall Aid Plan work?

Africa’s plight follows a ten-year attention deficit cycle. Every decade or so, mega-plans are drawn up and rock concerts held to whip up international rescue mission for Africa. Acrimonious wrangling over financing modalities ensues. Years slip by, then a decade later, another grand Africa initiative is unveiled. Back in 1985, there was Live Aid and a “Special Session on Africa” held by the United Nations to boost aid to Africa. Then in March 1996, the U.N. launched a $25 billion Special Initiative for Africa. In September 2005, the plight of Africa will again take center-stage at a U.N. conference with clockwork precision. Expect another major initiative for Africa in 2015.

Helping Africa of course is noble but has now become a theater of the absurd – the blind leading the clueless. A recent IMF study estimated that Africans in the diaspora remit $32 billion annually back to Africa, with the main destinations being Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. About $7 billion is sent to southern Africa (Ghana News Agency, Accra, May 31, 2005). The amount Africans abroad remit back exceeds the $25 billion Tony Blair seeks to raise.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo says corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion (£95 billion) from their people since independence. The World Bank estimates that 40 per cent of wealth created in Africa is invested outside the continent. Even the African Union, in a stunning report last August, claimed that Africa loses an estimated $148 billion annually to corruption – or 25 percent of the continent's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Rather than plug the huge hemorrhage, African leaders prefer to badger the West for more money. And the West, blinded by its own racial over-sensitivity and guilt over the iniquities of the slave trade and colonialism, obliges. This is the real tragedy of Africa.

Between 1960 and 1997, the West pumped more than $450 billion in foreign aid – the equivalent of four Marshall Aid Plans – into Africa with nothing to show for it. Contrary to popular misconception, foreign aid is not free but a soft loan. Outright debt relief and massive inflow of aid without any conditionalities, safeguards or monitoring mechanisms is absurd. It is akin to writing off the credit card debt of a drunken sailor and allowing him to keep the same credit cards. No African government has been called upon to give a full public accounting of who took what loan and for what purpose since many of Africa’s foreign loans taken in the past were misused and squandered. No government official has been held accountable; instead, irresponsible past borrowing behavior is being rewarded.

More distressing, much of the new aid money will flow directly into an African government budget – a huge black maze of vanishing tax receipts, extra-budgetary expenditure items, perks and off-budget “presidential privy accounts,” redolent with graft, patronage and waste. Over the past few decades, African budgets have careened out of control. State bureaucracies have swollen, packed with political supporters. Back in 1996, 20 percent of Ghana's public sector workforce was declared redundant by the Secretary of Finance and Guinea’s 50,000 civil servants were consuming 51 percent of the nation's wealth. In Kenya, civil service salaries take up half the budget; in Uganda, it is 40 percent. Zimbabwe has 54 ministers; Uganda with a population of 35 million has 70, while Ghana, with a population of 22 million, has 88 ministers and deputy ministers. With bloated bureaucracies, soaring expenditures and narrow tax bases, budget deficits have soared.

They are covered with World Bank loans and foreign aid (Ghana’s budget is 50 percent aid-financed and Uganda’s is 60 percent). If the aid is insufficient, the rest of the budget shortfall is financed by printing money. Even when is aid available for “budgetary support”, there is no guarantee that it will be used productively to generate a return to repay the soft loan. It could well be “consumed” when it pays for the salaries of civil servants. Writing off Uganda’s debt does not eliminate the aid dependency. In fact, when the World Bank canceled $650 million of Uganda’s debt in 1999, the first item President Yoweri Museveni purchased was a new presidential jet!


British Prime Minister thinks he can cajole or browbeat African leaders into curbing corruption and ensuring that resources released by debt relief are put to some good use – such as increased spending on education and health care. But the push for good governance and reform must come from within – from African civil society groups, organizations and the people. However, in country after country, chastened by diabolical restrictions, these groups have no freedom or political space to operate.

Carlos Cardoso, an investigative journalist, was murdered in November 2000 for uncovering a bank scandal in which about $14 million was looted from Mozambique's largest bank, BCM, on the eve of its privatization. The official in charge of banking supervision, Antonio Siba Siba, was also murdered while investigating the banking scandals. Such was also the fate of Norbert Zongo, a popular journalist in Burkina Faso, who was gunned down on Dec 13, 1998, while investigating official corruption. In September 2001, President Isaias Afwerki closed down all the independent media and arrested its staff, quashing calls for democratic reforms. In all, the government shut down eight private newspapers and arrested its journalists, picking them up in their newsrooms and homes and from the streets. They were held in a central jail until April, 2002, when they threatened to begin a hunger strike to protest their detention. They were then transferred to an undisclosed location.

In neighboring Ethiopia, President Meles Zenawi, a member of Tony Blair’s Africa Commission, just held fraudulent elections. Anticipating public outrage, he banned street demonstrations for one month and assumed full control of the country’s security forces. When the opposition rallied to protest the results dribbling in, the police opened fire, killing 26; opposition leaders have been placed under house arrest. Witness the election machinations in Egypt.

The paucity of good leadership has left a garish stain on the continent. Worse, the caliber of leadership has distressingly deteriorated over the decades to execrable depths. The likes of Charles Taylor of Liberia and Sani Abacha of Nigeria even make Mobutu Sese Seko of formerly Zaire look like a saint. In an unusual editorial, The Independent newspaper in Ghana wrote: "Most of the leaders in Africa are power-loving politicians, who in uniform or out of uniform, represent no good for the welfare of our people. These are harsh words to use on men and women who may mean well but lack the necessary vision and direction to uplift the status of their people (The Independent, Ghana, July 20, 2000; p.2).

The crisis in leadership remains a major obstacle to poverty reduction and has many manifestations. It is characterized, among others, by the following dispositions and failings: The "Big Man" syndrome, subordination of national interests to personal aggrandizement, super-inflated egos, misplaced priorities, poor judgment, reluctance to take responsibility for personal failures, and total lack of vision and understanding of even such basic and elementary concepts as "democracy," "fairness," "rule of law," "accountability," and "freedom" -- among other deficiencies. In some instances, the leadership is given to vituperative utterances, outright buffoonery, stubborn refusal to learn from past mistakes, and complete absence of cognitive pragmatism.

Believing that their countries belong to them and only them only, they cling to power at all costs. Their promises are worth less than Al Cappone’s. They stipulate constitutional term limits and then break them: Angola, Chad, Gabon, Guinea, and Uganda. African leaders themselves drew up a New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in 2001, in which they inserted a Peer Review Mechanism (PRM), by which they were to evaluate the performance of fellow African leaders in terms of democratic governance. What happened? To be fair, they acted in reversing the “military coup” in Togo in February but went on vacation when elections were stolen in Zimbabwe and Togo.

Ask them to cut bloated state bureaucracies or government spending and they will set up a “Ministry of Less Government Spending.” Then there is the “Ministry of Good Governance” (Tanzania). They set up “Anti-Corruption Commissions” with no teeth and then sack the Commissioner if he gets too close to the fat cats (Kenya) or issue a Government White Paper to exonerate corrupt ministers (Ghana in 1996). To be sure, multi-party elections have been held in recent years in many African countries but the electoral process was so contumaciously manipulated to return incumbents to power. Four such “coconut elections” have so far been held this year: Zimbabwe, Togo, Congo (Brazzaville), and Ethiopia.

Ask them to place more reliance on the private sector and they will create a Ministry of Private Enterprise (Ghana). Ask them to privatize inefficient state-owned enterprises and they will sell them off at fire-sale prices to their cronies (Uganda). Or ask them to move a foot and they will demand foreign aid in order to do so. In 2003, some 30,000 ghost names were discovered on the payroll of the Ministry of Education, costing the government $1.2 million a month in salaries heisted by living workers. When Ghana demanded foreign aid to purge the payroll of these ghost names, Japan coughed up $5 million.

The reform process has stalled through vexatious chicanery, willful deception, and vaunted acrobatics. Only 16 out of the 54 African countries are democratic, fewer than 8 are “economic success stories,” only 8 have a free and independent media.

No amount of debt relief and increased aid will help Africa until Africa cleans up its own house. But the leadership is not interested in reform. Thus, without new leadership and genuine reform, debt relief and increased aid would compound Africa’s problems and more African countries will implode. The continent is stuck in a veritable conundrum. What can Western donors do?

Smart aid would do one of two things. One, bypass the vampire state and target the people, who produce Africa’s real wealth. An African economy consists of three sectors: the traditional, informal, and the modern sector. The people who produce Africa’s real wealth – cash crops, diamonds, gold and other minerals – live in the traditional and informal sectors. Meaningful development and poverty reduction cannot occur by ignoring these two sectors. But in the 1960s and 1970s, much Western development aid was channeled into the modern sector or the urban area, the abode of the parasitic elite minority. Industrialization was the rage and the two other sectors – especially agriculture – were neglected. Huge foreign loans were contracted to set up a dizzying array of state enterprises, which became towering edifices of gross inefficiency, waste and graft. Economic crises emerged in the 1980s and billions in foreign aid money were spent in an attempt to reform the dysfunctional modern sector. Between 1981 and 1994, for example, the World Bank spent more than $25 billion in Structural Adjustment loans to reform Africa’s dilapidated statist economic system. Only 6 out of the 29 “adjusting” African countries were adjudged to be “economic success stories” in 1994. Even then, the success list was phantasmagoric. Ghana, declared a “success story” in 1994, is now on HIPC life-support system.

At some point, even the most recklessly optimistic donor must come to terms with the law of diminishing returns: That pouring in more money to reform the modern sector is futile. Greater returns can be achieved elsewhere – by focusing on the traditional and informal sectors.

Second, smart aid would empower the African people (African civil society groups) to monitor how the aid money is being spent and to instigate reform from within. Empowerment requires arming the African people with information, the freedom and the institutional means to unchain themselves from the vicious grip of poverty and oppression.

Africa already has its own Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights (the 1981 Banjul Charter), which recognizes the right to liberty and to the security of his person (Article 6); to receive information, to express and disseminate his opinions (Article 9); to free association (Article 10); to assemble freely with others (Article 11); and to participate freely in the government of his country, either directly or through freely chosen representatives in accordance with the provisions of the law (Article 13). Though the Charter enjoins African states to recognize these rights, few do so. When President Thabo Mbeki called on June 3, President Bush should have handed him a signed copy of this Charter to be delivered to President Robert Mugabe of ‘Zimbabwe.

The institutional tools Africans need are an independent central bank (to assure monetary stability and stanch capital flight), an independent judiciary (for the rule of law), a free and independent media (to ensure free flow of information), an independent Electoral Commission, an efficient and professional civil service, and a neutral and professional armed and security forces.

Recent events in Ukraine (November), Ghana (December), Zimbabwe (March), Lebanon (April), and Togo (April) unerringly underscore the critical importance of these institutions. Without them, President Bush’s plan to spread democracy may stall. Democracies are not built in a vacuum but in a “political space” in which the people can air their opinion, petition their government without being fired on by security forces and can choose who should rule them in elections that are rigged by electoral commissions packed with government goons.

On May 13, thousands of Egyptian judges, frustrated by government control over the judiciary, agitated for full independence from the executive in their oversight of the electoral process. “The institutions are presenting Mr. Mubarak with an unexpected challenge from within, one that will be difficult to dismiss. The fact is, major changes in this country are going to come out of those institutions, not from the streets," said Abdel Monem Said, director of the Ahram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo.

In the past 24 years, Egypt has received more than $55 billion in U.S. aid in direct government-to-government transfers. Smart aid would assist civil society in instigating institutional reform. Since this approach carries some risks, the same objective can be achieved by funneling aid through diaspora Africans and their organizations, as was the case with Soviet dissidents during the Cold War.

Africa’s long term growth prospects do not lie in rock concerts and increased dependency on Western aid but on the ability of the African people or civil society groups to instigate reform from within. Assistance to such groups – both at home and abroad – constitutes much smarter aid to Africa than all the LIVE AID concerts Bob Geldof can organize.
______________

The writer, a native of Ghana, is a Distinguished Economist at American University and President of the Free Africa Foundation. His new book is Africa Unchained (Palgrave/MacMillan). This article is culled from his May 10 testimony before the Standing Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate of Canada.

Thomas Sowell wrote "...Promoting dependency and irresponsible borrowing is not the way to help the poor internationally any more than these are ways of helping the poor at home. Such policies benefit the bureaucracies that administer foreign aid and enable vain people to see themselves as saviors, even when they are doing more harm than good..."
Via Enviropundit

Remember back in the late 1990's? It was a time period with an economy still growing after the reforms of the great Ronald Reagan; we had a conservative Republican Congress and a moderate Democrat President that had put in place a balanced budget with no deficits and had taken people off of the government's dependency and was putting in place free trade agreements around the world. And on the TV we enjoyed Seinfeld, Fraiser, Home Improvement, and Beavis and Butt-Head.

It appears that these good times can again be within reach, if only our nation makes a couple changes to bring back hope to the great citizens who live here. Tim Allen is coming back with a new show that looks good, the Tea Party is leading the Republican party back to its conservative roots, there is no way in reality that progressive President Barack Obama is kept for another term, and Entertainment Weekly reports that Beavis and Butt-Head are going to be back on television:

They’re back! Below is the first video from MTV’s upcoming revival of Beavis and Butt Head. Let’s put that another way: This is the first new Beavis cartoon produced for an MTV series run in 14 years. Yes, they say “bunghole.” Yes, they poke fun of Jersey Shore....

...Judge then screened the long version of the Beavis preview. It included segments taking on 16 & Pregnant, Teen Mom and the Twilight films (where the duo try to find somebody to turn them into vampires to pick up girls). Fans went absolutely nuts over the footage, and it’s like the show had never been away.

Mike Judge has always put together funny shows- from the cult classic movie Office Space to the underrated animation sitcom King of the Hill- and I am glad that he is coming back to Beavis and Butt-Head, because poking fun at teenagers and the utter stupidity of what they watch on TV is going to be very fun.

To see a clip of the show, follow this link.

Glenn Hubbard writes in FP:

In all rich countries, the development of a thriving business sector came before physical and social infrastructure. In fact, the Marshall Plan worked because it made loans to European businesses first, which then paid money back into a national pot to fund commercial infrastructure. Africa has already demonstrated its potential for achieving the same. In telecommunications, for example, Africa has become the first continent where cell phones outnumber land lines, thanks to many excellent African entrepreneurs (and the many terrible government land-line systems). Besides, businesses that have a stake in the maintenance and viability of a given project are bound to be far more apt at building and maintaining infrastructure than aid agencies, which have been trying to do it and failing for the past 40 years. Given that many parts of the continent still lack basic roads, water systems, electrical grids, and more, isn't it time to retire the current, aid-driven system?

More here

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• Beyond a Culture of Dependency (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)

Mental Acrobatics asks What can the ordinary African citizen do to make Africa relevant on the Global Scene?:

As Africans we have to start focusing our energy on adopting strategies to counter this state of affairs beginning with a harsh reality check. We are under-represented at these summits because we are increasingly irrelevant. On the global scene African countries have very little influence, even less power and no force at all (except against other African countries).Relying on our current political leaders to draw up and implement a strategy to make Africa relevant in a positive way is a non starter...[continue reading]

The increasing irrelevance is the largely the result of incompetent,unaccountable,clueless leaders with a serious dependency syndrome. Herein lies the danger of the endlessly outstretched hand.Why would anyone take them seriously, would you?

There are a lot of rising stars in the Republican Party- true conservatives who grew up in the Reagan years of freedom and liberty and got a taste of it in their mouths and want more of it. One of these rising stars is Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin. From the Wall Street Journal:

The 39-year-old from Wisconsin, who is the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, cruised to re-election last year in a district that voted for Barack Obama for president. The 6-foot-2, blue-eyed lawmaker was recently named one of the "50 most beautiful people on Capitol Hill" by the Hill newspaper, and his shock of black hair stands out in Congress's sea of gray.

But Mr. Ryan also personifies the GOP's difficulty in finding a broadly appealing message. Colleagues praise him as an articulate spokesman for a conservative economic philosophy, but some of his ideas -- like injecting more competition and market forces into Social Security and Medicare -- have shown limited appeal in polls. And as Mr. Obama's robust agenda has thrown Republicans on the defensive, even conservatives acknowledge the public seems open to strong government action.

In a budget he recently released as an alternative to Mr. Obama's, Mr. Ryan proposes freezing all basic spending for five years except for defense and veterans' health care. He would allow Medicare participants, starting in 2021, to choose a private insurance plan with a federal payment going to that plan. He would cut the corporate-income-tax rate to 25%.

As Republicans search for a path to power, Mr. Ryan says the GOP must re-establish itself as the party of economic common sense, rather than a group seen as overly focused on rewarding its supporters and contributors.

"We had a lot of old bulls who were more machine-minded politicians," Mr. Ryan said in an interview in his office, adorned with a large Green Bay Packers helmet and a duck he bagged on a hunting trip. "We need the reformers to take over the party."

Mr. Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future," introduced in May 2008 as a plan for addressing the swelling budget deficit, proposed changing the tax system so people could file either under current law or a highly simplified code. He also wants to shake up entitlement programs, suggesting, for example, that Social Security beneficiaries be allowed to establish personal retirement accounts.

"We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock," Mr. Ryan said. "We don't want to turn the safety net into a system that ultimately drains people of their potential, that ultimately lulls people into lives of complacency and dependency on the federal government for their well-being."

As a Republican, I'm glad to see that people like Paul Ryan in the party, fighting for liberty, the rule of law, and conservative economic principles.

Just want to warn you- this post might not cheer you up too much. The always good Nolan Finley has this article in the Detroit News today, reproduced with some edits:

These must be glorious days to be a liberal. A stunning confluence of events has rushed the left to the political mountaintop and promises to keep it perched there for a good, long time.

Voters have placed in the White House the first truly liberal president in nearly 30 years, and he begins his tenure as no less than an Olympian god. His election is hailed as the dawn of a new age of enlightenment for America. He's expected to do everything from cooling the earth to curing our warts.

Barack Obama takes the field with no credible opposition. The botched Bush presidency destroyed the Republican Party and turned conservative into a pejorative. He can do what he wants.The nation is tenderized for his vision. The sudden collapse of home values and retirement plans and the greed of some CEOs have shaken Americans' faith in the free markets that form the foundation of America's prosperity. They're persuaded that only Big Government can spare them from living their grandparents' Depression horror stories.

The recession works in perfect tandem with the green movement's triumph over global warming skepticism. Green is now the fastest growing religion, and its followers are prepared to sacrifice their quality of life and individual freedoms for the collective good.

Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs explains in the Guardian that the convergence of the recession and global warming will destroy traditional capitalism. In the name of the environment, Sachs writes, "Obama is already setting a new historic course by reorienting the economy from private consumption to public investments.

That's the mission in a nutshell: Move from an economy based on free choice to one controlled by the government. And it is marching forward without critical review. The media is too heavily invested in Obama's success to even nip at his heels.

But the Obama children won't retreat to indifference, nor are they likely to abandon him when his policies collapse. That, for the left, is the greatest gift of all- Obama can't fail. When all his spending doesn't restore their jobs and saving accounts, Americans won't blame him- they'll blame Bush. It's Pavlovian.

The field is wide open for liberals to finally bring to America European-style socialism, with its low productivity, high unemployment, crushing taxes and subjugation to government. Successful or not, going back will be impossible. By moving more people from the tax rolls to the dependency rolls, the constituency for reform will disappear.

Liberals have won a great victory, indeed.

These are the very same thoughts that I have been thinking- that there will come a time when the vision is lost, when more students learn communist values than capitalist ones, when safe tyranny is desired more than liberty and freedom, and when the United States will lose that greatness, lose that special feeling, and become like most other nations of the world. And like Finley, I think that time has come- my tax dollars are now subsidizing groups like ACORN, who perpetrate voter fraud, and then judges okay it- the system might have been broken this time around. I know that conservatives and America survived Carter, but I think that this time around, this time liberals have achieved the permanent victory that will result in the total destruction of the United States of America.

Positively Zambia writes about "pretend NGO's":

There are over 10,000 NGOs registered with the Zambian government. Almost all have a mission, vision, moto, logo, constitution and strategic plan. My experience is that only about 1 in 10 are implementing activities at any one time. In a country with over 50% unemployment, people seek the easiest route to employment. This is often starting a non-governmental organisation as Zambia is one of the countries which has received the most aid since independence.In Chipata, the fourth largest town, the UN are represented by the World Food Programme and UNAIDS volunteers. There are several large international development NGOs, World Vision, Care International, Plan and Africare. There are perhaps 50 medium-sized organisations with staff, premises and activities, and several hundred smaller organisations. Most upwardly mobile young people I speak to are trying to set up NGOs not businesses because of the easy money that comes with it.
There is a great deal of learnt dependency. People are used to getting money from willing donors so have tired of coming up with ways in which they can work themselves out of poverty. Of course I am working in an urban setting, and many rural Zambians would never have even seen a white person, never mind accepted donations. And its wrong to suggest that Zambians are lazy. They work incredibly hard tilling fields and cycling the produce to market.

via Global Voices

Okay, so Iran fired a couple missiles off, and now I hear Obama's moronic response. I'm not an expert in diplomacy or international affairs, but neither is this guy, so I can criticize him. In fact, my undergrad degree is in International Affairs, and his is in law, so I think I actually am more of an expert than he is! That's kind of sad!

Anyways, his response is 'firm talks' and 'economic incentives' while 'cutting exports.' So, talk to them and give them money- that won't do anything. 'A strong incentive program'- he thinks he can bribe bullies to leave us alone, much like he is trying to bribe the American people into picking him President.

And the whole stuff about cutting exports- if they become dependent on us, then we can control them. Exports create dependency. It's the whole idea of free trade- countries that trade together won't go to war together. China won't go to war with us- we'll quit importing/exporting to them, and their economy will collapse. Economically isolating a country really doesn't work (unless the whole world does).

This weekend I got into a conversation with a friend of a friend about politics, and throughout the course of the conversation, I was bullied. This guy I was talking to responded to my attempts to engage in intelligent and thoughtful discussion about politics by attacking my person by calling me names, mocked my arguments by refusing to discuss them and instead making fun of them, tried to name drop and awe me with knowledge, and then when none of this got me to back down from my ideas, he actually physically tried to intimidate me. And it got me thinking about liberal teachers deal with bullies in schools, whether they be intellectual or physical.

Physical bullying still happens in schools, and liberal teachers have an interesting approach to it. After separating the students, a liberal teacher will take the student who is being bullied, and talk to them about why they are being bullied. They will attempt to make the student being bullied the bad guy, because they provoked the bully by talking back to them, they stood up to the bully instead of backing down, or they weren't sensitive enough to the bully's needs. According to liberal teachers, the bully is not a bad guy, but instead a victim of circumstances such as racial or economic, and acting out at the world, and thus you need to give in to his demands and not fight back. If the student feels too threatened, they should run for help, but should never rely on themselves to solve the situation.

Liberal teachers want to teach weakness and dependency. It makes them feel more powerful. In the same manner, liberal teachers are the most frequent intellectual bullies in the classroom. Liberal teachers badger their students during discussions, using superior knowledge and learning to awe students, and in order to get the right grades, they demand that student give in to their intellectual theories and demands. They don't want students to critically reason and explore complex ideas and thoughts- they demand that students give in to their demand, and their demand is that students agree with their liberal worldview. Yes, sometimes conservative teachers do this, but for every one of them that does, there are ten liberal teachers bullying their students intellectually.

My advice, to intellectual or physical bullying, is to fight back. Armed with logic and faith, I can do anything, including physically or intellectually whooping any liberal I want, and so can anyone being bullied.

Glenn Hubbard writes in FP:

In all rich countries, the development of a thriving business sector came before physical and social infrastructure. In fact, the Marshall Plan worked because it made loans to European businesses first, which then paid money back into a national pot to fund commercial infrastructure. Africa has already demonstrated its potential for achieving the same. In telecommunications, for example, Africa has become the first continent where cell phones outnumber land lines, thanks to many excellent African entrepreneurs (and the many terrible government land-line systems). Besides, businesses that have a stake in the maintenance and viability of a given project are bound to be far more apt at building and maintaining infrastructure than aid agencies, which have been trying to do it and failing for the past 40 years. Given that many parts of the continent still lack basic roads, water systems, electrical grids, and more, isn't it time to retire the current, aid-driven system?

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