Disaster in Somalia

Newsweek online has a piece about how bad things are in somalia. The largest indicator seems to be that farmers are charging refugees from Mogadishu who want to take shelter under their trees. Newsweek calls it "renting trees." The article is worth reading, but contain the simplistic clan-based analysis that the Western press always resorts to:

And that's the internationally recognized government, which enjoys U.S. support, although it is widely unpopular in southern Somalia and the capital, Mogadishu. That's not surprising, since the prime minister is from a clan that's hostile to the clan that dominates the capital, and the president, Abdulahi Yusuf, is from Puntland, in northern Somalia, a breakaway region that is best known as the homeland of Somalia's pirates, who once again are on the prowl, bedeviling aid shipments even further.

How much failure will they take?

It's almost like an American coup d'etat. The military has long opposed Bush in private and one gets a sense that the public outcry from our uniformed services is just beginning. The irony is that Bush's staunchest defenders on Iraq don't necessarily support his policies there; they are just protecting that flank in defense of their real concerns: opposition to abortion, stem-cell research, gay rights. The question is, how much death, destruction and abysmal failure will the religious right wing accept in defense of their primary concerns? The answer is that there's no limit. Like their fundamentalist brothers in the Islamic camp, Christian fundamentalists are value their petty pieties more than life.

The Curse of Oil in Africa

Why does everything turn to shit in Africa? Events that would seem to indicate a positive outcome in other places inevitably bring pain and suffering to Africa and a windfall to a couple of Africans (and a bunch of outsiders)

The discovery of oil in Africa has been, almost without exception, a disaster for the host countries. The reasons are partly economic, partly having to do with the lack of well-developed institutions in many African states, partly owing to colonial legacies, and partly the fault of Western oil companies all too willing to turn a blind eye to corruption while the getting is good.

This article in Salon is about "Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil," by John Ghazvinian. A quote from the book:

That oil wealth could be a curse seems counterintuitive. When an oil bonanza is discovered in a struggling African country, the instinctive assumption is that it can only be a good thing; that it will result in a rapid improvement in the lives of the people; that suddenly there will be money for hospitals and vaccines and schools and roads; and, even more than that, everyone will be rich. To the contrary, however, studies suggest that real GDP and the population's standard of living nearly always decline where oil is discovered. Between 1970 and 1993, for example, countries without oil saw their economies grow four times faster than those of countries with oil.

Part of this is the legacy of colonialism. The systems that remain in Africa were designed to extract wealth and to only invest the bare minimum in infrastructure and society while enriching a very few. The system, 50 years after independence seems immutable. It devours everything -- including and especially aid -- and turns it into the monster that continues to devour the continent.

Darfur, Oil, Money

This is from the LA Times today:

In Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have perished in what the United States calls a genocide, the killing has been supported by profits from companies helping the government of Sudan tap its vast reservoirs of oil, according to services that research corporate conduct for investors. The firms include China's Sinopec Corp., Malaysia's Petronas, and Schlumberger, based in the Netherlands Antilles — whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation's most significant connection to the Sudanese oil industry, however, is through Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Bill Gates is a Berkshire director, and Berkshire's chairman, Warren E. Buffett, is a trustee of the Gates Foundation. Berkshire holds a $3.3-billion stake in PetroChina Co., a subsidiary of the China National Petroleum Corp., or CNPC, the biggest player in Sudanese oil.

Buffett has pledged $31 billion worth of Berkshire stock to the Gates Foundation in annual installments, beginning last year with $1.6 billion. In 2009 and afterward, the foundation expects Berkshire's wealth to fund about half of its charitable awards — which have included more than $34 million for emergency refugee and health services in Sudan, plus a share of at least $167 million more in regional health grants.

But some of Berkshire's wealth comes from PetroChina, whose parent company supplies a large part of the money that underwrites Sudan's military — as well as the janjaweed, according to the United States and the United Nations. The infusion of Berkshire stock places the Gates Foundation in conflict with its own efforts to help victims of the Sudanese civil war.

It's hard to keep your hands clean in this world. But that's the way things go in the aid business. And it's not just oil companies. Pharmaceutical companies, grain processors and others fuck over Africa every day but then invest in aid projects. Industry always hedges its bets and supports both sides in a conflict. Support Hitler, support the Janjaweed but make a show of helping the victims.

Republican Fundamentalists

One of the questions put to John McCain in the Republican "debate" last night was "Do you believe in evolution?" Do you believe in evolution? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do you believe in gravity? Do you believe in DNA? Evolution is a fact. Gravity is a fact. The appropriate question is: Do you have your head totally up your ass, or are you pandering to the slobbering mass of Christian fundamentalists who live in fantasy land? The thought that in the 21st century we could possibly have a president who will not or cannot accept scientific fact is positively frightening.

For the record, McCain does "believe" in evolution. Three or four of the republican candidates do not. (There was a show of hands, and I couldn't say who raised them or not.)