QUOTE (evakurvan @ Aug 12 2005, 11:32 PM)
a) But i did like when bono said: "We are not looking for charity we are looking for justice."
Indeed Lord Paramatma must have surely revealed why the performance style has so little magneticism that you thought you were watching marionnettes - because it is true! All musicians felt within that there's something wrong and that's what we saw while watching.
In short, the Istanbul tribunal reaffirmed that Bush and Blair and their henchmen are war criminals, not just in the eyes of world public opinion, but also, according to the Nuremberg legal principles, under international law as well.
As Geldof and Bono reassured us respectively: Bush is, after all, a pretty good guy, "passionate and sincere" about ending poverty, and that Blair and Brown [British treasurer] are, "the John and Paul of the global development stage".
War criminals, yet tender caretakers of the poor? Could this really be so?
Even a cursory investigation of the G8's debt forgiveness proposal immediately reveals it as a transparent con.
Thus, the $50 - 55 billion African debt deal must first be set against the context of the G8's 350 billion dollars worth of yearly subsidies to its agribusinesses whose cheap products then flood Third World nations devastating their economies. Or set against the Bush Administration's $200 billion tax gift to the richest American citizens. Or against Africa's total debt which is $300 billion. Or against the Third World's total debt which is a staggering $2.4 trillion!
Britain's annual contribution to the debt write-off will amount to somewhere between $70 and $100 million - about what it spends maintaining the Royal family in the style to which they are accustomed. The US's yearly contribution will come in somewhere between $130 and $175 million dollars - less than 15% of what it spends waging war against Iraq each month.
The $55 billion, then, represents a tiny drop in the proverbial bucket. A drop, moreover, which is itself purely theoretical since the 'debt forgiveness' is, at first, to include only 18 countries (accounting for only 5% of the population of the Third World), while another 20 become eligible under a vague, to-be-determined, future schedule. [It is worth noting at this juncture, that never, ever, in summit after summit, have any of the promises regarding poverty reduction ever been kept...ever.
More to the point, there are a few, shall we say, minor conditions. To wit:
Buried in a section of the deal entitled "G8 proposals for HIPC debt cancellation" is a perfidious little item to the effect that, for every dollar of debt forgiven will the debtor's foreign aid be reduced. In other words, the indebted countries will gain a big, fat nothing, while the IMF and the World Bank will be the recipients of, what is, in effect, a social safety net for creditors.
It gets more Kali-yuga.
For a country to qualify for debt forgiveness, it must meet what is known as the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative's "completion point". This is another perfidious measure taken from the (failed) 1996 G8 'debt forgiveness' scheme, one which compels the indebted country to adopt the usual battery of free market reforms and 'structural adjustment programmes' so dear to the heart of the IMF and the World Bank.
Reforms that have been instrumental in creating and maintaining the poverty, mal-development and general economic subjugation of the 'developing' nations to begin with.
Contrary to popular opinion there is an easily discernable net flow of wealth from the Third to the First world. Thus, for every dollar of 'aid' given to Africa, three dollars are taken out by various Western banks and governmental institutions, and this does not even include the repatriated profit of the private transnational corporate sector.
Indeed, much of the token aid that the Third World does receive serves, in actuality, merely the development of the necessary infrastructure for the more efficient - and more or less criminal - extraction of these countries' resources and goods.
Furthermore, such 'aid' is almost always conditional - as in the present debt deal - on the implementation of 'free market reforms'. Reforms that oblige these countries to close down their schools and hospitals, sell off their public services at fire-sale prices to Western privateers, grow cash crops for export rather than food crops for local consumption and, in general, to subjugate themselves before the modern form of economic imperialism known, euphemistically, as neo-liberalism / globalization.
Finally, it is probably worth mentioning at this point the tiny, niggling fact that the 'debt' itself is totally fraudulent. That is, if one does the proper accounting of the amounts borrowed versus the amounts remitted in the form of principle and interest, then the so-called 'debt' of the Third World has already been more than repaid. If one does a more legitimate, that is fair, that is, historical accounting, then the debt has been repaid many, many times over.
In short, the debt is, by any rational accounting measure, entirely ours. This, then, is probably the biggest scam of all. Our wealth has been, and still is, entirely dependent on the exploitation of the so-called 'developing' world. In truth, the First world is not helping to 'develop' the Third. It is feeding off it.
So why do these 'developing' nations fall for all this?
Here one could write a book, and, of course, many have. Suffice it to say that military and economic power allows elites and institutions in one country to bribe and coerce those in another. Then once the debt cycle is set in motion, it is carried forward by its own inexorable inertia.
Still, there is always the potential for rebellion, and, indeed, the continuing and massive exploitation of the Third World by the First has, of late, produced more than a little evidence of such.
Thus, in Venezuela, the revolutionary government of Hugo Chavez has defied the United States and begun to redistribute its oil wealth amongst the poor. In Bolivia, millions have taken to the streets and unseated a government that was totally in the thrall of Western neo-liberal policies. In Africa, numerous countries have recently defied, rejected or delayed various IMF, World Bank and transnational imperatives, directives and deals.
To the question, then, of why the leaders of the G8 nations should, of a sudden, be so interested in addressing Third World poverty, the answer is, consequently, not hard to fathom: At all costs they have to protect the golden goose. To which end they must needs defuse the simmering revolt, and what better way to do that, than to throw a little token aid into the pot?
And to cover the fact that it is just token aid (in fact, 'Trojan' aid) how very comforting to have on board some of the elder statesmen of rock culture?
Now one can argue until the cows come home as to whether or not, or to what degree, Bono, Geldof & Co. were aware of all this. Certainly they should have been. [Certainly they would have been aware of the huge payoffs to the Live 8 corporate sponsors, i.e. the massive multi-million dollar promotion and marketing deals with EMI, with Ford Motor Co., and with AOL Time Warner].
But really, the only important distinction that need be made is that they were functionally complicit in the most profound way with a bloody militarism and with the economic immiseration of vast swaths of this planet's population.
And complicit also in tragically misleading the literally billions of viewers of the Live 8 concerts. Viewers who were treated to the greatest advertising gig in history. An event ostensibly in the name of 'aid', 'peace', 'freedom' etc, yet which, in reality, was in the service of their complete opposites. And that's what made evakurvan suspicious - could even Orwell have envisioned a propaganda system so insidious, so all encompassing, and so obscene as this?
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It restores some of my faith in the people who went to the concert.
