COMMENT - This is typical neoliberal boilerplate theft of public and private resources. 1) Run up government debt, 2) say that 'we don't have the money' for subsidies and programs that help people instead of transnational corporations and 3) start slashing food, agriculture, energy subsidies, and target the biggest prize of all, pensions. This is theft. There is no rational economic reason to start doing away with pensions, which is what he talks about. And frankly, part of this economic streamlining of society, is getting rid of the very old, the sick and very poor in what amounts to passive eugenics. This is at the real heart of elite, neoliberal thinking. Anyone who is concerned about the economy will want people to have more money, not 'more choices', which ends up being the choice you can afford. - MrK
THE MAST EDITORIAL COMMENT FOR 08/12/2016:
Pension reforms or theft of workers’ money?
December 8, 2016
In the 2017 budget speech, the Minister of Finance, Felix Mutati, alluded to the need for pension reforms in order to give people “more freedoms and choices”.
He stated that “the government will in 2017 present legislation that will allow new entrants into public schemes, revise the employer and employee contributions upwards, facilitate private sector management of pension funds and revise the benefit scheme to ensure longer-term protection for pensioners”.
The first question to the finance minister would be: where and how did the current pension system fail the Zambian workers? Without clarity on this issue, the direction of the proposed pension reforms will be muddled in ambiguity. Giving the workers “more freedoms and choices” is a poor and dishonest explanation of what has gone wrong.
The pension system in Zambia has failed on account of political inertia, massive corruption in the management of pension funds and archaic operational systems. This is failure by design and not by default. The three factors allow our ruling and business elite unhindered access to workers’ money without having sweated for it.
Since 1992, several studies have been undertaken and recommendations made on how to improve the pension management system. Several countries were visited, stakeholder consultations held and the national budget speeches by Ronald Penza, Emmanuel Kasonde, Edith Nawakwi and subsequent finance ministers made mention of pension reforms.
Why have these reforms remained illusive? Why is it proving difficult to prioritise such a critical aspect of livelihood affecting hundred thousands of our workers? Why do ministers, permanent secretaries, chief executive officers of corporations get their post-retirement or end of contract entitlements that quickly? Yet the same system is lethargic in dealing with the pension needs of the ordinary workers!
For the ordinary Zambian worker, life after retirement or at the end of a contract is a nightmare. Forms have to be filled in, countless journeys made to “push” the papers and unending phone calls made in follow-ups. It is rare to receive all pension dues within a year. We have in our midst retired workers that are still not fully attended to 10 years after retirement. The hopelessness and frustrations on their faces tells it all. These are dejected and impoverished citizens. Yet they served their homeland diligently over a long period of time. Now that they are no longer needed in revenue generation, they are cast aside like garbage! Many of them have been spared the misery of dealing with the pension offices through death. They died after retirement without accessing their pension money.
Who is the beneficiary of this daylight robbery?
Increasingly, pension funds are now being channelled towards financing the construction of shopping malls, “gated” housing complexes and upmarket office spaces. All of these target the rich. The poor Zambian worker is therefore financing the luxurious living and working environment of the rich. It is an investment that is not in the best interest of the workers.
What if the pension funds were used to construct modern public markets in the compounds where the majority of the workers live?
How about low-cost houses that would be rented or eventually owned by an ordinary worker?
Why not channel some of the funds into profitable micro-credit schemes owned and managed by workers themselves?
Unfortunately, this will not happen. We live in an economic system where the interests of the workers come last. The worker’s wealth is appropriated for the wellbeing of the elite.
The 2017 pension reform is therefore meant to formalise an existing trend. Workers will be forced to pay more towards pension funds whilst the private sector will now have unhindered access. This is not about ensuring longer-term protection for pensioners. It will be a reform that enhances the avenues for stealing workers’ hard earned pension funds. Just like civil works’ contractors get away with millions of dollars without completing projects, the private pension fund managers will follow suit. They will join the bandwagon. They will make millions out of the pensioners but give nothing back. Ours is a country where political patronage overrides legal, commercial and economic considerations. Zambian workers have not gained much from the existing pension system; they stand to lose even more from the envisaged 2017 pension reforms.
Yes, pension reforms are urgently required in our homeland. These should be reforms that put the interests of the workers first, that empower organised labour in running the pension funds, where viable investments that improve working class communities and services are prioritised and where robust ICT platforms and mobile phone application services will make it possible to access pension funds on day one of retirement without stepping foot away from one’s locality.
Some countries having similar GDP per capita to that of Zambia are successfully moving along that path. All it takes is a dose of political will and honesty.
Our trade unions could also play a significant role in enabling this change. Their collective voice has been missing all along. It is time for justice and fairness to prevail.
A pension system is too important for the working masses to be left primarily in the hands of politicians.
Labels: EUGENICS, FELIX MUTATI, NEOLIBERALISM
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Govt committed to raising standards for families, says Chisenga
By Masuzyo Chakwe
Sat 07 Dec. 2013, 14:20 CAT
LUSAKA mayor Daniel Chisenga says the government is committed to alleviating the suffering of families as a result of population growth challenges that the country is facing.
Making a presentation at the World Family Summit +9 in Berlin on Tuesday during the local authorities roundtable session, Chisenga said the local authority with the support of the government was currently undertaking various initiatives to raise the standards of families.
Chisenga, who is also Local Government Association of Zambia president, highlighted a comprehensive urban development plan for the city of Lusaka which was currently being implemented.
"The construction of inner ringroads, and projects such as the Pave Zambia Project, L400 Road Project, as well as the undertaking of flood risk mapping and related actions in flood prone areas of the city, will definitely ease mobility and increase activities by families living in the area," he said according to a statement issued by first secretary for press and public relations at Zambia's Embassy in Germany Yvonne Shibemba.
Chisenga explained that the Water Supply Sanitation and Drainage Project would help ease access and improve reliability of water and sanitation in selected urban and peri-urban areas of Lusaka.
He further stated that the council in conjunction with ZICTA had also embarked on a street naming exercise, under the National Addressing and Postcode System Project for purposes of developing a residential address system for speedy delivery of municipal services.
"We also want to take our services closer to the people, so the council has come up with zone development committees per hundred households to enhance participatory governance of residents in all municipal services including waste management," Chisenga said.
He emphasised that the improvement of densely populated communities through the Participatory Slum Upgrading Programme (PSUP) would enhance land tenure security.
"Under this programme, the local authority is issuing title deeds to residents who have never had the opportunity to possess such documentations thereby increasing their opportunities to obtain loans for property improvement and raise investment levels," he said.
Chisenga thanked the World Family Organisation executive for conferring Zambia with the status of World Family Capital City for the year 2013.
He also congratulated the delegates for unanimously electing Judith Mwila as vice-president of the WFO.
Mwila, a renowned family building consultant counsellor and founder of Families Are Nations, becomes the first African woman to hold the position since the inception and affiliation of the WFO to the UN in 1986, deputising Brazil's Dr Deisi Kutsztra.
The WFO is an international organisation which has as main objective to represent families of the world at all levels, to defend their interests and to act with them and for them vis-a-vis governments and the international community.
Chisenga led a five-member delegation to the World Family Summit +9 organised by the WFO, the United Nations Division for Sustainable Development, and the United Nations NGO Branch, in partnership with the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, senior citizens, women and youth and the German Red Cross, under the theme 'Building the Future We Want'
Others in the delegation were Lusaka City Council town clerk Moses Mwelwa, president of Families are Nations Zambia (FAN) Mwila, FAN board vice-chairperson Antoneill Mutentwa, board trustee and women empowerment trainer Angela Banda and FAN national director of youth and talent identity Morgan Phiri.
Labels: DANIEL CHISENGA, EUGENICS, JUDITH MWILA, POPULATION CONTROL
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Parry calls for one-stop shops on sexual health
By Edwin Mbulo in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Tue 12 Nov. 2013, 14:00 CAT
HELEN Parry has called for the establishment of one-stop shops to integrate HIV, sexual and reproductive health in Africa.
Parry, a senior advisor on sexual reproductive health, told journalists during a training session ahead of the
International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP2013) to be held at the African Union Conference Centre starting today, that integration of reproductive health and HIV programmes would
help reduce costs of treatment and care.
"Integration is very much about practically joining up the services and interventions on the ground so that people get a full range of services; from HIV prevention, care, support and treatment if they are HIV positive and also looking at family planning and sexual and reproductive health needs such as contraceptive needs. In an ideal setting, one health care provider will be able to provide all of those things and we call that a one-stop-shop," Parry explained.
She said there was a clear link between reproductive health and HIV, in that most HIV infections globally are transmitted sexually or associated with pregnancy, child birth and breastfeeding.
"So obviously bringing these two things together can help address these issues. We know people living with sexually transmitted infections are more likely to be infected with HIV, so, looking at HIV and sexual reproductive health makes a lot of sense. Some of the root causes and the things that can impact on people's risk in relation to sexually transmitted infections, unsafe sex, potential HIV infections and some of the underlining issues such as poverty, gender norms, cultural practices are all the same," she said.
Parry said patients in rural areas walk long distances to access health care and everything must be done to ensure that a patient gets all the services at one visit.
"Joining services on the ground would greatly help because if a patient is coming for a health service, be it family planning or STI treatment or voluntary counselling and testing, the fact that the patient would have walked a distance to get there you would want to make sure that you provide her with all the services that she might possibly need as a patient in rural areas might not come again to the health centre in months," she said.
Labels: EUGENICS, HEALTHCARE, HELEN PARRY, HIV/AIDS, HIV/AIDS FRAUD
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Zambia still has high fertility - Kaseba
By Fridah Nkonde
Fri 08 Nov. 2013, 14:01 CAT
FIRST lady Christine Kaseba says Zambia still has high fertility and unmet family planning needs against a backdrop of high poverty levels. During the launch of the national family planning eight-year scale-up plan in Lusaka on Wednesday, Dr Kaseba said the plan gave Zambians a unique opportunity to transform the lives of millions of women and men.
"Once funded and implemented, this plan will not only save lives but save the country millions of much-needed kwacha needed for Zambia's development. I am confident that this plan will be used to lobby for support from cooperating partners who pledged a total amount of US$2.6 billion to support developing countries successfully implement family planning programmes from 2012 to 2020," Dr Kaseba said.
She said increasing access to family planning creates proven benefits in women's health, child survival and HIV prevention.
Dr Kaseba said universal access to family planning was a human right, central to gender equality and women's empowerment, and a key factor in reducing poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
"A well planned family size leads to social economic prosperity at family and subsequently at national level. Conversely, a family that is not well planned is at high risk of leading a miserable social economic life with a high risk of malnutrition and increased disease burden. The social and reproductive health indicators as they stand today paint a very gloomy picture but I am positive that with investment, individual and collective commitment, hard work and collaboration, we can start reversing these statistics," she said.
Dr Kaseba said rapid population growth impedes economic growth and made it difficult to achieve improvements in education, health and environmental quality.
She said 27 per cent of married women had an unmet need for family planning, adding that it was unacceptable that such a high number of women and girls had continued to die from pregnancy complications and lack of family planning services.
Dr Kaseba said 42 per cent of pregnancies in Zambia were unintended, adding that 16 per cent of them were unwanted.
She said family planning would reduce pressure on the fragile economy and that it could facilitate opportunities for economic development.
And UNFPA representative Dr Mary Otieno said Zambia would be a model in Africa if it successfully followed the eight-year plan.
Dr Otieno said women in Zambia were destined to have a good future because of the commitment that the government had shown towards women issues.
She said there was need for women to have children by choice and not by chance.
Labels: CHRISTINE KASEBA, EUGENICS, FAMILY PLANNING
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Genetic Engineering, Eugenics and the Ideology of the Rich
Social Control In The 21st Century
By Colin Todhunter
Global Research, March 29, 2013
Whatever the publicly stated aims of the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) sector, and however terrible its impact is on health, the environment and cotton farmers in India, there is a much more sinister side to this industry.
In order to govern and control a population, apart from the use of violence, people’s consent must be achieved via what Louis Althusser once called ideological state apparatuses: the education system, entertainment, religion, the political system and so on. Noam Chomsky’s book ‘The Manufacture of Consent’ discusses the important role of the media in this, and Antonio Gramsci wrote much about hegemony – the methods used by the dominant class to legitimize their position in the eyes of the ruled over – a kind of ‘consented coercion’ that disguises the true fist of power.
However, possibly the most basic and arguably effective form of social control is eugenics, a philosophy that includes reduced reproductive capacity of ‘less desired’ people.
There is a growing fear that eugenics is being used for the purpose of population control – to get rid of sections of the world population that are ‘surplus to requirements’. In the West, due to automation and the outsourcing of jobs, there is likely to be a large section of the population that will be permanently unemployed or underemployed. In places like China, Africa and India, promoting birth control has been high on the agenda for some decades.
Millionaire US media baron Ted Turner believes a global population of two billion would be ideal and billionaire Bill Gates has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to improve access to contraception in the developing world. Based on the misguided premise that the world is getting overpopulated, fewer people means elites and the better off can reduce the competition for the resources they covert so much and maintain their current high levels of material consumption. Gates has also purchased shares in Monsanto valued at more than $23 million. His agenda is to help Monsanto get their genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into Africa on a grand scale.
Here’s where things get interesting. In 2001, Monsanto and Du Pont bought a small biotech company called Epicyte that had created a gene that basically makes the male sperm sterile and the female egg unreceptive. In the US, GM foods are already on the market and unlabeled. The GM sector has spent millions to ensure this remains the case. US citizens thus have no idea of what could be in their food. These foods where not independently tested for their impact on health.
Would you like to know whether you are eating stuff that (according to Professor Seralini of the University of Caen in France) damages health?
Would you like to know if what you are eating contains something that could make you sterile?
Bill Gates’ father has long been involved with Planned Parenthood:
“When I was growing up, my parents were always involved in various volunteer things. My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.”
The above quotation comes from a 2003 interview with Bill Gates.
Planned Parenthood was founded on the concept that most human beings are reckless breeders. Gates senior is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a guiding light behind the vision and direction of the Gates Foundation, which is heavily focused on promoting GMOs in Africa via its financing of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
The Gates Foundation has given at least $264.5 million to AGRA. According to a report published by La Via Campesina (The Peasants’ Way) in 2010, 70 percent of AGRA’s grantees in Kenya work directly with Monsanto and nearly 80 percent of the Gates Foundation funding is devoted to biotechnology. The report also explains that the Gates Foundation has pledged $880 million to create the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), which is a heavy promoter of GMOs.
Rather than embrace a move towards genuine food sovereignty and address the underlying political and economic issues that cause poverty, the Gates Foundation has chosen the promotion of corporate-controlled agriculture which has led to the disempowerment of farmers.
As the GM sector continues to hammer at India’s door, we have every right to be concerned, not only because of the much reported impact of seed monopolies and GMOs’ well-documented detrimental effects on health and the environment, but also because of concerns over just which genes may be in the foodstuffs that we eat and are unknown to us.
Researcher F William Engdahl states that genetic engineering cannot be understood without looking at the global spread of US power. Leading figures in the US financed ‘Green Revolution’ in the agriculture sector of developing countries in order to create new markets for petro-chemical fertilizers and petroleum products, as well as to expand dependency on energy products. Food has now become weaponised to secure global dominance.
The world’s problems are not being caused by overpopulation, but by greed and a system of ownership that ensures wealth flows from bottom to top. It’s not about stopping population growth in its tracks, but about changing a widespread global system and mindset that is based an over reliance on oil and unsustainable depletion of natural resources, with the US being the biggest culprit.
Millionaires like Ted Turner believe it should be a case of carry on consuming regardless, as long as the population is cut. This is the ideology of the rich who regard the rest of humanity as a problem to be ‘dealt with.’ He says there are “too many people using too much stuff.” He couldn’t be more wrong. For instance, developing nations account for more than 80 percent of world population, but consume only about one third of the world’s energy. US citizens constitute 5 percent of the world’s population but consume 24 percent of the world’s energy. On average, one American consumes as much energy as two Japanese, six Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 307 Tanzanians and 370 Ethiopians (mindfully.org)
So, should we be weary of a hugely politically connected sector that has ownership of technology that allows for the genetic engineering of food and a gene that could be used (or already is) for forced sterilization? Of course we should. This is a sector whose stated objective is to control the world’s food chain and, by implication, the global population.
In today’s technologically-driven world, state-corporate concerns are using the full panoply of hi-tech means to control us. Some decades ago, theorist and social philosopher Herbert Marcuse summed up the problem facing modern society by saying that the capabilities— both intellectual and technological— of contemporary society are immeasurably greater than before, which means that the scope of society’s domination over the individual is also immeasurably greater than ever before. It appears none more so than where the GM sector is concerned.
Labels: EUGENICS, GENOCIDE, GMOS
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Melinda Gates on family planning
18 Dec 2012 21:45 - Faranaaz Parker
The M&G caught up with Melinda Gates while she visited Lilongwe, Malawi to see how a family planning campaign in the country was going.
The trip comes at the end of a year in which Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, not only worked hard at promoting family planning and its benefits, but also put this topic back on the global agenda and helped secure pledges for
$2.6-billion in funding for the cause.
Last week, the Mail & Guardian spoke with Gates to find out why family planning is so important, particularly in developing countries such as Malawi, where an estimated 3 000 women die during or shortly after pregnancy each year, and about some of the practical steps that can be taken to ensure that women who want to use contraception have access to it.
Why is family planning now so important for the foundation, which is better known for its work around vaccination?
We still focus hugely on HIV, tuberculosis; you’re hearing a big push with Bill being the strong voice on polio. Always on our agenda had been family planning. If you look at the history of the foundation – when Bill and I started – we actually started with vaccines and with family planning. There were some internal reasons why we got away from family planning for a while but it’s always been important to us and this felt like the right year to really move forward with family planning.
Also, this is the year we wanted to make sure family planning got back on the global health agenda, and it felt like the right time to do it … that’s why you see me speaking out on it much more. I’ve been very involved in maternal and child work for quite some time with the foundation, and as I travelled around this issue just kept coming up over and over again from women.
You often speak about putting women at the centre of family planning issues. What does this mean for you?
It means making sure women are both educated about contraceptives and making sure they have access to contraceptives. But this means more than just the contraceptives: it means girls can stay in school – hopefully all the way through secondary school – so that at the other end they have a different trajectory for economic output for themselves and their family.
Why is family planning so important, particularly for a country like Malawi?
One of the things we know from some long-term longitudinal studies that happened in Bangladesh, is that families who use family planning end up healthier and wealthier over the long term.
In Malawi, one of the great things going is that the [family planning] idea is already there. When you get up to 42% modern contraceptive use, to push it up to 60% honestly in some ways shouldn’t be that hard.
It’s one of the reasons why I was so enthused about coming to Malawi. One of the first times I met President Joyce Banda was in Washington DC, almost five years ago at the Women Deliver Summit, I was so impressed by what she had done by focusing on child mortality.
If it has such obvious benefits, why is access to contraception such a controversial issue in parts of the world?
That’s hard to answer by country. It’s still controversial in my country, which it shouldn’t be. In each country you have to look at what their religious issues are and what constraints have been placed on women, for example: do they or don’t they have power?
Part of the issue frankly is just education and supply. Once a woman knows that it’s not just God’s will, that she can do something about [her reproductive life], and gets educated about what her options are … it can take hold pretty quickly. And that’s why you’re starting to see contraceptives change a lot in places like Ethiopia, Senegal and Nigeria.
You spoke of supply as one of the things that keeps women from accessing contraception. Supply chain management is a very real and practical barrier to providing access to family planning. What sort of interventions can be made to get this one thing right?
I think part of the huge issue is we haven’t focused on family planning as a world. That’s why the family planning summit was so important, and because of that you have all these problems all the way down the chain.
If we focus on the supply chain issues like we’ve done with antiretrovirals (ARV), I think we can totally solve this. But we’ve got to decide that it’s important and we’ve got to put it in the clinics in the right way.
The clinics that I visited in Lilongwe already had good HIV or antiretroviral therapy (ART) services and now they’re putting in the family planning component. It’s a model for the country.
They’re doing all the right things. They’re not only making sure that they have the supply of contraceptives, but they’re doing something to integrate the services, by having a checklist and asking women who visit the clinic whether they have been asked about family planning.
“Do you know about family planning, do you want contraceptives?”
In Senegal there’s a model where they’re combining the public and the private sector. So the public sector does all the family planning, in a holistic clinic. They have a checklist, they ask women all over the clinic, at any point they come into the clinic, about family planning, they get them over for family planning but they use the private sector to supply the channel of contraceptives.
The private sector does a push model where they fully stock the clinic and they come every 15 days. They get a report by cell phone ahead of time, telling them whether they need more Depo-Provera [birth control shot] or more IUDs.
Malawi’s maternal death rate is among the highest in the world. Some of this stems from the young age at which many Malawian women have their children. There’s a growing lobby in Malawi to raise the age of marriage from 16 to 18 years. Why is raising the legal age for marriage important?
It’s important for women and girls all over the world. There are still 10-million child brides across Africa; and those are the girls who often have very little power in their relationship to negotiate to use contraceptives.
It’s incredibly important because it has all kinds of ramifications for a young girl who has a baby too soon. Her chances of dying or ending up with fistula are incredibly high.
But even if the age of marriage is raised to 18 or higher, in a country like Malawi, which is very poor and dependent on agriculture, what is there for women afterwards? What can women do to empower themselves in other ways?
I’ve travelled just outside of Lilongwe, to visit the villages in 2009, and when you do community empowerment in the village, it’s the health worker and a lot of the community [members] going out to do dramatisations to elucidate the issue in the village and let the villagers realise themselves what’s going on.
In one of the dramatisations I saw a healthcare worker ask: ‘”Why is it that women are dying in childbirth in the village?” The villagers started to elucidate the problem themselves and said, “We don’t take them to the clinics”. Then we asked them, “Why don’t you take them to the clinics?” And they started to map out what the problems were: in the rainy season they didn’t have a bridge to get across, or they didn’t have transport money, or the men wouldn’t allow it because women don’t have power.
That’s when you start to get to the real [picture]: it’s because we’re not allowing girls to stay in school. If they don’t stay in school they don’t have economic means, if they don’t have economic means, they don’t have power in their village.
All of those things have to happen with empowerment at the village level and it often means on-going discussion between a community health worker, helping the village to come together to map themselves and then come together once a week to talk about the issues in the village. It has profound implications in places around the world. It really changes things for women.
Health workers can provide services but changing the mindsets of men is very tricky. How do you get men and women to relate in a different way so you don’t have cases where a woman can’t get access to contraceptives because her husband doesn’t allow her to?
At the Lighthouse Clinic in Lilongwe, I was speaking to women about the role of their husbands and it comes up over and over again that the husband doesn’t want the wife to use family planning.
You have to work at the issue from both angles, from the top and the bottom. Working with the youth is great because you’re getting them to talk about sexual empowerment at a younger age and you’re getting the girls and the boys to talk about it together but you also have to work at the issue from the top down.
President Banda wants us to meet with the chiefs. You’ve got to work from both sides so the chiefs then are also are saying to the villagers, how do we create economic empowerment? That means leaving our girls in school for longer. How do we keep our girls in school longer? You actually need to have family planning services even for the youth so that they don’t get married early and drop out of school, and then girls don’t have the chance to do secondary school and have economic means. So you work at both ends of the system.
Again, you have to understand the context of the country.
We were in Niger this summer and in Niger the power structure is held by the imams. So we talked with them, and that network is just starting to help us get the message out because they need to give the messages out.
They can help us in Niger, along with these husband schools that have being created in Niger, so the women start to understand through the men. If you don’t get through to the men in Niger, we won’t reach the women for quite a while.
In every country, you have to understand the context of who holds the power at the village level and at various levels of hierarchy.
With countries that are very aid-dependent, projects that are funded by donor organisations often collapse when that funding dries up. How do you build sustainability into a project so that it continues after that funding ends?
That’s why it’s so important to work with the government upfront.
Another thing is to have realistic goals for countries, to say what’s actually achievable in a country. We now have this large sum of money $2.6-billion with realistic plans by 2020 to get to 120-million new women but the plans are built from the bottom up.
Since the London Family Planning Summit there are six countries that have very specific plans that they’re rolling out now. Each of those plans has a component in it that says, what happens after 2020? Where does the government start to plan for itself in its health budget?
One of the things the governments have to plan for is, as we drive more demand for family planning it will create more demand as well. The other piece that needs to happen between now and 2020, which the foundation and others will be involved in is to drive the prices of contraceptives of down.
By having this $2.6-billion we can now purchase in bulk and already we’ve got a couple of agreements with pharmaceutical companies to bring down the prices of the implants and Depo-Provera.
You’ve known Joyce Banda for some time now, and she’s only become president this year. What are your hopes for Banda’s presidency?
One of the things about Joyce Banda is that she’s a bold leader; she’s not afraid to do things that are unpopular sometimes and she’s already said that she wants to also focus on family planning. The fact that she decided not to have Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir at the AU meeting, and that meant not having the AU meeting here was a bold move by a brand new leader.
I think Joyce is willing to stand up and do some things that are hard to do. She has believed in women for a long time and she knows the power of women for her own country.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity, brevity and grammar.]
Faranaaz Parker is a reporter for the Mail & Guardian.
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Twitter: @Faranaaz
Labels: BILL GATES, EUGENICS, MALAWI, MELINDA GATES, POPULATION CONTROL
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Overpopulation: The plan to poison South East Asia
By Global Research
Global Research, June 16, 2008
The Age Australia February 10, 2002
This article was originally published in 2002.
Burnet’s solution: The plan to poison S-E Asia
By Brendan Nicholson
Poltical Correspondent
March 10 2002
World-famous microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, the Nobel prize winner revered as Australia’s greatest medical research scientist,
secretly urged the government to develop biological weapons for use against Indonesia and other “overpopulated” countries of South-East Asia.The revelation is contained in top-secret files declassified by the National Archives of Australia, despite resistance from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Sir Macfarlane recommended in a secret report in 1947 that biological and chemical weapons should be developed to target food crops and spread infectious diseases.
His key advisory role on biological warfare was uncovered by Canberra historian Philip Dorling in the National Archives in 1998.
The department initially blocked release of the material on the basis it would damage Australia’s international relations. Dr Dorling sought a review and the material was finally released to him late last year.
The files include a comprehensive memo Sir Macfarlane wrote for the Defence Department in 1947 in which he said Australia should develop biological weapons that would work in tropical Asia without spreading to Australia’s more temperate population centres.
“Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions,” Sir Macfarlane said.
The Victorian-born immunologist, who headed the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1960. He died in 1985 but his theories on immunity and “clonal selection” provided the basis for modern biotechnology and genetic engineering.
On December 24, 1946, the secretary of the Department of Defence, F.G. Shedden, wrote to Macfarlane Burnet saying Australia could not ignore the fact that many countries were conducting intense research on biological warfare and inviting him to a meeting of top military officers to discuss the question.
The minutes of a meeting in January, 1947, reveal that Sir Macfarlane argued that Australia’s temperate climate could give it a significant military advantage.
“The main contribution of local research so far as Australia is concerned might be to study intensively the possibilities of biological warfare in the tropics against troops and civil populations at a relatively low level of hygiene and with correspondingly high resistance to the common infectious diseases,” he told the meeting.
In September, 1947, Sir Macfarlane was invited to join a chemical and biological warfare subcommittee of the New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee.
He prepared a secret report titled Note on War from a Biological Angle suggesting that biological warfare could be a powerful weapon to help defend a thinly populated Australia.
Sir Macfarlane also urged the government to encourage universities to research those branches of biological science that had a special bearing on biological warfare.
A clinically scientific approach is evident in a note he wrote in June, 1948.
He said a successful attack with a microbiological agent on a large population would have such a devastating impact that its use was extremely unlikely while both sides were capable of retaliation.
“The main strategic use of biological warfare may well be to administer the coup de grace to a virtually defeated enemy and compel surrender in the same way that the atomic bomb served in 1945.
“Its use has the tremendous advantage of not destroying the enemy’s industrial potential which can then be taken over intact.
“Overt biological warfare might be used to enforce surrender by psychological rather than direct destructive measures.”
The minutes of a meeting at Melbourne’s Victoria Barracks in 1948 noted that Sir Macfarlane “was of the opinion that if Australia undertakes work in this field it should be on the tropical offensive side rather than the defensive. There was very little known about biological attack on tropical crops.”
After visiting the UK in 1950 and examining the British chemical and biological warfare research effort, Sir Macfarlane told the committee that the initiation of epidemics among enemy populations had usually been discarded as a means of waging war because it was likely to rebound on the user.
“In a country of low sanitation the introduction of an exotic intestinal pathogen, e.g. by water contamination, might initiate widespread dissemination,” he said.
“Introduction of yellow fever into a country with appropriate mosquito vectors might build up into a disabling epidemic before control measures were established.”
The subcommittee recommended that “the possibilities of an attack on the food supplies of S-E Asia and Indonesia using B.W. agents should be considered by a small study group”.
It 1951 it recommended that “a panel reporting to the chemical and biological warfare subcommittee should be authorised to report on the offensive potentiality of biological agents likely to be effective against the local food supplies of South-East Asia and Indonesia”.
Dr Dorling said that while Sir Macfarlane was a great Australian he was also a product of times when many Australians held deep fears about more populous Asian countries.
He said the Menzies government was more interested in trying to acquire nuclear weapons. “Fortunately this also proved impracticable and Australia never acquired a weapon of mass destruction.”
The secretary of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, Peter French, said he had not yet seen the files but the whole notion of biological warfare was something that Australian scientists would not be comfortable with today.
“Viewed through today’s eyes it is clearly an abhorrent suggestion,” Dr French said.
Labels: ASIA, EUGENICS, POPULATION CONTROL, WAR CRIMES
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COMMENT - As neoliberalism is being restored to Malawi by Joyce Banda, turning back the achievements of President Bingu wa Mutharika, one of the 'blessings' that come with donor aid, is population control. (Read:
(NYASATIMES) Malawi promises to raise contraceptive prevalence rate to 60% – VP, and
(NYASATIMES) Britain committed to helping Malawi in family planning.) Also watch: (YOUTUBE, PRISONPLANET)
UN Sterilization Campaigns in Developing Countries Accelerating. This should make it clear that the reason Africa is not developing in a way that is meaningful to the people of the continent, is because, through the financial control of government budgets through 'donor aid', domestic and foreign policies are dictated from Brussels, London and Washington DC. There has been no cry going out from the Malawian people for more access to birth control. This is entirely driven by the likes of Bill Gates, who has too much money and time on his hands.
Depopulating The Third World: UN Sterilization Campaigns In Developing Countries Accelerating
Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars.com
July 10, 2012
“The real trick is, in terms of trying to level off at someplace lower than that 9 billion, is to get the birthrates in the developing countries to drop as fast as we can. And that will determine the level at which humans will level off on earth.” From a MIT lecture by professor Penny Chisholm.
For over half a century demographers at the United Nations have attempted to “convince” people from both developing and developed nations to limit their households to one child. In the decades after WW2 no means were spared in order to get this message across.
Radio, television, newspapers were cleverly used to reach people in the remotest areas. By the mid-seventies, all available instruments of propaganda were strategically set in motion, with taxpayer’s money to spare and lots of “human resources” to scale back (as social engineers prefer to call us). The justification that could be given to the Western middle class was wonderfully simple: under the guise of developing the undeveloped, the UN sold its Third World population agenda. Simultaneously the developing nations were propagandized into surrendering their people’s birthright to procreate and multiply- two things our species is prone to do. All those resisting the onslaught of information were characterized as a scourge on the environment. Because the eugenicists have an enemy that is not easily defeated, namely human instinct and dignity, it was crucial to discredit human nature first, making it suspect, while replacing human nature with an artificially created “shadow nature” which readily rejects notions such as life and liberty, embracing covert eugenics and tyranny instead. Although the UN in the west has learned to speak of “sustainable development” when speaking of population control, their language in developing countries has been more crude, more closely resembling the original eugenic tongue on how best to keep their populations in check.
Despite all these efforts the overall human population has increased. The UN began to grow restless and less impressed with its own propaganda efforts. In the West populations may have decreased, in the developing world they increased all the more. More drastic measures began to be proposed for the Third World with the aim of speeding up the population agenda. From the beginning of this century onwards all kinds of horror-stories began dripping in, describing among other things state-sponsored sterilization policies in the Third World.
Uzbekistan
In 2010, the British Independent featured an AP article detailing suspicions that health officials in the Republic of Uzbekistan are widely involved in involuntary sterilization-practices.
The AP-reporter spoke with a 24-year old housewife named Saodat Rakhimbayeva, an extremely brave woman who tells a heart-wrenching tale of state-sponsored eugenics in her home country of Uzbekistan. After giving birth to a premature boy, she had to witness her son dying just three days later.
“Then”, states the article, “came a further devastating blow: She learned that the surgeon had removed part of her uterus during the operation, making her sterile.”
“According to rights groups, victims and health officials, Rakhimbayeva is one of hundreds of Uzbek women who have been surgically sterilized without their knowledge or consent in a program designed to prevent overpopulation from fueling unrest.(…). The order comes from the very top,” said Khaitboy Yakubov, head of the Najot human rights group in Uzbekistan.”
This statement by Yakubov has more significance that he himself probably realizes. By “the very top” he likely refers to the central Uzbek government. As it turns out, the order came from even higher up.
An official communiqué from the embassy of Uzbekistan in New Delhi gives us more insight in a remarkable initiative by the Uzbek state and the different partners with which it collaborates:
“The complex of measures for the “Mother’s and Child’s Screening”, directed to prevent the childbirth with the hereditary diseases, accompanying with intellectual backwardness as well as inspection of pregnant women is carried out in the Republic with the purpose of revealing anomalies of development of a child-bearing. (…). Within the framework of the State Programs the cooperation is continuing with the WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, USAID, JICA, KfW Bank, World Bank, Asian Development Bank (…).”
The United Nations Population Fund concurs. It admits helping Uzbek authorities screen its citizens:
“In Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, UNFPA worked to strengthen national capacities to collect, analyze and disseminate gender disaggregated data on population, development and reproductive health and to integrate population variables and gender concerns into development and environmental planning.”
Now what this really mean? A Japanese International Corporation Agency, profiling Uzbekistan’s disability policies, states the following in regards to the Uzbek national screening program (page 11):
“By 2001, 124.000 of new-borns had been examined, 2.800 children in at-risk groups had been identified; and 160 had been registered in health clinics. For genetic reasons, 1.381 pregnancies were terminated.”
Furthermore, an Uzbek government-website acknowledges receiving generous funding for its eugenic programs and restates the UN-funded mission:
“Up-to-date medical technologies help detect possible defects in the development of a fetus at an early stage of pregnancy. To preclude birth of children with genetic disease accompanied by mental abnormalities and to detect fetus abnormality (…).”
Another Uzbek government website gave a description of the ultimate goal of the “Mother and Child screening” program as follows:
“(…) reducing the birth of disabled children.”
In the same publication, the above-mentioned “screening” of possible “intellectual backwardness” serves to “prevent childbirth with hereditary diseases”.
Interestingly the link to that webpage is now dead. However they can not erase away the fact that these practises constitute eugenics in its purest form. And transnational organizations like the UN, World Bank and the German KfW Bank are directly and fanatically involved in the funding of these “screening”-programs conducted by Uzbek health authorities.
The UN itself admits in its own publications to its “long-standing partnership and track-record working in Uzbekistan.”:
“The UN’s mandate in supporting the implementation and monitoring of the MDGs (UN Millennium Development Goals) at the country level is a substantial comparative advantage in assisting the Government (of Uzbekistan) to enhance living standards, and achieve higher levels of human development. As a credible and trusted partner of the Government, we provide policy advice, technical assistance and programmatic support, drawing on best global practices.”
An important item of the UN’s “programmatic support” is their ideas on population-screening and control, making sure that Uzbek women:
“… have access, as and when they require, to what we call reproductive health.- family planning, contraception, and medical care during pregnancy, at delivery and afterwards.”
In a publication by USAID, the largest US aid institution paid for by US tax dollars, reference was made to the contributions of the United Nations Population Fund:
“UNFPA provided IUD’s, injectables and pills. Health facilities hold at least 3 different methods, though their quantities are not sufficient.”
In regards to USAID’s own contributions, which include training local Uzbek health officials, the document lists a training-course:
“The two week-training included theory and extensive practise. Each participant passing the course received a set of instruments for minilaporotomy. During training courses 39 clients were sterilized. 88 clients have been sterilized by trained providers to date.”
Another USAID-document from 1993 recommends some actions to be taken in regards to Central European nations, such as Uzbekistan (page 10):
“New contraceptive technologies should be offered, with training in their application and in the counseling of clients on the choices available to them. Policy change will be required in some countries to permit sterilization to be included among available options for both women and men. To assure the commitment of health sector leadership, study tours in the united States would be useful, as would inclusion of the heads of medical training institutions in the redesign of medical and nursing curricula to integrate family planning into health care.”
Remember the reports from the Uzbek woman reporting involuntary sterilization practices by Uzbek doctors. It seems it is being done with US taxpayer dollars, and with additional donations from the World Bank, German development bank, the United Nations Population Fund- and let’s not leave out another important contributor, the World Health Organization. The WHO reports on their own website:
“Uzbekistan and WHO: A close relationship exists between WHO and the Ministry of Health (MOH).”
Listed under “Opportunities”, the WHO mentions that:
“Uzbekistan now receives substantial funding for health programmes with contributions from many key partners.”
India
According to a report out of India earlier this year, several victims of forced sterilization by state officials have come forward, providing bone-chilling evidence of widespread sterilization practices in Madhya Pradesh, a huge province in India’s heartland. An item carried by India Today, under the header “conned into sterilization” features no less than 8 victims of Indian government officials, who routinely round up citizens and sterilize them just to meet the state’s family planning targets. As it turns out, it’s not just the state’s targets they are meeting. Every time some chicken-necked eugenicist grabs a surgical knife, it is the desires of the UN and World Health Organization he’s satisfying.
The victims interviewed include a 98-year old man and an 80-year old man, both of whom were forced to undergo vasectomy. Government officials threatened the men with withholding their social benefits if they refused.
“While these men got to live the life they wanted till a ripe old age, 24-year old Jamuna Kori of Sidhi district was not so lucky. One day, he was just picked up from a road by two men, sterilised and left on the highway again.”
The article, written by correspondent Rahul Singh, also features a woman who was drugged into submission:
“They gave me something to drink and I fell unconscious. When I woke up I realized they had operated on me. I want an inquiry”.
The video also shows several mentally challenged individuals, who were not even threatened but just directly operated upon.
The clip also features a 25 year old man who took his 2 year old son for an anti-rabies vaccine after the boy was bitten by a dog. The doctors told the man they would only treat his son if the father would undergo sterilization. The Telegraph carried an article recently about this case, in which the young father said:
“My son’s life was more important. I was told private hospitals charge 900 Rupees (£11) for each injection,” he told The Indian Express.”
“In 2010”, states a 2011 article out of New Delhi, “Madhya Pradesh achieved a record sterilization target of 645,000, luring villagers with freebies such as mobile phones, two-wheelers and gold coins to undergo sterilization.”
But now, in 2012, it seems the eugenicists in the UN are loosing patience as now they just order people picked up from the road to have them drugged and sterilized.
In an ad put out by the UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund) for the job of family planning consultant (7 vacancies) the candidates are being informed about the reasons for more hands:
“Given that the presence of the private sector is marginal, there is major client load on the public health system. Hence, if sterilization services in Madhya Pradesh have to pick up, public health system has to gear itself and other options of public–private partnership, wherever feasible, will have to be explored.”
Another piece of evidence that the sterilisation-efforts contributed to the state is actually being coordinated by the UNFPA:
“It is proposed to have a dedicated technical person in the office of divisional joint director, as divisional family planning consultant, supported by UNFPA. The consultant would be physically located in the office of divisional joint director health services and will work under direct administrative and technical control of joint director health services.”
In fact, these practices are being conducted worldwide- always with the help of the same old modus operandi: the World Bank and their UN partners constrict sovereign nations to the point of them accepting trading-“privileges”. In order to safeguard a seat around the transnational table, these nations- often struggling with widespread poverty- accept every and any condition by the lender of last resort (IMF, World Bank). These conditions are far from secret. They are actually right out in the open. This latest Indian horror story is further evidence of the fact that not the Indian state is the initiator of these forced sterilization policies, as the article by Rahul Singh argues. It is the UNFPA rather, the enforcement arm of the eugenicists, which both sets the standards, provides the technology, recruits the medical personnel, and- on a global level- enforces these sterilization policies through binding treaties and other supranational strangleholds.
In the context of the 2011 UN’s World Population Day several developing nations were quick to pledge allegiance to the eugenic deity. In the east-Indian state of Bihar, officials put out the announcement that:
“The Bihar government will soon formulate a new population control policy. The policy will be framed in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF).”
Another Indian state, Karnataka, had President Gladys Almeida “observe World Population Day” at which event she told local government employees:
“There is a need to create an awareness on the need for population control.”
Another individual present said:
“as the population increases, nature takes its own method to control it.”
Another compliant nation, Pakistan, had their Federal Minister for Population Welfare Firdous Aashiq Awan announce that:
“The government is taking serious measures to control population growth in the country.”
The government in Islmabad even recruits religious leaders (a trick stolen from the UN) in order to sell population control to the masses:
“(…) religious leaders are being empowered. For the first time, ‘Imam Masjid’ is being made a partner in population Welfare programmes. He would act as a social mobilizer, she (Awan) added.”
These pledges of allegiance to the UN and their set goals of reducing human numbers are not exclusively made by developing countries. Developed countries have accustomed themselves with the same line of reasoning. The only difference is that, as of yet, the language has been more “friendly”, masking the true purpose of the scientific dictatorship implemented.
China
Via news outlet the Global Times, the Chinese State in 2010 lamented the “issue of unauthorized births” in light of the UN’s stated goal of “efficient population control.”
The UN’s World population Day, July 11, was originally set up in 1989 by the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programma to “raise awareness of global population issues.”
“The theme of this year’s (2010) 21st World Population Day”, mentions the article, “is “Everyone Counts”, and the activities in China will focus on the 2010 population census and emphasize the right to life.”
“In China”, the article goes on to say, “the issue of unauthorized births is at the forefront of its efforts to control the growth of its population as it undermines the country’s family planning policy, or “one-child policy”, which was implemented in 1980.”
“According to Chinese statistics, the national population reached 1.3 billion at the end of 2008, with 6.7 million born that year. Unauthorized births accounted for a large percentage of those births.”
“Since the family planning policy was implemented, local governments strictly controlled the births of each family, and allowed each couple to have one child, but with a more flexible policy in China’s ethnic minority areas. However, not all couples obeyed the rules (…).”
Besides the horrible “obeyed the rules”, the bone chilling term “unauthorized births” is used several times in the article to describe families exceeding their allowance of babies they decide to put on this earth. As we know, having more than one baby provokes direct interference from the Chinese State, which can tax, fine, threaten and even terminate the new life considered by the all-powerful state to be a burden on the environment. The article also mentions the existence of a “household contract responsibility system”- created nationwide to make sure the population control policies would be strictly carried out. Such a slave-state is exactly what the UN envisions for their desired world government. Although the UN itself tempers the tongue when it comes to their stated goal of reducing the world’s population, the Chinese authorities know exactly what goals the UN expects them to pursue:
“It (the UN) also aims to stress the importance of efficient population control by means of collecting and analyzing the latest data so as to make an impact on decision-making and improve people’s lives.”
A statement written for World Population Day by the Secretary-General of the UN reads as follows:
“On this World Population Day, I call on decision-makers everywhere to make each and every person count. Only by considering the needs of all women and men,girls and boys,can we achieve the Millennium Development Goals and advance the shared values of the United Nations.”
These shared values were described in detail by UN’s Agenda 21:
“(…) a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced: a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
The stifling silence that envelops this subject in developed nations, will only make it easier for the UN to go ahead with their population policies in developing ones. And to anyone in the West who thinks strict population policies in the Third World are sad but necessary, I would like to point out that under a global government, or “global governance” as the UN prefers to say, developed and developing nations alike are subject to its decrees. So every time we wave these facts away like an irritating fly, be assured it will come back to haunt us.
Jurriaan Maessen’s post first appeared on his blog, Explosivereports.com.
Labels: EUGENICS, GENOCIDE, POPULATION CONTROL
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COMMENT - There is no population problem in Malawi. There is an access to financing problem. When a mere $62 million fertilizer support program can turn around agriculture, you know you're looking at an economy that is being starved of cash. So here Bill Gates of Microsoft breezes in, to tell the people of Malawi that 'there's just too many of you for my liking, I will fund a contraceptives drive'. This is a foreign conceived problem with a foreign solution. Elevate the Malawian people to a middle class lifestyle, and they will reduce family size on their own. Don't try and do it on the cheap by handing out pills.
Malawi promises to raise contraceptive prevalence rate to 60% – VP
By Sam Makaka,
Malawi News Agency
July 12, 2012
Malawi Government says it wants to
use family planning as a strategy to achieve its development goals and has declared its commitment to
raise Malawi’s Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) to 60% by 2020 with a
targeted increase in young people aged
15 to 24 years. The remarks were made Wednesday by the
Vice President Khumbo Kachali who is also Minister of Health at
the London Family Planning Summit.
He told delegates that the Malawi Government does realise that
family planning plays a very important role in stabilising population growth, which contributes to the improved health of its citizens, promotes economic growth and development which ultimately improves quality of life of women and girls.
[Proof? What country has raised it's citizens income by reducing family size, instead of the other way around? None. - MrK]
Kachale speaking at the London Summit. -Photo by Sam Makaka/ Malawi News Agency
“The Government of Malawi wishes to embrace family planning as a strategy to achieve its development goals and hereby declares its commitment to raise Malawi’s Contraceptive Prevalence Rate to 60% by 2020 with a focused increase in those aged 15 to 24 years,” declared Kachali.
Plan of action
To achieve these objectives, the Vice President said, Government will have to approve a National Population Policy before the end of this year, raise the legal age of marriage and strengthen institutional arrangements to deliver effective policy leadership for population and family planning. He said this means elevation of the population department in the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development and the Reproductive Health Unit in the Ministry of Health to full Departments.
He, however, accepted that despite Government’s good plans, without enough resources, the plans cannot be realised.
“However, in spite of our best efforts as reflected above, we acknowledge that we still have some funding shortfalls. It is in this regard that I wish to solicit for funding support from our partners to bridge the gaps,” the Vice President appealed.
He disclosed that in the programme development and service delivery front, Malawi would among other interventions, increase community access to all family planning methods through community structures, and cited examples which included the creation of the Presidential Initiative on Maternal Health and Safe Motherhood, the establishment of the Chiefs Committee on Safe Motherhood chaired by Traditional Authority Kwataine from Ntcheu himself an activist in this area.
Kachali also touched on early parenthood saying: “We will also ensure that there is no parenthood before adulthood,” he concluded.
Bill and Melinda Gates
Speaking in closing, Bill and Melinda Gates expressed satisfaction that the summit had been able to raise more money than targeted 4.3 billion dollars by 0.3 billion dollars.
“We are happy that the summit has raised more than what we targeted. However the main task begins now to walk the talk. It will mean nothing to make so many pledges but without fulfilling them,” Bill Gates pleaded.
The summit was organised by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation aimed at sourcing funds for family planning in developing countries from donor partners and the developing nations themselves.
Lack of information
Speaking to the press before the summit opened, the Veep said that most Malawi women die because they lack information on family planning and expressed the hope that with the London Summit.
[Really? So 'family planning' will ensure lower a maternal mortality rate, not an increase in spending on real health? - MrK]
He confirmed that the Malawi Government has a strong political will on issues of safe motherhood in order to reduce maternal deaths and also that young women must have children by choice and not by chance.
Kachali added that family planning is vital not only for quality lives of women and children but also helps government plan effectively as it is able to predict how many people will be in a given time.
[It can already do that - the population doubles about every 25 years. What does not change is access to financing for entrepreneurs, investment in infrastructure, hoarding of land by a few foreign corporations and an end to the theft of natural resources by foreign mining corporations. Of course, changing that would be 'restrict free trade', so why not reduce the size of the population instead? Foreign problems with alien solutions. - MrK]
And speaking in a pre recorded video clip broadcasted at the summit by the organisers, President Joyce Banda, said she is ashamed that Malawi is the second worst country in Africa on maternal mortality after Sierra Leone which was ravaged by war.
She promised to work tirelessly to reduce the figures.
Labels: EUGENICS, JOYCE BANDA, POPULATION CONTROL
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Freedom Rider: Criminal Injustice System
Wed, 05/30/2012 - 01:08 — Margaret Kimberley
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
If police states are ranked by the number of persons imprisoned, then the U.S. is the world’s worst and biggest police state. The system runs on greed and racism. “Being ‘tough on crime’ is a metaphor for keeping black people under control.” It is a place where being a “big black guy” means conviction, and where
“prosecutors routinely overcharge defendants with long sentences, and force innocent people to plead guilty in order to avoid decades behind bars.”
Freedom Rider: Criminal Injustice System
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley
“Jim Crow was made illegal, so a legal means of destroying the black community had to be created.“
There are so many things amiss in the United States that one hardly knows where to begin discussing them all. Yet of all the calamitous situations faced by Americans, the cruelest by far is the criminal justice system. America is the world’s prison capital, and just one state, Louisiana, has an incarceration rate 13 times higher than China’s and 5 times higher than Iran’s.
Mass incarceration did not come about by happenstance, but was a coordinated and perfected reaction to the successes of the civil rights movement. Jim Crow was made illegal, so a legal means of destroying the black community had to be created.
America’s obsession with punishment always results in a cause celebre which gets media attention because of obvious unfairness, prosecutorial misconduct or blatant racism. However, these details are less important than the unmitigated horror of American justice. The ordeal of Brian Banks is a case in point.
Banks was a 16-year old high school student and football stand out in Long Beach, California when he was falsely accused of raping a classmate in 2002. Banks faced a charge not only of rape, but kidnapping as well. He wanted to invoke his right to plead innocent, but Banks was facing a 41-year sentence if convicted. As Banks’ recalls, his lawyer pointed out that he was “a big black guy” whom the jury would assume to be guilty. Banks followed the advice to plead no contest.
“The entire criminal justice system ought to be on trial.”
Even after serving five years in prison, Banks was forced to be monitored with an ankle bracelet, and register as a sex offender. Sex offenders in particular are in effect prisoners forever, unable to live where they want or monitored for years at a time. The draconian measures don’t end sexual assaults or make anyone safer. They are just added to the long list of ways to mete out more suffering.
Such is the case with untold thousands of Americans who end up in the maw of the system despite being innocent of any wrongdoing. The recantation of the alleged victim made the Banks case a headline story, but the entire criminal justice system ought to be on trial.
Prosecutors routinely overcharge defendants with long sentences, and force innocent people to plead guilty in order to avoid decades behind bars. Prosecutors in the state of Florida have decided that they don’t really want to try cases in court any longer. They punish suspects who want to go to trial by seeking sentences that are 5, 10 or even 20 times longer than the sentence that would be served had they pleaded guilty. Marissa Alexander fired a shot at her husband, and could have pleaded guilty and served only 3 years in prison. By insisting upon going to trial, and despite the fact she didn’t actually shoot anyone, Alexander will now serve 20 years behind bars.
What we witness in American courts bears no resemblance to a justice system, which would give judges discretion and allow defendants a day in court without fearing a life sentence. The system even punishes the innocent for saying that they are innocent. Many states automatically deny parole to individuals who assert their innocence and keep them locked up until they confess the guilt that isn’t theirs.
“The system even punishes the innocent for saying that they are innocent.”
The corrections and criminal justice system in this country is nothing but a nest of corruption and must be torn apart. Prisons and jails are used to create jobs for prison communities, make money for corporations and keep black people from effectively challenging the system as they did forty and fifty years ago. Prosecutors and politicians benefit from tough sentencing and can expect publicity, election victories and higher office should they seek it.
They have little to lose with “three strikes your out” life sentences and decades in jail for low level drug dealers. Being “tough on crime” is a metaphor for keeping black people under control. The code words are clearly understood and the fear created by media’s “if it bleeds it leads” obsession makes even many black people support these awful measures.
No crime is too small to put thousands of people away. Even child support enforcement is used to put black people behind bars who, once there, obviously can’t support their children at all. But dead beat dads, sexual predators, drug kingpins and other imagined or exaggerated criminals are never the point. They are used to keep the dreadful system running, make money for corporations, get votes for politicians, and keep racist and/or uninformed Americans happy.
The case of Brian Banks gets media attention because a liar put him behind bars. It is tempting to remember that aspect of his case but it shouldn’t be what we think about. We should think about an unnecessarily long sentence, presumption of guilt of a “big black guy” and permanent punishment.
There will always be people whose stories generate more sympathy or who have better organized supporters. Even as they get our attention we must acknowledge that there are thousands more like them. The cause of the moment should be an occasion to expose the beast and kill him once and for all. That will be the story most worthy of our attention.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com
Labels: EUGENICS, PRISONS
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Legitimizing Global Tyranny: Moving Towards World Government
by Jurriaan Maessen
Global Research, May 21, 2012
Gideon Rachman’s 2008 article titled ‘And now for a world government’ and, more recently, Scientific American- editor Gary Stix’s piece Effective World Government Will be Needed to Stave Off Climate Catastrophe, illustrate a widespread and dangerous misconception. It also demonstrates the cunning of one world- propagandists in the crafting of their arguments. In Rachman’s article we are shown typical Palaeolithic artistry: horses, warriors, deer and, portrayed on the very same rocky surface, a globe. It is almost admirable were it not so deviously cunning, to bundle within a single image the primitive with the “modern” and by doing so, considering the latter as the logical conclusion of the former. Rachman explains:
‘For the first time since homo sapiens began to doodle on cave walls, there is an argument, an opportunity and a means to make serious steps towards a world government.’
This statement may be considered as the basic assumption out of which a lot of these globalists’ musings emanate. Point of departure is always the human journey, that once upon a time began with cave-scribbling tribes scattered aimlessly on the planet surface, in the course of time crystallizing into sophisticated city-states, in turn evolving into even more sophisticated nation-states- and finally, approaching present-day, culminating into one world-state, eclipsing all of the above.
It sounds logical, treacherously logical. As we take a closer look at this line of reasoning however, we immediately encounter difficulties. The logic as it turns out, is not so logical after all- and besides, without long term historical precedent. History is certainly littered with tyrants and their attempts to bring about overarching supranational states. And without exception, their enterprises eventually failed, forcing freedom loving people throughout history to build firewalls against tyranny, at the same time compelling the elite to refocus their eyes on more modest ambitions.
That the implementation of a one world government is not some magical or mysterious suggestion that can only be understood by an arduous reading between the lines, as some naive debunkers have suggested, has been disproven by the fact that the aim of global government has been spelled out for us word for word by overeager transnationalists and the think tanks they tend to assemble in. Like any governmental decree, the implementation of an actual world state to replace the nation-state of old requires a theoretical legitimization. The people designated to clear the theoretical brushes, so to speak, have been picked from the marble halls of academia. In this article I will shed some light on some of these.
Professor Saul Mendlovitz, founder and co-director of an international think tank ominously called the World Order Models Project (WOMP) has since 1968 attempted to formulate an answer to the question what world government should look like. The World Policy Institute gives a description of the project by stating that “this was one of the first truly global think tanks, with partners and contributors in India, China, Africa and Europe.”
Mendlovitz, as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, received his first funding for the project from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Rockefeller Foundation. As Daniel Taylor points out in his excellent 2007 article on the World Order Models Project:
“Saul H. Mendlovitz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, directed the project. Richard A. Falk, also a member of the CFR, contributed academic work. The goals of the WOMP, according to Mendlovitz, were to “…go beyond the nation-state system…to use a much broader range of potential actors, including world institutions, transnational actors, international organization, functional activities, regional arrangements, the nation-state, subnational movements, local communities, and individuals.”
Taylor goes on to write that “The long term goals of WOMP (2011-2013), as Mendlovitz states, is to establish “…a global tax scheme to establish and maintain a basic needs regime for global society… a complete and general disarmament with alternative security system in place…”
Richard Falk, the CFR member mentioned by Daniel Taylor, has openly written about WOMP’s endeavors throughout the last half of the 20th century, claiming world government is not one of them. In his Global Constitutionalism and World Order Falk writes:
“Contrary to many outside critics, the Models Project has never identified itself with the advocacy of world government or world federalism (…). And yet, more than anyone in his generation, Mendlovitz (…) has kept alive the notion that a global constitutional order is theoretically necessary and historically inevitable.”
The notion that Mendlovitz is not an advocate of world government, as Falk suggests, contrasts sharply with statements made by Mendlovitz himself at his acceptance speech at the award ceremony of the 1990 UNESCO ‘Prize for Peace Education.’ Mendlovitz, as co-Director of the World Order Models Project (WOMP) stated (page 36):
“it is my personal belief (not shared by all members of WOMP) that there is an overwhelming surge in the direction of global polity and that a world state is emerging. Indeed, some of the policy elite are beginning to discuss a single world central bank and a single currency.”
All this is not science, of course. Rather, it is an attempt to scientifically legitimize a move toward world government. It is not a new concept, the idea that the large emerges from the small, rising in the steadiest of lines upward in time. This idea accommodates our most intimate fancies about time, evolution and progression. The mind, after all, tends to construct scientific parameters around the immeasurable unpredictability of the universe hoping to encapsulate infinity. It also watches nature and then, one on one, projects it onto political systems. The problem is that once these counterfeit scientists have calculated their way towards world government, and propagate its inevitableness, the sociopaths move in to seize control.
Two years after Mendlovitz’s speech, two term President of the European Commission Jacques Delors gave a speech to the Royal Institute of International Affairs titled ‘The European Community and the New World Order’. Invoking the famous New World Order-speech of George Bush senior, Delors took it a step further, speaking of “world government”, “transferring sovereignty” and a “worldwide single market”.
In his speech, Delors advocates the destruction of sovereignty of all nation-states as a remedy. Furthermore, he states this to be neseccary in order to prevent “human rights violations”:
“International apathy about human rights violations will not be able to hide behind pretext of immutable, inviolable national sovereignty much longer.”
As it turns out, also in this respect Jacques Delors has proven himself a prophet- as the borders are eroding worldwide while the central banks consolidate power. After he elaborates further on the fact that globalisation is often counteracted by grass roots movements, attempting to preserve national sovereignty, Delors throws up his arms in feigned indignation:
“I would add- and I will not go into detail- that economic integration, unless it is backed by a strong political will, will not in itself produce stronger international institutions or help create world government.”
Here we see that all transnational institutions have global government in mind- or better: they have all been erected with the aim of establishing it.
In 2003, University of Chicago’s Alexander Wendt witch-crafted a philosophical monstrosity under the header “Why a World State is Inevitable: teleology and the logic of anarchy”. Carefully avoiding any moral implications clinging to his manuscript, Wendt argues the case for world government as the necessary and inevitable end result of the current merging of nation-states into ever-larger bodies of influence.
“(…) this article argues that a global monopoly on the legitimate use of violence- a world state- is inevitable.”
Wendt invokes many of the major philosophers in order to add credibility and substance to the concept of the inevitability of a world state emerging out of the ruins of national sovereignty. After parading big names to invigorate his “big idea”, the author finally departs from a neo-Darwinian predisposition and the self-organizing principles included in it. In the struggle of nation-states, Wendt concludes, there can be no other outcome than the formation of a world state to settle all scores. He forgets to mention that neo-Darwinism can just as easily be applied to the idea that life organizes itself into more complexity as it evolves. But Wendt pays no heed: he raises his finger in foreboding: the greatest threat on the path to world government, he states, is national sovereignty. Wendt:
“Rather than go down with the ship of national sovereignty, states should try to “get the best deal” they can in the emerging global constitution.”
After identifying the main enemy to world dictatorship, he then proposes to co-opt the natural drive towards auto-determination in order to bring about his desired world state.
“Nationalist struggles for recognition are by no means over, and more new states- “more anarchy”- may yet be created. But while further fragmentation is in one sense a step back, it is also a precondition for moving forward, since it is only when difference is recognized that a larger identity can be stable. (…) Far from suppressing nationalism, a world state will only be possible if it embraces it.”
Everyone dedicated to fight the push for world dictatorship should wash their ears well with this statement. For the New World Order will pull out all the stops, including flirtations with national sovereignty, courting true libertarianism and align itself with any and every grassroots movement springing up out of the soil. The anti-venom is education, education and some more education. Anything too much centralized leaves itself wide open to infiltration.
Self-education that is. As we know, all institutionalized schooling has for many decades now been infiltrated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). At a meeting in 2009, Mr. Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai, Chair of UNESCO’s executive board, admitted the organization was created to “think global governance”:
“You will recall, dear colleagues, that I said, before Mr Ban Ki Moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, that UNESCO’s role is to think global governance. That is why the Organization was founded. We come to the rescue of the system especially when the economic machine runs out of steam, as it clearly has today. It is thus a matter of urgency to set up a long-term working group on global governance. I hope that a State or group of States will seize on this worthy proposal, and that the Organization, as of this session, will give it the attention it warrants.”
At her installment as Secretary-General of UNESCO in October 2010, Irina Bokova stated:
“I am convinced of the need for global governance, founded on universal ethics, in order to take up these common challenges.”
In a 1968 publication by Louis Francois for UNESCO, the author elaborates on the need for a worldwide education-system as opposed to the old, discarded one which still recognized sovereignty of the nation-state (page 18):
“We are witnessing the establishment of a new world order based upon the system of the United Nations”, Francois explains.
He links a growing world population as one of the main obstacles to be overcome in the quest for a global educational system (page 25):
“(…) not only is the population of the world increasing; it is also growing younger (…). So the first obstacle to be overcome by education is that of quantity. The first problem to be solved by a ministry of education is that of accommodating and teaching these rapidly increasing multitudes of young people.”
On page 32 the author arrives at the logical destination of his train of thought:
“Educational expansion is hard put to it to keep up with the huge growth of population.”
In order to effectively guide the population toward slavery, the number of people should be reduced lest its effectiveness wear off.
“Wherever we look“, says Francois on page 36, “education is striving to forestall the demographic explosion.”
All these statements do not fall out of the clear blue sky. UNESCO’s founder, Vice President of the Eugenics Society and foremost transhumanist Julian Huxley explained why global governance is crucial in his UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy:
“Even though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”
Another “founding father” of the scientific dictatorship, Sir Bertrand Russell once explained:
“Every government that has been in control of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen …”
With a sharp sense of foresight when it comes to media matters, Francois describes the future of education and what its ground principles are on which this future should be founded (page 80):
“Promoting the recognition of the fact that, if the countries of the world are still divided by their interests and their political convictions, they are, day by day, growing more closely interdependent in matters of economics, science, technology and culture. Promoting awareness of the fact that nations must cooperate, that is to say work together for their common good within international organizations.”
“To sum up”, the author concludes on page 98, “UNESCO serves as a catalyst for dynamic ideas. Well placed to hear of what is happening in the world, sensitive to the nation’s needs, UNESCO is aware of the very first stirring of ideas, follows their development and can, at the proper time, co-ordinate, harmonize and finally impose them in their full force.”
It would almost be amusing, this notion that UNESCO is merely picking up on ideas, if it were not so horribly cynical in the end. The calculated and synchronized move toward a brave new world is not a bottom-up thing, somehow evolving naturally from the grass roots; it is a top-down system, posing as grass roots, crafted to brainwash as large an audience as it can through the use of mass media, schooling systems and other available instruments of propaganda.
In 1974, the Director-General of UNESCO, Rene Maheu, stressed the importance of gathering all media, irrespective of its medium, under the great wing of UNESCO and the globalists. At a banquet of the International Coordinating Council of the Man and the Biosphere Programme in Williamsburg, USA, Maheu starts out by giving some insight in UNESCO’s long-term vision for mankind (page 2):
“The rationale behind the MAB (Man and the Biosphere) programme is to ensure that the physical, biological and other environmental requirements of man are placed in the hands of each of us (present) and remain under our overall control.”
Explaining to his listening audience that the earth will disintegrate if not for “a collective effort planned, organized and executed by the international community acting in concert”, the Director-General goes on to state:
“I believe that we have now reached the point in world affairs where we must have a systematic reorganization of international relations on all levels.”
He of course favors the UN as the proper body to do the reorganizing, gives it its proper name (page 4):
“I wish to reiterate my firm conviction- together with my hope- that a new world order- political, monetary, economic and social- should now be established.”
Precisely ten years after Louis Francois outlined the plans for a new world order, a meeting of “consultants” was organized at UNESCO Headquarters discussing “the free and balanced flow of information in a new communication order.”
The participants were carefully selected (page 1):
“Fifteen consultants and observers from university and professional circles and representatives of international journalists’ organizations attended this meeting. The main purpose of the meeting was to review briefly the origins of the concept of a free and balanced flow of information, to analyze the current state of discussions and the components of a new world order, together with its legal, technological and socio-economic implications, and to maker suggestions and recommendations for future action by UNESCO and other international organizations.”
One of the aims described in the document, was (page 2): “Preparing and carrying out “pilot programmes” of education incorporating these principles.” Regarding the before mentioned “legal implications”, one of the proposals was to “draw up regulations relating to international mass communications (page 3).”
There is nothing like a strong choke hold to force your subjects into submission. When the status of the journalist in this new world order was discussed, the participants agreed that they would first have to “assess the feasibility of establishing an international code of ethics which would be adopted by journalists possessing a “universal” sense of mission, that is to say transcending their national origin in the defense of peace and fraternity (page 3).” After we strip off the Orwellian euphemisms, this code of ethics clearly equals a strangling oath of obedience.
Among the many disturbing recommendations made by the panel, such as setting up “an international fund for the purpose of renting news transmission channels”, the need was expressed “to set up a “World Press Council” to help ensure the truthfulness and objectivity of information, in the event of it proving impossible to devise and adapt an “international code of ethics (page 6)”’.
A transnational body, in other words, that will decide whether a news item is truthful or not. While the going was good, the participants also called for (page 4) “seminars for professionals in order to make them understand the need to broaden the concerns of those who, in the mass communication process, have the responsibility for selecting information, in other words, those who act as information filters (Gate-Keepers).”
At a 1983 UNESCO conference, there seemed to be an even greater consensus on the strategies that should be implemented in order to reach a new world order- and it appears that those in attendance had a swell time debating semantics (page 16):
“The participants regarded the new world order as a recognized concept, developing but irreversible, which would be established stage by stage.(…) The establishment of a new world communication order appeared to one participant as a participation, a world response to the communications revolution, whereas another emphasized the importance of the word “new” in describing the concept.”
Bordering on the ridiculous, this exchange between globalists is nevertheless significant for it occurred long before papa Bush delivered his famous ‘new world order’ speech before the US congress in 1991. It became part of the nomenclature long before that within the seclusion of key globalist meetings. On page 10 some participants of the conference declared that “the effort to establish a new world information and communication order in stages could not be separated from the effort to promote a new international economic order.”
Or, if I may add, a scientific world order. Just recently I covered statements made by professor of physics at California State University and American representative to the UN, Roger Dittmann, who in 2004 wrote that all policies related to Agenda 21 should be pursued with the aim of worldwide population reduction and population control: “The Big Die Off”, as the professor calls it.
In his presentation Sustainable Development, the New International Scientific Order, and UN Reform Dittmann outright calls for a new “International Scientific Order” to make sure the entire scientific community will be made ready to implement worldwide population reduction objectives. Dittmann:
“Not only do people require organization about their (multiple) identities (including professional, scholarly, and scientific), they need international, even supranational affiliation, facing a common adversary.”
This common adversary-remark neatly ties in with the Club of Rome’s 1993 The First Global Revolution in which the authors state:
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
As the theoreticians pancake hypothesis upon hypothesis to prove their position, namely that a world state is inevitable, a closer inspection of their work reveals it is a false understanding, manufactured by a biased predisposition: both time and space have stunningly little regard for our fancies, phasing- as they do- in and out of our grasp as quickly as you can say ‘fallacy’. History, it seems, does not support their arguments.
After the Roman Empire had collapsed, other, smaller kingdoms emerged out of its ruins. This applies to the Greeks, the Babylonians, and almost every other system with imperial designs. The Egyptian kingdom, once a vast and powerful culture, grew to be just a shadow of its former self at the beginning of our calendar. Charlemagne established the great Frankish empire only to unwittingly lay the groundwork for the establishing of sovereign states in the centuries to come, like Germany and France. We have only to study history in order to counter the mythology of a gradual evolution towards a one world system. There is no evidence supporting an historic, chronological pattern of progression from the small to the great. More often than not it is the other way around, for excessive power always provokes resistance.
Global Research Articles by Jurriaan Maessen
Labels: COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, EUGENICS, GLOBALISATION
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