Live 8-Ball in the Side Pocket: Getting Cozy with the Man

George Monbiot gets it exactly right about the dangerous game of footsie that Bono and Bob Geldolf are playing with world leaders -- helping them paper over the true causes of ruin and despair in Africa with feel-good gestures laden with draconian conditions.

Bards of the powerful:
Far from challenging the G8's role in Africa's poverty, Geldof and Bono are giving legitimacy to those responsible

An excerpt: ...

ANOTHER, from July:

Saturday, July 09, 2005

The Hollow, Hateful, Harmful Compassion of the Great and Good G8

The "historic" aid package announced by the Politburo of the Plutocracy in Scotland this week will indeed provide an unprecedented level of unhindered assistance, doled out with no strings attached. Unfortunately, this largess is being dispensed to the G8's corporate masters, not the suffering people of Africa. Bono and Geldof have been played like violins -- or maybe honked like clown horns -- by the Politburo, who used the pop stars' credibility to blur the rapacious essence of their heavily conditioned "compassion." Here's yet another look at the truth behind the prancing popsters, again from the Guardian. An excerpt:

"While the G8 agreement commits the richest countries to increase aid and write off the debt of 18 countries, it requires developing countries to pursue a raft of free-market policies. The G8 is united behind this agenda, which Britain has taken a lead in pushing. Gordon Brown's new deal talks of the poorest and richest countries "each meeting our obligations". Poor countries' obligations are to "create the conditions for new investment" and "more favourable business environments" while "opening up trade". Only in return for these will rich countries provide aid and debt relief and open up their markets. One might think that countries where poverty kills thousands every day have no obligations towards the rich. But in the world of Brown and the G8, they are to help western companies make more profits by pursuing policies that have increased poverty and inequality from Ghana to Zambia... It's a cheap strategy, too - last month's G7 finance ministers deal cut in aid what countries got in debt relief...

"The basic aim of British elites has traditionally been to help companies get their hands on other countries' resources. Secret 1960s files state that "we should bend our energies to help produce a world economic climate in which our external trade, our income from invisibles and our balance of payments can prosper". The key was to protect sources of raw materials in the Middle East and southern Africa by promoting "freer" global trade and "increasing our efforts to open up new markets".

"Postwar planners never intended to allow African countries to be truly independent. After decolonisation, they sought to establish pro-western elites - like those who now welcome the G8 agreements - and impose indirect economic rule through levers such as aid. The Attlee government, which established the aid programme in 1948, drained millions from Africa to help Britain's postwar recovery. Current development policies are ways to control nominally independent economies in a post-imperial world."

And again, this is a sinister coin that's paid out on both sides of the Atlantic.
posted by Chris Floyd at 10:45 PM  

IZZY wrote a good diary about this:

G8 Squeezing Them Dry

by Izzy
Thu Jul 7th, 2005 at 01:36:56 PM EDT

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but there's something fishy about the recent announcement proposing debt relief for Africa's poorest nations.  When the G8 leaders announced the plan, it was greeted with almost universal delight, as well it should.  ... [...]

In fact, I'd love to hold hands with Bob Geldof, Bono, and the G8 leaders and sing Kumbaya -- okay, maybe not all the G8 leaders, but you know what I mean.  I like happy news.  

But there's a problem with the G8 announcement.  There are nefarious strings attached -- conditions set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, whose president is neo-conservative Paul Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq invasion.  ...

Londonbear:

We Should Give Africa Nothing

by Londonbear
Sat Jul 2nd, 2005 at 09:20:22 AM EDT

Today Live8 is holding concerts across 9 time zones. As I write, the one in Japan has almost finished, the one in Johannesburg has started, the London one is about to start and the sound checks are starting in the USA. It's laudable aims are to influence the leaders at the G8 meeting next week to focus on Africa and the world's other poorest nations to provide a series of measures including increasing aid to the UN target figure of 0.7% of GNI (Gross National Income). I want to propose a greater challenge - to achieve an aid budget to Africa as a whole of zero, that's right nothing.

If Live8 reinforces the perception of Africa as a impoverished disease-ridden continent whose peoples are waiting for a hand out, they are in danger of committing a greater crime than any of the old colonial powers. ...

and many more such instances...

Hickok: "You know the sound of thunder. Can you imagine that sound if I ask you to? Ma'am, listen to the thunder."