-Caveat Lector-
from alt.conspiracy
-----
As always, Caveat Lector. Sorry, but I sent two copies of part one.
Om
K
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<A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:539872">EIR on British gold war vs.
Africa Pt. II
</A>
-----
Subject: EIR on British gold war vs. Africa Pt. II
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, 25 July 1999 04:22 PM EDT
Message-id: <7nfrmr$7ok$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
TONY PAPERT: Another sign that the financial elites think
that their system has a very short life ahead of it, is the huge
attrition among finance ministers and officials in charge of
monetary affairs in advanced countries.
RICHARD FREEMAN: Yes. Well, when Robert Rubin said he was
not going to re-hitch up on July 1st and he was leaving, Lyndon
LaRouche said "Well, this is a case of the ships leaving the
sinking rats." (Laughter.) I think that's probably true.
TONY PAPERT: Maybe Greenspan.
RICHARD FREEMAN: Maybe Greenspan. But then, --
TONY PAPERT: Gore had said he's going to reappoint
Greenspan, by the way. We may have said that --
RICHARD FREEMAN: Yes, and so has Lindsey (ph), Larry
Lindsey, the spokesman for Bush. So we can both see what the
Intelligence Quotient of those people are -- (laughter) -- and
why people need to absolutely elect Lyndon LaRouche president.
But Eisuke Sakakibara left. He was the deputy finance
minister in Japan, known as "Mr. Yen," always spoke out on
international financial questions. And he told the {Australian
Financial Review,} he said "Look, the reason I'm leaving, is I
expect a Wall Street crash." and this is absolutely remarkable,
for a finance minister -- we suspected that. But for him then to
say that, is to confirm that the people who know the real shape
of the financial system, are getting out, which again raises the
question of the need to change policy direction right now, not to
be afraid of this financial crisis, but adopt the type of
solutions LaRouche has put out for getting out of it.
TONY PAPERT: Right. You're listening to "EIR Talks," and
we'll be back in just a moment.
TONY PAPERT: Welcome back to "EIR Talks." It's Wednesday,
July {EIR} economics writer Rich Freeman and {EIR} Africa editor Linda
de Hoyos.
Linda, Richard was speaking about the declines in standard
of living, especially food consumption, joblessness, in Latin
America. The Ibero-Americans themselves often refer to this as
the "Africanization of South America." What is the situation
now in Africa?
LINDA DE HOYOS: Well, what has happened in Africa, is
essentially that a lot of the levels of austerity that countries
are beginning to go through now, or over the last year:
Indonesia, South America, countries in South America, countries
in Southeast Asia, Russia -- these are levels of austerity that
Africa went through in the mid-1980s.
TONY PAPERT: My God.
LINDA DE HOYOS: That is, about 15 years ago. And there has
been no improvement since that time. In the 1980s, most African
countries were put through what is called a "Structural
Adjustment Program" (SAP) of the International Monetary Fund. And
this meant that they had to lay off many government workers, and
most of the health services of African countries collapsed at
this point. There was massive unemployment, food subsidies were
eliminated, and also subsidies for the production of food were
eliminated, and many African countries then had to turn to food
imports.
And at the same time, the terms of trade of African
countries has dropped more precipitously than any other region of
the world. That is to say, that the terms of trade for coffee,
tea, cocoa, diamonds, gold -- all of these different commodities
have absolutely collapsed, at least by one-third if not more.
And the African countries had debts. So the International
Monetary Fund was forcing devaluations. They were -- say, for
example, if you're exporting -- if you're spending 15% of your
government revenue and export earnings on debt service in the
early 1980s, for most African countries, this was going t up to
levels of 25%, 30%, 40%, 50% or more.
And in the northern African countries of Algeria, in
particular, and Egypt, this was even higher. In Algeria, the debt
service ratio to export earnings was 75%. The same with Nigeria:
the debt service went up way higher.
So, that also means that they have to export a lot more. So
they are forcing people to come out of food production into
production for export. And this has created what I call a
"vacuum cleaner effect," that everything is just being sucked
right out of the country. And the effect of this, was a takedown
of national economies, and a takedown of all government services.
So that today, for example, in Niger, which is a very poor
country in the world today, there is one doctor for 70,000
people, which really means that there is no health care. There's
no medical care whatsoever. And, under conditions where there is
hardly any sanitation, where people do not have access to clean
water; in most African countries, less than 50% of the people
have access to clean water, you have disease.
{And if you are not treating this disease, then what you
have done is on the level of the actual physical economy, you are
creating a depletion of the physical well-being of the
population.}
People also have protein deficiencies, which is a stress on
their immune system that they have, from the very beginning.
So, you are physically depleting the population, and you are
creating really a gigantic petrie dish for disease. And this is,
of course, what we have seen.
TONY PAPERT: Old and new diseases.
LINDA DE HOYOS: That's on the level of the physical economy
and what's happened to the people. And on the level of what this
socially creates, is a culture of despair, which is fed upon by
people who want wars in the region. And the reason that they want
wars, is to completely destroy any institutionalized resistance
to the wholesale robbery of Africa's very enormous and very rich
resources.
TONY PAPERT: And who are these people?
LINDA DE HOYOS: Well, for the most part, these are the same
types of private entities that Richard was talking about, who
have just managed to get their hands on all the -- you know, on a
large portion of the Bank of England's gold.
These are private companies that are backed up, by, say,
major types of financial banking interest. But they are, for the
most part, British Commonwealth extraction companies, like
Barrick Gold, which is Canadian, Bonro (ph) resources, Anglo
American, which Richard mentioned has moved to London, but from
South Africa. You know, Anglo American even has an ad, which has
its sort of base in South Africa, with all kinds of tentacles
reaching out to the rest of the continent, and says, you know,
"We're there." Well, that's for sure. And if they're not there,
they definitely want to be there.
And they are -- to give you an example of the type of
problem that they have, they waged a 10-year siege against the
government of Zambia, first under Kenneth Kaunda, and then under
the current president, Frederick Chuluba. They waged a 10-year
siege to force the Zambian government to sell its copper fields.
This also involved a tremendous plummeting of the copper
price, so that the company, the state company, was really not
even bringing in enough money to meet the cost of production, so
the company was falling into disarray, and so forth. And it
represented ostensibly an "objective burden" on the government.
So, first the Zambian government agreed, and they wanted to
sell this to a Zambian consortium. But that wasn't good enough.
The IMF had cut Zambia off of all money, which meant that all the
quote, unquote "donor countries" also cut them off, and the
banks, so that they were under a literal financial siege.
And they said "No, no, it's not good enough to sell it to
Zambians. And the people who were bidding for it, was one
consortium that involved Phelps-Dodge, and also another British
firm, and then the Anglo American.
And no matter what economic problem came up in Zambia, the
answer was always the same: "Sell your copper mines." There was
no other answer to anything. You know, AIDS -- "Sell your copper
mines." Anything that's going on, "Sell."
So finally, they were forced to sell.
Now, they sold these mines for the sum --if you can imagine
this -- of $72 million. And the plummeting recently further of
the copper price, had forced this very low sale price. But Anglo
American will not take on the debts of the company. The Zambian
government still has to pay those.
TONY PAPERT: They take the profits, but not the debts.
LINDA DE HOYOS: Yeah, they take the profits. But they are
supposed to put some money in to refurbish and revitalize the
company and get it up and running again, so that at least there's
employment.
Well, it came to my mind, as I was looking at this, well,
suppose the Zambian government said "Okay, fine, refurbish the
mines," and then turned around and did like what Kenneth Kaunda
did in I think the late 1960s and said "We're nationalizing this
again. Thank you very much, good-bye." Right?
So, for these interests, which operate through governments
-- right? -- and through the International Monetary Fund; for
these interests, the best insurance policy is not to have "your
man" in power, because under conditions of such austerity, there
is extreme instability. You never know what's going to happen.
The best guarantee to make sure that you will have your holdings,
is to have no government at all.
And this is why we see what we have seen in the 1990s, with
the removal of the atmosphere of the Cold War, the environment of
the Cold War, what we have seen, is the deliberate instigation of
conditions which create -- right? -- the failed state. And this
is why they want the failed state.
And what this means for the African people, is tremendous,
tremendous instability, leading to all kinds of wars, a condition
in which the idea is that the winner takes all, and the loser
loses everything, even up to the point of possible extermination
of the people.
And the big companies sit back and say "Well, we have our
hands on it, and we can protect our holdings with private
security companies, which are very rampant in Africa, and the
rest of it can go."
TONY PAPERT: It's back to the British East India Company,
really, a private company which controlled India.
LINDA DE HOYOS: Well, and also back to really almost feudal
conditions, where you have private armies, right? Where the
governmental structures have broken down, and you really have
private armies that are on the march now, mercenary forces
operating for -- you know, in that case it was land, but in this
case it's financial and oligarchies, who had moved very, very
forcefully into grabbing African resources and raw materials and
commodities at the point that they realized that the financial
system was going to come down.
Because at the end of the day, when the dust settles, they
want the property titles, right, on the strategic minerals, which
are required for industry, and on commodities, and on food. I
mean, Africa produces a lot of food, and could produce a lot
more, of course.
TONY PAPERT: Now, it seems clear President Clinton has good
will for Africa, even if he doesn't know exactly what to do, or
have a clear policy. I mean, who in the U.S. government is
covering up and protecting these genocidal operations you're
discussing?
LINDA DE HOYOS: Well, the problem that we have, of course,
is located in the Africa Affairs Department, in sort of the
hands-on sense. We have a type of policewoman there (Tony Papert
laughs) -- who's the undertrained Susan Rice, who's the assistant
secretary of state for African affairs. And I think she's 34
years old.
And as she herself has said recently in a speech at Oxford
University, she got most of what she knows about Africa from the
libraries of Oxford University. And this would be widely accepted
by the African diplomats and others who have had to deal with
her, and who can't believe how little she knows about Africa.
But, she has been vetted by British Intelligence, and by the
highest echelons of British Intelligence, because she received
prizes for her theses that she had written, from the Royal
Institute of International Affairs.
She's -- (brief audiotape break) -- in British Commonwealth
studies, and therefore has, unlike President Clinton, who went to
Oxford and rejected the type of oligarchical mentality which he
saw there, she has adopted it. And this is unfortunate for her
personally, of course, but it is far more unfortunate for the
many hundreds of thousands of people in Africa who have been the
victims of a policy basically of war coming from the United
States toward Africa.
RICHARD FREEMAN: I always wondered: how does someone 34 or
she must have been younger, get appointed? I mean, how did she
get into the State Department at such a young age? She normally
would be serving on a desk somewhere.
LINDA DE HOYOS: She would be serving on a desk, she would
have been going through various -- you know, foreign service
posts, foreign assignments. She doesn't seem to have any real
field work in Africa in any shape or form whatsoever.
She went from a short stint as a consultant with McKinney,
which is a Canadian firm, and then she was brought right into the
National Security Council a few years ago as an "expert on
peacekeeping." And she's very much involved with the African
Crisis Response Initiative, which is the idea of a regional
U.S.-backed regional militaries, to intervene into crises, which
would prevent things like -- presumably -- would prevent things
like Rwanda or Somalia happening again.
So, she's just brought in. I think that one of the
interesting things or "useful" things about her, is that since
she knows nothing, she's also not in a position to question any
reports that she gets. Then, she is protected by the U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She is very close to
Madame Secretary. And this also creates a problem, and functions
really as her protection.
And then, Vice President Gore is also one of these people
who believes that "there are too many people in the world." And
you will find that within the British and American policy makers,
that those people who really, truly are behind a policy of war
for Africa, will tell you that there are too many people in
Africa.
Well now, this is basically a ludicrous proposition, if you
look at the actual population densities of Africa. And they will
tell you that there's too many people in Angola, which is a
gigantic country that has about 10 million people in it, because
of the levels of technology. I mean, in other words, if you had
higher levels of technology and production, you could sustain
many more people. But at this very low level of technology, 10
million is "too many."
So these people will tell you that there are far too many
people in Africa to begin with, and the implication being that
we're doing them a "favor" by killing them. It's a certain type
of rationale, right. We're "alleviating them of their burden,"
which is themselves.
And so, Vice President Gore buys into this idea, and he has
praised the book, {The Population Explosion,} by Paul and Ann
Ehrlich, who were the pioneers of this idea that, you know, the
world's going to end if it goes to six billion people, that I
mean, we're all going to -- I mean, the world would just explode,
evidently.
And this is also coming from, as you can see, the absolute
neglect from the quote, unquote "donor countries" or from the
world at large, on the issue of AIDS in Africa. I mean, it's just
assume if you have HIV in Africa, you're going to die.
Well, if you live in a wealthy suburb in the United States
and you have HIV, it is not assumed any more that you are going
to die, because you can be put on a regimen of drugs which will
maintain you for x number of years, right.
But those drugs in the United States are expensive. And
there is now a war going on between Vice President Gore and the
South African President Tabu Mbeke, who both chair a binational
South African-U.S. Commission of Cooperation. And the United
States is demanding that South Africa repeal an act which permits
it to produce generic brands of these drugs, which would address
AIDS and other types of diseases. And they're saying that this
is unfair trade practices.
And Susan Rice and Gore and others, are pushing for
sanctions against South Africa.
RICHARD FREEMAN: But, Linda, weren't they also saying to
South Africans "We'll give you some recompense, we'll pay you
for some of this, but we can't pay the full price of the drug."?
But weren't they actually willing to make some payment on this
also?
LINDA DE HOYOS: Oh well, yes, of course, I mean, they do.
But they're saying that this is not enough. Now, it turns out
that one of Gore's top lobbyists is also a top lobbyist of the
major pharmaceutical companies in the United States. And it is
true that the pharmaceutical companies bear a lot of the cost of
research and development of drugs.
But not only, right. And so, what they're basically saying
to South Africa, where they have more than three million people
infected with HIV right now, and to a continent where 5,000
people die every day of AIDS, they're saying "Too bad," right.
"There's no room in the lifeboat for you, because we're not
going to subsidize the cost of these drugs, of giving you these
drugs at full price. And we're not going to permit you to produce
them, except we will punish you if you attempt to produce them,
and to distribute them to your population at a lower price."
TONY PAPERT: I understand that the U.S. price is or was
something like $500 a week, which is said to be the average
annual per capita income in southern Africa.
LINDA DE HOYOS: OH, well, in South Africa and in many places,
it's much lower. So you see this type of idea that we are letting
the continent go. We have written it off. And I think that this
is a tremendous illusion, to think that an entire continent of
700 million people can just be written off, and that this will
not have incredible repercussions.
TONY PAPERT: Well, I think the same thing is going to come
here. I mean, you have, as you say, the dysfunctional state --
the non-state and all this stuff. But that's now what Colombia is
becoming, as people are waking up with a shock. And if it can
happen in Colombia, it can happen elsewhere. And ultimately, it's
what the United States is heading toward, under current policies.
LINDA DE HOYOS: And there's also a very interesting book,
really, which says that, you know, this type of mentality of
really treating whole broad sections of the world as if they were
nothing better than animals, this type of mentality is what
creates and fosters -- or, say, it's a type of mentality which is
extremely vulnerable and conductive to various forms of fascist
movements, right.
There was a book that came out recently, or I guess last
year, saying that imperialism and what the imperialist countries
-- well, governments. Let's not say the people of the imperialist
countries.
But that the way in which -- what imperialism did in its
brutal repression and destruction of African societies, came
home, was a precondition for the creation of Nazism and fascist
movements in Europe. And I think that that is --
TONY PAPERT: Dehumanization.
LINDA DE HOYOS: The dehumanization that's involved, right?
Because if you are going to -- it's a lot easier, if you want to
steal something from somebody, it's a lot easier to do it if you
create conditions under which they are acting against their own
interests. And the best way to do that, is to dehumanize them and
bestialize them. And that's what we see within the culture of the
United States today.
TONY PAPERT: Exactly. The Confederacy -- the remains of the
Confederacy.
LINDA DE HOYOS: Well, the remains of the Confederacy, and
also the entire type of enormous cultural despair which you see,
and lack of any sense of a positive future that you see exhibited
in events like Littleton, the Littleton murders, right.
Now, I'm not saying that, you know, there's a one-to-one
causality, you know, correspondence in some Newtonian sense. But
the dehumanized mentality, I think, comes across.
And, you know, to give you one example of this. The African
leaders are getting to the point where they are beginning to
speak out in ways that they have not spoken out before, because
they know that if they do not start fighting in a different way,
the compromises of the post-colonial period are off, they are
finished, there is no compromise. The demand is really that you
die.
And therefore, there's nothing to be lost by fighting. And
President Mugabe has come out. He has been -- well, the IMF has
told him, the President of Zimbabwe, the IMF has told him "If
you want money to pay your balance of payment deficit, you have
to get out of the Congo." That's the unofficial but actual
demand.
TONY PAPERT: Where he's the main supporter of the legitimate
government.
LINDA DE HOYOS: He's the main supporter of the government of
Kabila; which they have done, in order to preserve the concept of
sovereignty within the continent as a whole.
And he said "Well, the IMF -- we don't need them. Who are
they?" Right? "They're useless." And he called the IMF "that
monstrosity. If they don't want to give us money, we don't need
them." And this is an attitude which is becoming more and more
prevalent.
And they are also speaking out on the fact that in Kosova,
for example, the United Nations $1.50 per day on every refugee,
and in Africa, it's 11 cents a day.
Now, what that means, is not that food is cheaper in Africa
than it is in Eastern Europe. What that literally means, is that
displaced people in Africa are dying of starvation. They're dying
in Uganda, they're dying in Angola, they're dying in Somalia,
they're dying in Ethiopia, they're dying in southern Sudan.
They're dying in Zambia, where refugees are coming in from the
Congo.
RICHARD FREEMAN: How many displaced persons are there? Are
these largely because of these instigated wars and things of that
sort?
LINDA DE HOYOS: Yeah. Well, there are many hundreds f
thousands of displaced. I would have to -- certainly -- well, in
the range of millions of people, right. Some of them are
internally displaced, like in Angola, they're mostly internally
displaced. But there's nothing that's being done for these
people. They are dying of starvation, literally. In northern
Uganda, it's the same.
And combined with drought, and the fact that people cannot
cultivate under these conditions of war. If you look at a map of
Africa, you see that the entire -- from the Horn of Africa,
southern Sudan, large parts of Uganda, the eastern Congo,
Burundi, Rwanda, Angola, and moving down into Zambia, these
entire areas are in war conditions.
So, cultivation and production is not going on. And this
means starvation, in short term.
TONY PAPERT: But just let's return to something you were
talking about a minute ago, because the Americans among our
viewers and listeners are going to have to be ready when this
system collapses, to move ahead with a workable monetary and
economic system. And it was very inspiring to me, what you told
me earlier, about what African leaders have said. Perhaps you
could say more.
You mentioned Mugabe, but I know others have spoken as well.
LINDA DE HOYOS: Well, what's required, really is not just a
cancellation of the debt, which most African leaders are
demanding, and they are demanding it without conditions. In other
words, "We don't have to meet some onerous Structural Adjustment
Program and take down our entire system to get the debt
cancellation. We cannot pay this debt, some of this debt is not
legitimate anyway, the money never even made it into the
country."
TONY PAPERT: Obasanjo said that.
LINDA DE HOYOS: Obasanjo was saying that.
TONY PAPERT: He's the new president of Nigeria.
LINDA DE HOYOS: The South African Anglican Archbishop is
saying that many of these debts that you're making us pay were
taken under apartheid to destroy us, so why should we be paying
them?
But it's not just a question of debt cancellation. It has to
do with credit for development. And what is required, is credit
for the purposes of infrastructural development. African
electricity consumption is one-sixteenth of the entire world
average, which is to say there's no electricity. The homes don't
have electricity. Most women in Africa cook with firewood, or
some equivalent.
And there's also -- there are many rivers in Africa, but
none of them are connected, so it's very difficult. The internal
transport system is practically non-existent. All the transport
systems, the railroads, the roads, go from a location of some
type of commodity and resource to the coast. But there's nothing
that really that has opened up the interior.
There's a tremendous deficit in schools, and for educational
facilities, and obviously an enormous deficit in medical
services.
So, what's required is credit for development, and this is
what a monetary system has to do. So the issue is not just simply
the debt, the issue is also credit, and for what purposes? At
what interest rate?
And I think that one of the reasons we find ourselves in
such a tremendous financial mess -- I mean, in other words, a
worldwide systemic crisis of the monetary system -- is because
the original Bretton Woods had within it this fraud, which said
that all countries have to be equal, and no country could have a
balance of payments deficit, when, if you're a developing
country, and you have just broken 100 years or more of
colonialism, in which everything was taken out and nothing was
put in, you require a deficit. Of course you will have a deficit.
How could you possibly pay back everything in the course of
one year? It's impossible. And this created this debt bubble. But
it also prohibited -- acted as a financial block against the
development of the developing countries.
And it is that physical drag on the world economy, which is
one of the major contributing factors to the depression that we
see today.
TONY PAPERT: Yeah, yeah. In other words, we think we're
getting cheap commodities from Africa, but it's really much more
expensive than it would be if there was development.
LINDA DE HOYOS: Yes. If we had developed these countries,
created markets for our capital goods; and that's what we must do
now, with a new monetary system, as Mr. LaRouche has proposed,
which would issue credit for the purposes of development --
30-year, long-term, you know, low-interest loans. And would
actually restart the economy.
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