George Bush is in Africa this week,
on another of his 'Insult Everyone's Intelligence' tours. Today he spoke,
inarticulately and insincerely, about America's shameful legacy of slavery.
He didn't use the term 'shame' or 'apology' of course -- lawyers were listening.
He blathered about free trade, terrorism and AIDS, as his aides rushed around
arranging photo ops. The mainstream US media, obediently, slavishly
, delivered the press releases they were fed, grateful that thanks to last
week's FCC ruling they now have permission to totally monopolize the airwaves.
The rest of the world's media told the rest of the world a different story:
- Unruly mobs of anti-Bush demonstrators and protesters calling
Bush a "butcher" were ruthlessly cleared from the streets, and forced from
their homes near the Bush visit sites by government militia, before photographers
and US media arrived. The motorcade trip down mostly emptied streets was
an astonishing contrast to Clinton's 2000 African trip, where throngs of
hundreds of thousands lined the streets and cheered.
- Bush refused any commitment whatsoever to assist war-ravaged
Liberia or Sierre Leone, or support a major infusion of peacekeeping forces
in Congo to stem the slaughter of millions and the tinderkeg about to produce
yet another round of genocide.
- Bush refused any commitment to ease the massive subsidies given
to US agricultural and manufacturing businesses, which prevent Africa from
exporting anything of substance to the US, while hypocritically insisting
that Africa "open its markets" to American products, making the visit essentially
a cynical, one-way, self-serving trade boondoggle.
- The Senegalese host president curiously requested "more funds
for African infrastructure, specifically heavy military equipment to help
with farming". Now we know why he was such a polite host, but why did none
of the journalists question what military equipment has to do with farming?
- Distribution of the $15B promised by Bush for African AIDS relief
remains tied up in legal wrangling and political logistics. Though we can
expect most of it to go to US pharma companies to subsidize the lower price
charged in Africa for AIDS drugs, neocons are holding up some funds because
the NGOs that distribute the drugs and AIDS education programs espouse family
planning and contraception, rather than abstinence, to prevent spread of
the epidemic that currently infects 30 million Sub-Saharan Africans.
- A Kenyan woman's pleas to Bush through the media for return of
her husband, seized and 'disappeared' by US 'counterterrorism' troops in
Malawi, have been ignored.
- Bush remains the only world leader since the end of apartheid
to visit South Africa without meeting, or seeking to meet, with Nobel prize-winner
and African hero Nelson Mandela. Mandela was an outspoken critic of the Iraq
invasion and of Bush's destabilization and undermining of the UN and its
institutions, saying, in the understatement of the century, that Bush 'has
trouble thinking clearly'.
Meanwhile physical and sexual slavery are ironically alive and well in much
of Africa, where the desperate spiral of poverty, greed, corruption and crushing
foreign debt precludes any hope of self-sufficiency or sustainable prosperity.
Aside from the laughable prospect of winning a few black votes back home
from the trip, its real motive is to find ways for America to get access
to West Africa's sizeable oil and gas reserves, and markets for American
goods, inevitably paid for with '
conflict (blood) diamonds
'.
And back at home, slavery of another form -- economic slavery -- is endemic.
Americans work ever harder and longer at underpaid, contract, piecemeal jobs,
languishing in chronic and severe under-employment, to pay inflated prices
for shoddy merchandise produced by shackled and beaten workers in American
subsidiaries and contractees in third world countries, as Bush slashes critically
needed public services for the economically disadvantaged in America to fund
tax cuts for the rich.
Yes indeed, Mr. Bush. Slavery is indeed 'one of the greatest crimes of history'.
But a greater crime is that you continue to use the past tense to describe
it, when it is still all around us, everywhere in the world, thanks in no
small part to your complicity, and your 'trouble thinking clearly'.
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9:22:38 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
