Mooning the world

"FITTING easily into the most conservative wing of the Bush administration, Josette Sheeran was from the outset an unlikely candidate to run the World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian aid organization, which has frequently been at odds with Washington.

But what made her more unusual was her long tenure as a major figure in the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church — she left it in the late 1990s — a conservative church that many Americans distrust.

She was appointed the World Food Program’s executive director in November, having been nominated and aggressively promoted by the Bush administration over vociferous objections from the European Union."

aid for democracy

"Saudi Arabia and Egypt do not receive massive foreign aid from the U.S. because they are bastions of freedom, justice, and democracy. These regimes are supported by leaders concerned primarily with gaining control over the regions' major oil reserves, an inconvenient fact quietly conceded in declassified government records and official policy statements. It is this obsession with the strategic power conferred by oil that we must consider if we are to understand overarching U.S. policy in the region."

unkept promises

"Families participating in an American-financed irrigation project from 2002 to 2006 were promised payment in corn for clearing the land and digging canals. The Kenyan government objected to the importation of American corn because the country was awash in a bumper harvest that had caused corn prices to plunge.

The result: American officials, prohibited by law from buying the corn locally, could not deliver it. As the impoverished families waited in vain for sustenance from the American heartland, malnutrition among the youngest children worsened and five people died of hunger-related causes." (thanks Yasmine)

Adam's (Smith) apple

"Like farmers in the bigger apple-producing states, they are increasingly anxious that China could flood the U.S. market with its fresh apples - an event many believe is inevitable, even if it could be years away.

China's advantage is its cheap labor. A picker makes about 28 cents an hour, or $2 a day, according to the U.S. Apple Association. In 2005, workers in Pennsylvania made about $9 to $10 per hour, and those in Washington State about $14 per hour, the association said.

To gain access to the U.S. market, China must prove that it meets U.S. standards for pest and disease control. The U.S. Apple Association said the Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service sent a list of more than 300 insects and diseases of concern to the quarantine inspection agency of the Chinese government in 2003. Beijing responded the next year, and then Washington asked for information on 52 pests from the list.

Most apples already carry the labeling, but Mark Barrett, a grower in Yakima Valley in Washington, said full implementation was the best way to help U.S. apple growers.
"I believe if we had country-of-origin labeling that the consumers would buy U.S. all the time," Barrett said."

Consumerism and imperialism

"All around the world, America is invading nations through its foods, medicines, consumer products, dangerous economic practices, synthetic chemicals and intellectual property. And everywhere that American products are adopted, widespread disease and death soon follows.



The World Trade Organization, for its part, makes sure that targeted nations comply with imperialistic western trade practices. The huge push of Big Tobacco into Asia, for example, is the result of support by "world trade" proponents who threatened to impose trade sanctions against Asian nations if they tried to ban cigarette advertising. Today, more than a third of Chinese men are addicted to cigarettes, generating billions in annual profits for Big Tobacco companies who are right now producing more Chinese casualties than any war in China's long history.



America is the world's largest exporter of disease. Through our popular soda products, cigarettes, fast food chains and manufactured foods, we have caused more death and disease around the world than any nation in human history (including Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot). And it all remains perfectly legal. Our chemical companies even manufacture and export pesticide chemicals that have been banned in the United States. Poor agricultural nations openly use those deadly pesticides on their crops, then ship the produce back to the U.S. where consumers buy it at grocery stores. It's all perfectly legal and, in fact, encouraged by U.S. political leaders.

Resistance is futile

It's actually more than legal: It's required! Any nation that says "no" to western products and intellectual property is immediately branded an enemy of world trade and is targeted for legal action by the WTO. Even creating pro-consumer safety standards such as banning aspartame, sodium nitrite or hydrogenated oils can be deemed a violation of international trade agreements. Product sales, you see, are the No. 1 priority, even when nations are being decimated by the products manufactured and exported by American companies.

Poor nations with undereducated populations suffer enormously under western economic imperialism. It's easy to sell Pepsi, cigarettes and lotto tickets to people in a country like Panama, for example, where the education level remains low and people are easily tricked into thinking that western products will make them happier. Pepsi, in fact, is the dominant consumer product throughout most of Central and South America. You can hardly travel anywhere south of the U.S. / Mexico border without being inundated with Pepsi propaganda. The Pepsi logo is more prominent than images of the Virgin Mary or the Pope, even though many South and Central American populations are Catholic. (It's quite clear what they actually worship!)

These international product invasions are important to the bottom line of U.S. corporations, of course, who are expanding their propaganda campaigns to non-U.S. countries following the wising up of American consumers. Only uneducated, ignorant consumers drink soft drink products in America these days. It's the same crowd that buys lotto tickets, smokes cigarettes, watches TV infomercials and lives on frozen dinners. Smart consumers in America switched to healthier drinks long ago. That's why soda sales continue to fall each year, and that's why U.S. soda corporations have to increasingly crank up their marketing machines in countries that haven't yet caught on to the toxicity of aspartame or the links between diabetes and high-fructose corn syrup. "


Read and weep. An excellent article, an absolute must read. The last part is a sort of a manifesto for sustainable nations, an alternative development strategy.

Cotton club

"Agricultural economists at the University of California, Davis, who conducted the study for Oxfam, found that a typical farm family of 10 in Chad, Benin, Burkina Faso or Mali — Africa's major cotton producers — that now earns $2,000 a year would have an extra $46 to $114 a year to spend if American subsidies were removed.

Oxfam, which has long campaigned for reductions in rich country agricultural subsides as a means to fight rural poverty in the developing world, said the added income would help families feed and educate millions of children. It maintained that Congress, now debating the farm bill that will set the rules for farm subsidies for the next five years, should cut cotton subsidies.

Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard who is skeptical of the importance of reduced agricultural subsidies, said he found Oxfam's new estimates credible, but said the gains forecast were relatively small. He said advocacy groups should be careful not to oversell them. Helping Africa's rural poor escape poverty will require a different set of economic strategies, he said. There is a need to foster a shift to the cultivation of higher-value crops and to develop industries, like garments and toys, that bring jobs."

Yasmine who sent me this article has asked me to remind you that you can post comments directly on the IHT site. Thanks Yasmine!

US penetrates the Middle East

"The web site, http://www.uae-us.org, provides a comprehensive overview of social and cultural relations, bilateral trade and security cooperation between the United Arab Emirates and the United States. The site also provides a regularly updated library of useful links and third-party analysis of the UAE, from US and UAE government sources, international media and high-level research and academic institutions.

Economically, the UAE is now the largest export market for US companies in the Middle East and North Africa, and therefore a significant trading partner."

The US is also the largest exporter of foodstuff to Lebanon. Lebanon's annual food import bill is $2billions. Lebanon's total food exports is $2millions per year. Only a small quantity reaches the US for many reasons, among them the bioterrorism act: products coming from countries like Lebanon have to undergo special scrutiny. This is also called a non-tariff trade barrier.

Lebanon's ministry of economy and trade ably led by Haddadamus is trying as hard as it can to sign a bilateral free trade agreement with the US. This should make it easier for the US to export even more junk food to Lebanon. So we are going to grant even more trade facilities to the country to which we pay most of our food bill, while they import almost nothing from us.

This is Nobel prize winning stuff.

Court Marshall

"A Muslim Marshall Plan will be as effective and as successful as our experts can make it. However, first we need the political will to make it a reality, and then we need to hire some new experts, because the current set is lazy, intellectually bankrupt, and complicit; these experts are focused on giving hand outs to dictators (and upon not seeing results agitating for invasion). That is the extent of their plan.

A Muslim Marshall Plan for the non oil-producing Muslim nations. That is the direction we must go."