Kushmonster

Kushmonster

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Saturday, April 24, 2010

IMF BIG BROTHER, GREECE, AND ANOTHER TROJAN HORSE

QUESTION: The Greek public, the majority of the Greek public is demonizing the IMF and think things are going to be worse than better. What is your message to the Greek public?

MR. STRAUSS-KAHN: Unfortunately, the Greeks are not the only ones demonizing the IMF. But, I think that the Greeks, as others, should see the IMF as it is today. The IMF is a kind of cooperative organization, where all the countries of the world work together to try to help those being in trouble. Today, Greece is in trouble. Tomorrow, maybe another. And so what is the IMF doing? Trying to provide advice on behalf of the entire international community, trying to provide resources to help on behalf of the entire community. So, the Greek citizens shouldn't fear the IMF. We are there to try to help them.....

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I suppose the hysterical debt burdened, cash strapped minions of the Greek Archipelago can be forgiven for their deeply felt trepidations concerning the generally unwelcome intrusion of the International Monetary Fund onto the scene of the desperate economic straits into which their otherwise idyllic socialist utopian society has descended. After all, with such agencies as the Eleftheros Typos broadcasting that "George Papandreou has unconditionally surrendered to the IMF" along with many other "left-wing extremist" organizations "demonizing" the humanitarian dispensations of the Fund, it would follow that the confused and hard pressed masses might misconstrue the benign and paternally philanthropic nature of this widely misunderstood international economic brotherhood. And what if so many Laocoons and Cassandras come forth to challenge and detract the Fund as the Greek journalist who posed this provocative question to "le grande seducteur" has suggested? Does this in any way diminish the responsibilities of the members of the international financial community who, possessed of such great fiscal and monetary resources, are in a position to extend much needed aid and a hand up to this economically devastated European nation? Why, that would be like questioning...well, Big Brother himself...

The wide media circulation of Mr. Strauss-Kahn's disavowal of any "demonic" intentions on the part of the IMF is reflective, not only of the deeply held suspicions regarding its activities, but is also indicative of the radically new terrain upon which the IMF has embarked. Western European countries have reflexively understood that the peculiar economic ministrations of the Fund have been exclusively reserved for the developing and emerging nations, generally of the third world type, or at best for the laggard cousins of Eastern Europe, only recently emerging from the shadow of Soviet domination. That a bona fide member of the European Monetary Union, albeit one of Southeastern Europe (SEE), would find itself in the gunsights of such a widely acknowledged international economic predator brings the very viability and purpose of the EU experiment into question, especially given Mr Louse-Con's thinly veiled threat of "Tomorrow, maybe another".

Perhaps even more disturbing to the "amour propre" of the EU members and especially the so- called PIIGS is that the IMF's impending "structural adjustments" are coming not only on the heels of the Greek government's own significant "austerity measures" but perhaps more importantly in the wake of the government and financial sector's serious fraudulent economic collusion with Goldman Sachs involving the now notorious CDS and IRS derivatives which are largely responsible for the country's massive external debt obligations and the ever deepening Greek economic malaise.The subsequent and ongoing attacks of institutional speculators and investors from hedge funds on Greece are only another prefigurement of what is in store for the other collapsing "sovereigns" in the EU as well as the bankrupt states in the U.S.

As the assemblage of financial ministers from the IMF/World Bank and the G20 got underway in Washington on April 24th the plans for a joint EU/IMF bailout of Greece were paramount. Agreed upon was the unprecedented and game changing loans of some $60 million of which the IMF was expected to contribute some $15 billion. A recent poll in Greece found that some 91% surveyed agreed with the foregone conclusion that the IMF largesse would come at the price of greater austerity measures; 96% thought that already significant levels of unemployment would rise (already 30% among youth) and 71% feared some level of social unrest. I guess that qualifies as "demonization", actually a most curious and yet appropriate appellation, given the performance of the Fund over the past decades throughout the developing third world economies among its 186 quota bearing member nations.

It is interesting to note that as recently as March 9. 2010, Mr. Strauss-Khan had suggested, flying in the face of all available evidence, that Greece "would resolve it's debt crisis without an IMF bailout". The stark disingenuous of this comment is revealed by the fact that a 2008 IMF report had predicted the Greek deficit to be 6.7% in 2010 when the actual figure was a little less than double that figure at a startling 12.7%. On the basis of this fraudulent analysis the IMF actually predicted a recovery in late 2010. Papandreou himself stated in December of last year that "salaried workers will not pay for this situation; we will not proceed with wage freezes or cuts. We did not come to power to tear down the socialist state". Some few months later the government instituted a general public sector pay freeze, specific public sector pay cuts, increased the Value Added Tax by 2% and sharply increased taxes on alcohol, tobacco, fuel and luxury items in addition to a crackdown on endemic tax evasion. Oddly enough these were some of the very conditions which the IMF had demanded in its Article IV consultations as early as May 25, 2007. It is not difficult to discern a distinct "quid pro quo" arrangement between the Greek government and its IMF counterparts perhaps to preempt as much as possible any public perception of the Fund's past and future involvement.

At the same time, Strauss-Kahn also depicted the wider Eurozone economy as strong and was insistent that other countries, in particular the SEE nations would not "be forced into Greece's predicament". When it was suggested to him that Spain or Ireland might be in danger of default, SK responded that those who entertained such speculations "only want to scare the financial markets". Such incredibly optimistic assessments of the particularly dire situation are quite typical of the third rate IMF economic prognostications, indicating either gross incompetence or outright mendacity or both. The following charts by Reggie Middleton are only two of several which he has compiled indicating the IMF proclivity for disinformation which can be found in abundance on the IMF website as well.


Indeed, it can be stated that the IMF penchant for public relations far supercedes any serious attempt at economic analysis. The press conferences and public statements which attended the annual IMF/World Bank annual spring meeting with G20 finance ministers is an obvious example of the kind of doublespeak which is the euphemistic, ambiguous, and obscure stock in trade of government and military propaganda intended only for mass consumption. In this respect the IMF/G20 assurances concerning the so-called recovery of the world economy are nothing more than a smokescreen intended mostly to provide cover for the continuation of criminal economic policies which brought about the necessary pre-conditions for the financial collapse. This will bring the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944 to its intended denouément, namely the debasement and eventual devaluation of all Western currencies and the subsequent supplanting of the Anglo-American/European economic model with a pan-Asian industrial production and banking matrix colonizing and exploiting the vast labor pools and untapped resources of China, South Asia and Africa in tandem with replacing the US$ with the establishment of a new reserve currency with the IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDR) as its basis.

For the IMF/World Bank has a very distinct and pronounced agenda which it holds in common with the colonial empires of imperial conquest, which is nothing short of the complete domination of the world financial system in the name of neo-liberal economic policies. Its public persona as the guarantor of economic stability and the fluent exchange of goods, services, and capital only masks predatory economic policies devoted to the evisceration and exploitation of the social and economic order of the many developing nations who have the misfortune to have been the object of the IMF's destructive programs.

As the financial meltdown enters what an IMF economist recently called "its second phase", comparisons are being made between the Greek crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, 2008. As the sovereign nations of Europe increasingly become targets for the institutional investors, hedge funds, and bond rating agencies and are picked apart in the process, the IMF will inevitably become the lender of last resort much as the Federal Reserve has become the source of an endless hurricane blizzard of monetization in the United States. With most of the so-called developing world firmly in its grip, the IMF will now be free to concentrate on the EU which as become the latest and most lucrative platform for the enrichment of its conglomerate partner corporate and financial institutions. It remains to be seen who will emerge victorious in the battle between the investors, who stand to take enormous losses in the event of a Greek default, and the ordinary citizens, who stand to suffer the privations and indignities of the extraordinary and unprecedented austerity measures which the international creditors along with their IMF allies are howling for, ostensibly to reign in the exponentially growing levels of debt service, which threaten to inundate not only Greece, but the entire Eurozone as well as the largest debtor nation on earth and the insolvent state governments in the United States. Given the natural predilection for human greed especially in the financial class and in the presence of binding legal contracts for the payout of trillions of dollars to various counter parties in OTC derivatives financial instruments, massive civil and social unrest seems not only likely but inevitable with the corresponding overwhelming reaction from police and military forces to "restore order".


Thursday, April 8, 2010

THEY CAME TO PLAY-KYRGYZ MOB ROUTS COPS, PARAMILITARY, STORMS , BURNS GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, SEVERELY BEATS INTERIOR MINISTER, LOOTS BISHKEK

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Kyrgyzstan, a nation of some 5.4 million people about the size of South Dakota, former member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and subsequently, of the Commonwealth of Independent States, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December of 1991, and present participating member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization also holds the unique distinction of being the only country in the world to host both a U.S. military installation, the so called Manas Transit Facility, and a Russian base as well, the Kant Air Force Base, both within less than 30 miles of each other. Kyrgyzstan also shares a long border with China to the south opening up on the restive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the Peoples Republic, making the Kyrgyz Central Asian republic a critical geopolitical arena and staging ground for the strategic maneuverings of the three international powers as the global focus is drawn inexorably onto the stage of the Brzezinskian Grand Chessboard of Central and South Asia.

What for some of us might appear then to be merely another titillating third world IMF riot á la Joseph Stiglitz suddenly assumes a larger proportion, perhaps foreshadowing the rapidly evolving and inevitable confrontation brewing between the U.S., China, and the resurgent Russian federation as the world economic structural collapse accelerates and access to dwindling energy, food, and water resources becomes an increasingly essential concern of national security agendas.

Unfortunately for many poor and "developing" countries, little has changed since the Cold War when nations became so many battlefields by proxy for the wider ideological conflict between East and West. The same holds true for the nations comprising the "newly independent" Commonwealth of Independent States which came into being following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The abrupt and catastrophic transition into market based economies after decades of centralized state control paralleled the fate of Russia itself. Privatization and market liberalization, the longstanding concomitants of IMF hegemony eviscerated industrial production, transferred public utilities and national enterprises in the mining and energy sectors into the hands of a corrupt oligarchy. The resultant asset stripping, plundering of resources and national wealth, the evaporation of personal savings was creative of an economic and social catastrophe within Russia and its satellite countries.

The solution to this problem was, of course, more massive infusions of capital and credit, with a characteristic outflow of resources and capital back into the "donor" agencies*. In Krygyzstan alone, the combined agencies and enterprises of more than 40 locally based international organizations with 22 offices nationwide under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, along with a plethora of European, Japanese, Turkish, and Asian investment banks, finance corporations and security, development and cooperation organizations, all directly or indirectly funded by the World Bank and IMF, have since 1992, descended en masse upon the mountainous Central Asian nation with the obvious and unmistakeable consequences of organized economic predation under the flimsy and transparent guise of free market capitalism and development.

As one of the weakest and impoverished of the former Soviet Republics, the former Kirghiz SSR, came under the first of its nepotistic despots in the person of Askar Akayev, a physicist educated in Leningrad, in 1991. Akayev's connections with the old Soviet Union were such that he was later selected by Putin for the vice-presidency of the Russian Federation, a position which he declined in favor of his presidency of Kirghiz SSR. Akayev's accommodations with Moscow were accompanied by a similar fealty to the International Monetary Fund which established Kirghiz SSR as a full member in 1992, and the above mentioned cartel of international "donors" under the aegis of USAID and with the participation, not surprisingly,of the ubiquitous Soros Foundation. This precarious arrangement was augmented by an equally curious balancing act sandwiched between the vast and energy rich Kazakhstan to the north and the energy hungry and rapidly developing Chinese behemoth to the south. In the process, the Kirghiz SSR was ground inexorably and unremittingly between the opposing weights of these immense, economic and geo-political millstones, not to speak of the brutal ministrations of the corrupt despot working on their behalf

Akayev's tenure began to be threatened almost immediately upon a bilateral agreement with Russia which established the Kant Air Force Base in September 22, 2003. On the heels of the Rand corporation sponsored "color revolutions" in the Ukraine and Georgia, Akayev fled to Moscow after the so called Tulip revolution toppled his corrupt, despotic and scandal plagued regime on March 24, 2005, installing Kurmanbek Bakiev as the "first" president of Kyrgyzstan. Bakiev assumed power in the great and mistaken assumption that the dictatorial excesses of the Moscow puppet regime would be eliminated and that the grinding poverty with over 40% of the population below the poverty line would be alleviated. These grand and unfounded hopes were soon transformed into even greater and growing inequities and social chaos which had characterized the previous regime as Bakiev played off the contending international powers against each other all the while loyally serving the IMF suzerain with undivided loyalty.

Bakiev's undeniable skill at personal influence peddling was apparently the cause of his downfall as well. He managed to get the Americans to triple the amount of their "rental" of the Manas Airport, an extensive enterprise, essential for supplying U.S./NATO/ISAF forces in Afghanistan, from $20 million to $60 million, for his influence in forestalling a parliamentary vote to expel the Americans, while at the same time securing $150 million from the Russians in addition to a hefty $2 billion loan to be released in successive tranches for his efforts to remove the base in a quid pro quo arrangement with Moscow. In the end the USAF base was allowed to continue though now designated only a "transit facility", the immense and lucrative contract for concessions being placed firmly in the control of his son Maksim. It has been suggested that this double cross enraged Putin and was responsible for obvious and elemental role that Russian military forces played in the subsequent "revolution". To this effect Russian Federal Security Forces were on the ground in Kyrgyzstan in the weeks preceding the events of April 8 following the visit to Moscow by selected members of the Kyrghiz opposition.

Maksim Bakiev is a case study in the overt nepotism which has so characterized the regimes of both Akayev and the elder Bakiev. Bakiev the younger is part owner of the British Blackpool Football Club as well as now former head of the Central Agency for Development, Investment, and Innovation. Also the main shareholder in the Kumtor Gold Mine operated by Canada's Centerra Gold, an enterprise which contributes a whopping 10% of total GDP and over 40% of industrial production, Maksim just happened to be out of the country on his way to address the Krygyzstan Opportunities Economic Forum II in Washington co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The subject of that address preempted by the events back home was the acquisition of hydroelectric, energy and mining concessions in Krygyzstan by Western investors. With his whereabouts initially unknown he was eventually tracked to Latvia where he owns "several businesses".

Such incredible corruption is typical of IMF friendly regimes and is indicative of the kickbacks, slush funds, and preferential concessions meted out to the coteries of well connected insiders and dynastic hierarchies which help create the state facilitated climate that expedites and enforces the often draconian IMF economic policies which we are now witnessing the ultimate results of in Kyrgyzstan and throughout the "developing" world. Akayev, Bakiev, and most recently Roza Otunbaeva all serve the financial diktat of the IMF/World Bank hegemonic class. Indeed, the measures which Bakiev initiated in late 2009 including a sharp increase in taxes on small and medium sized businesses, and on January 1, the institution of new tariffs on telo-communications, electricity, and heating costs effectively increasing costs in public utilities by an "eye-watering" 500 to 1000% were a stark example of IMF austerity policies in a country where GDP growth had already taken a precipitous plunge of more than 10% from 12% in 2007 to less than 2% in 2009.

As recently as February 20. 2010, a little less than two months preceding the saguinary violence which convulsed the Khirghiz republic, the IMF issued one of its patented, most deliberate, and self serving misstatements concerning the supposed economic welfare of Kyrgyzstan. According to the IMF website, "the Kyrgyzs economy has weathered the effects of the global economic crisis well" and the performance of the economy under the Exogenous Shock Facility (ESF) "continues to be good". Krygyzstan was one of the first countries to avail itself of the ESF program in December of 2008, ostensibly providing the debt ridden nation $100 million over an 18 month period to "alleviate higher food and fuel prices". What isn't indicated is that the escalating prices were the direct result of the usual IMF Enhanced Structural Adjustment facility itself. The newly founded ESF had replaced the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) under which Kyrghystan had labored since its inclusion in the IMF fold in the early 90's.

Under the regimen of the PGRF, instituted in 1999 with IMF loans of $116 million and provisions of the Krygyz Republic Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (1998-2000), the usual "comprehensive privatization program" was undertaken with an expectation of the eventual privatization of 100 additional large enterprises, including the aforementioned Kumtor gold mine which under IMF dictate was to "render all dividends and other payments directly transferred to the budget". The government itself was quite typically to "reduce all transfers and subsidies to public enterprises and the Social Fund and to curtail all non-priority public spending". In addition the "government will submit to the parliament privitization plans for the gas and electricity companies". Government pension and disability funds were to be drastically curtailed as well. All of these measures were undertaken for the express purpose of maintaining increasing levels of external debt management along with the maintenance of current exchange rates and the "improvement of tax administration" and streamlining of customs duties and payments contributing to the debt service as well. With this fiscal stranglehold in place under the lockdown of an IMF friendly police state apparatus under Akayev, the denizens of Kyrgygstan were reduced to depending on "remittances" from immigrant workers in Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation for 27% of GDP, with the general population of 40% below the poverty line and 18% official unemployment, and a 10% inflation rate. When Putin cut the Russian quota for Kyrgyzs immigrant labor by over 50% in December 2008, the stage was indeed set for massive destabilization and the ensuing and inevitable conflagration.


Monday, April 5, 2010

U.S. WAR CRIMES IN IRAQ VIA WIKILEAKS


This video recording of the senseless and grotesque murder of innocent civilians is made all the more incongruous by the flippant smug and self-congratulatory attitude of the perpetrators as they sadistically exterminate their unfortunate victims by remote control and then revel in the carnage. This extraordinary documentation of callous inhumanity and indifference to suffering will surely go down in history as a most profound indictment of the invasion, occupation, and evisceration of the people of Iraq, that is unless we ourselves have already succumbed to the absolute moral indifference which is responsible for such heinous crimes. An entire nation stands indicted and convicted in these mere 17 minutes of video footage. The accompanying and dismissive disavowal of responsibility for this bloodbath on the part of the military authorities and the lack of any accountability whatsoever reflects our own complicity in this terrible carnage and assures us that we as a nation stand condemned and doomed to destruction for these appalling crimes, the victims of which cry out to heaven for justice. I think we can say without any qualification that the evidence of this footage places us squarely in the ranks of the of the worst war criminals known to mankind. May God have mercy on our souls.



McCaffrey himself is an accused war criminal due to his actions in the First Gulf War when he ordered the 24th infantry division under his command to position itself between retreating and defeated Iraqui forces and their intended destination, without receiving orders and with no clear strategic significance. The ensuing massacre, which involved the slaughter of innocent non combatants as well, surprised even his military peers, one of whom suggested it was "like shooting fish in a barrel". Of course he was cleared of any wrongdoing by a military inquiry. God only knows what other atrocities were perpetrated by this monster of iniquity in his previous tours of duty in Vietnam.

He subsequently became a military analyst for NBC and MSNBC providing the patented military doublespeak and disinformation that was the hallmark of the MSM reportage of the Second Gulf War.He was already an experienced hand at this due largely to his position as head of Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), 1996-2001, where he was the subject of a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation for the use of prepared and prepackaged news stories that did not inform the viewers that the bogus reports had been produced by his agency.(with illegally appropriated government funds to boot) Again a white wash ensued. At the same time McCaffrey was soliciting the producers of several prime time television shows to embed anti-drug propaganda in their scripts.

Given these impeccable credentials and in light of his stellar military pedigree with his penchant for the same kind of gratuitous murder exhibited in the WikiLeaks video, it is no wonder that he was trotted out to run interference and do damage control. This hell bound creature from the dark side presently runs a consulting firm from which he undoubtedly dispenses the same type of toxic waste which has characterized his entire inglorious career. Barry McCaffrey, murderer, liar, be damned.

thanks for the post and videos, George http://ofgoatsandmen.blogspot.com

Friday, April 2, 2010

IMF/ EXXON MOBIL AND THE CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES IN KENYA-WOLVES IN SHEEPS CLOTHING

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There was a great deal of controversy over the past several days concerning the appointment by Barack Obama of Mr. Islam Siddiqui as the Chief Agricultural Negotiator for the Office of U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). Mr. Siddiqui has had a wide experience in numerous federal and state agencies which oversee U.S. domestic and foreign policy regarding agricultural regulation and marketing. After 28 years as the head of the U.S.D.A. in California, Siddiqui served in the Clinton Administration for the same agency as Undersecretary for Marketing and Regulatory programs.

Most recently Mr. Islam was Vice President for Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America, a trade group representing the U.S. Agrichemical Industry, namely the chemical fertilizer/pesticide/genetically engineered seed cartel dominated by Monsanto, Sygenta, and Dow Chemical. It is also interesting in this respect that Siddiqui was on the Industry Trade Advisory Committee on Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals and Health/Science Products and Services which advises the U.S. Secretary of Commerce on international trade issues related to these market sectors. This tie in to Big Pharma interests and the rather broad category of "health science" has some interesting ramifications in his capacity as one time former lobbyist for CropLife America whose corporate interests include a large exposure in these areas as well.

What is of most interest to us though is Mr. Siddiqui's position of Senior Associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 2001-03. Little Sis.org has Mr. Siddiqui still listed in that capacity with CSIS, a position he shares with the likes of Zbigniew Brezezinski, Henry Kissinger and a host of other luminaries from the defense/intelligence agencies and the klepto-corporatocracy. Indeed, the Who's Who of the western world's power elite is in full and inglorious display on the listings of the CSIS trustees, counselors, corporate officers, program directors, chairs, and senior advisors. Founded in 1962 by Admiral Arleigh Burke and David Abshire, CSIS was an outgrowth of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, a redoubt of cold warriors who made the ferreting out of communist influences a profitable enterprise and growth industry. The neo-conservative CSIS think tank came into its own during the Reagan years with its insistent drumbeat against the Sandanista government and support of the Contras in the Nicaraguan war.

The video infomercial above piqued our interest as it depicted the work of the CSIS in Kenya as something akin to the charitable endeavors of a missionary organization, with the well heeled westerners stepping gingerly over trenches of raw sewage and otherwise traipsing through the warrens of corrugated metal shacks of Kibera and showing off the fine medical clinics and facilities which CSIS has apparently established for the ghetto dwellers. Note however the credentials of Dr. Steven C. Phillips who waxed compassionate about the 60 hectare slum in Nairobi, home to between "600,000 to 2,000,000"(?) Kenyans living in conditions of squalor which the good doctor described as some of the most desperate on the face of the planet. Dr. Phillips is the Medical Director of Global Issues and Projects for none other than the ExxonMobil corporation, an entity which might be rightly presumed to have an agenda with a much wider and distinctly less benevolent mandate than mere charitable work in a Nairobi slum.

Indeed, the CSIS and ExxonMobile have established a crucial symbiotic relationship over the past decade as they have made common cause in the oil giant's attempts to whitewash its environmental and economic depredations with its much ballyhooed anti-malarial African health initiatives under the auspices of its so called Africa Health Initiative. As of 2009 Exxon Mobile has by its own estimate ponied up $225 million in contributions to a "wide range of philanthropic activities" including bequests to CSIS for $1,112,500 since 1998 and and additional $5 million for the CSIS new Global Health Policy Center. As one might expect, Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, is a "trustee" at CSIS.

The recently released CSIS report of its "Commission on Smart Global Health Policy" co-chaired by Dr. Helen Gayle, CEO of CARE and Admiral William J. Fallon, former head of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Pacific Command gives evidence of the national security implications which CSIS places on global health policy, a reigning feature of the policies of the U.S. Agency for International Development for the past several decades. Indeed USAID forms an integral component of the all embracing CSIS full spectrum approach to global, social economic, political, and military affairs. That Kenya was chosen to be the testing ground for this initiative implies that this nation is being positioned as a stepping stone to the implementation of the multi-agency internationalist agenda for African geo-political strategies. Indeed the August 8-12, 2009 CSIS excursion to Kenya depicted in the above video serves not only as the focal point of the commission report but also displays the ultimate aims and objectives of that agenda and its deployment across the crucial African frontier and its decidedly important implications for the establishment of future world governance. It was no accident that the CSIS Kenyan initiative was shortly followed up by a similar state visit by IMF head Dominique Strauss-Khan in March 2010. (see IMF Ghoul Crashes Nairobi Street Party on Kushmonster)

The establishment of medical facilities for the optimization of health service distribution in such areas as the infamous Kibera slums of Nairobi, which are imparted with such a glowing and utterly sanitized gloss in the transparent public relations efforts of the CSIS, are touted as the the unselfish philanthropic efforts of ExxonMobil which include many such enterprises such as orphanages and schools for the blind etc. While the general goals of humanitarian enterprises are commendable, the efficaciousness and even the motivation of such particular efforts are open to question. This is especially the case when one realizes that the International Planned Parenthood Federation, with its African Regional Office based in Nairobi with outreach to 42 affiliates in Sub-Saharan Africa, is a contributor to and at the same time a major beneficiary of the CSIS ExxonMobil clinics in Kibera.

Though the Tabitha medical clinic is operated by the Center for Communicable Diseases as befits the HIV/AIDS programs funded by ExxonMobil, IPPF has redoubled its efforts to expand the presence of it "reproductive health services" in CDC clinics in Kenya under the auspices of the World Health Organization and the United Nations Population Fund. To this effect the IPPF affiliate, Family Health Options Kenya had embarked on a campaign in 2008 to effectively merge the HIV/AIDS programs with the IPPF reproductive health agenda to further mitigate the "effects of Kenya's high birth rate on development". Noting the "additional constraints" of the fact that abortion is illegal in Kenya, FHOK, the second largest distributor of contraceptives and female condoms in Kenya (next to the government), is aggressively advising clients in CDC and other clinics about"services offered" when they attend the clinics for any purpose.

The Mariakani District Hospital in Coast province has reported a family planning uptake of 25% as a result of the "integrated services". Through the Aids, Population and Health Integrated Assistance (APHIA) similar results have been achieved nationwide through "an expanded platform into which TB, malaria, and family planning services can be integrated". Under the auspices and funding of the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), APHIA has undertaken a massive reallocation of U.S. funding to family planning which it was admitted "was traditionally the major U.S. focus of support". The presence of Family Health International (FHI) on the CSIS board in the person of its president Peter Lamptey, also confirms the family planning agenda. FHI was an outgrowth of a contraceptive research project at the University of North Carolina in 1971. Funded by the USAID, FHI manages the largest network of HIV/AIDS prevention programs worldwide and is poised to provide a similar "platform" for the contraception distribution services of IPPF.

The involvement of the Universities of Duke and North Carolina in the establishment of the "Carolina for Kibera's Tabitha Clinic" has its roots in the long standing role that North Carolina has played in the eugenics movement and its evolution into the present Planned Parenthood. This long standing pedigree has displayed itself eminently capable of effecting the agendas of population control which the CSIS is in the process of implementing not only in Kibera but across Kenya and the African continent. The notorious forced sterilization programs carried out in North Carolina, starting in 1933 and culminating with the sterilization of hundreds of children in the Winston-Salem school district in 1946-47 by Dr. Claude Nash Herndon were the project of the Sterilization League of America which became "Birthright Inc." during WWII. Herndon became head of The American Eugenics Society just as IPPF was being founded in the offices of the British Eugenics Society. The USAID contracted with the latest emanation of the SLA, now dubbed Voluntary Surgical Contraception, for $80 million in 1988 for a 5 year program in 52 countries that ultimately sterilized over 2 million individuals in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It would not be groundless to conjecture that the same programs are continuing under the aegis of CSIS and USAID throughout Kenya and the rest of the Africa.

The overtly racist overtones of Planned Parenthood and its founder Margaret Sanger, which were less problematic in the days of its inception during World War I, have increasingly plagued the organization especially with its policy of placing its clinics predominately in the black ghettoes of the United States, a policy which is being replicated and expanded world wide with the ready assistance of the CSIS and ExxonMobil.
"To this day PPFA notoriously positions the majority of its burgeoning clinics in or adjacent to neighborhoods with predominantly minority populations. Sanger’s first clinic was opened in 1916 in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn with over 90% of its population Afro-American, and of course accompanied by all the ravages which perennially afflict ghettoized black enclaves throughout the United States: unremitting and grinding poverty, pitifully inadequate and substandard housing, chronic unemployment, government engineered saturation with hard drugs, pervasive alcoholism and addiction, non existent or over-taxed medical facilities, dysfunctional and understaffed schools, blighted urban landscapes with block after block of abandoned derelict buildings which Jimmy Breslin depicted as looking like Berlin after World War ll, altogether deserving of its familiar modern moniker, The Wasteland."
It is interesting to note that in the above CSIS public relations video, Karen Remling, Commissioner of the Virginia Department of Health, dandles a Kenyan infant in her lap and inquires if the child is "going to be a doctor" for her. This seemingly innocuous and entirely disingenuous question reveals a larger truth concerning the objectives of the Joint CSIS/ExxonMobil programs in Kenya and throughout sub Saharan Africa. On the one hand the elites are committed to programs such as The African Businesswomen's Network which seeks to sponsor "entrepreneurs and leaders in the corporate world". We can get a glimpse of the future prospects of such programs in the articulate and intelligent representatives of the local culture in the service of the CDC clinic and by association CSIS/ExxonMobil. On the other hand and by contrast we find the CSIS entering into a "strategic alliance" with the fast food group Innscor Africa to set up food courts at future service stations with contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to its foreign vendors. This type of two tiered program for a structured economic order in service to the interests of western think tanks and multi-national corporations implies a system divided into, on the one hand, a class of educated managers and on the other a much larger class of marginalized drones.

From the standpoint of strategic studies commissioned by the USAID and conducted by the think tanks in service to the military, "civil unrest" grows in direct proportion to the percentage of a population under a certain age. The fast growing populations of "developing" countries which are creative of a disproportionate majority of young people are viewed as a threat to the corporate plans for infrastructure investment and the exploitation of native resources. The ultimate aim is not the suggested alleviation of poverty, but rather social and political control in the interest of providing a friendly climate for the smooth and unhindered functioning of corporate enterprises. The much vaunted health initiatives which are so hypocritically portrayed as sincere efforts to alleviate the misery of the denizens of the Kibera instead play the essential role of the delimitation and control of local populations as a tool for the maximization of corporate profits. Thus we have the spectacle of the V.P. of Coca-Cola, Rhona Applebaum, one of the CSIS "commissioners", representing "the citizens of the world" in the concern for"global health". Margaret McGlynn, former president of Global Vaccines and Infectious Diseases for Merck and Company, poses unconvincingly as a crusader for third world children.

The nexus of corporate and state power which finds optimum expression at the Center of Strategic and International Studies brings together virtually unlimited corporate funding with the political and military imperatives of state power in a most unholy union which undoubtedly assures that "advancing global security and prosperity" and building "a healthier, safer and more prosperous world", the stated goals of the CSIS/ExxonMobil partnership, will likely become a reality. What only remains to be seen is to whose benefit and at whose expense. That ExxonMobil along with British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell were prosecuted in the U.S. for complicity with the South African apartheid regime as recently as 2002 might provide the answer to that question as well as posing some further disturbing inquiries as to the nature of corporate and government collusion. With immense capitalization, in ExxonMobil's case some $375 billion in 2008, and stratospheric profits, some $43 billion in 2008, entire nations such as Kenya with a total 2008 GDP total of about $30 billion become little more than a significant component of a corporate investment portfolio.

Kenya-All IMF'ed Up

As Kenya emerged from its British colonial past and assumed its putative status as an independent nation in 1963, like many other third world and developing countries, the fledgling African state found itself under the regime of a developing world economic order crafted in 1944 by English and American economists at the resort town in New Hampshire in the United States called Bretton Woods. The agreements of these lords of western finance were to exert an influence which in its own way supplanted the old political and military dominance with an economic hegemony which was to prove even more restrictive and repressive than the suffocating dominance of colonial empire. The establishment of the World Bank and The International Monetary in addition to the fiscal policies of Keynesian economics would all but assure that leveraged debt would be the stranglehold that would be applied to developing world economies.

By the time that the IMF had arranged more that $200 million in loans to the government of Danial Arap Moi in 1995, IMF austerity measures and the infamous structural adjustment arrangements had brought nothing but misery to the majority of Kenyan people. The signature of the international agency was writ large in the devastated Kenyan economy. Unemployment, hunger, child poverty, crime and the degeneration of social services were ravaging the country. True to form, the IMF suspended the massive injections of funding when the results of their economic depredations had brought about the intended objective of bringing the nascent economy to its knees.

Kenyan political and social organizations united in opposition to Arap Moi's Kenyan African National Union (KANU) and launched a campaign against the resumption of IMF aid in the common acknowledgement that the money was a "slush fund for the tyrant" productive of nothing more than propping up the "deformed capitalist system" that had ransacked the country for the past 40 years and transferred millions of Kenyan schillings from the government treasury to the pockets of the coterie of well connected insiders and ministerial agents surrounding the president. This was not to speak of the enormous outflows of capital circulating back to "donors" amounting to 25% of national resources as opposed to the meager 6.8% to education and 2.7% to health services.

The results were predictable. To restructure a public debt of more than $2.2 billion in an economy whose entire GDP in 1995 US$ was little over $10 billion and which was experiencing a sever drought resulting in massive energy and water rationing, the Kenyan government was offered $198 million in IMF, and an additional $150 million in World Bank loans on condition of privatizing the power generating facilities of the Kenya Power and Lighting Company and the Kenya Electrical Company, selling its port authority and railways outright, selling a third of the Kenya Commercial Bank and a 49% stake in the national telo-communication firm.