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.
No comments:
Post a Comment