Africans inherited corruption

This article was written by a Black honorary associate professor at Wits (University of Witwatersrand , South Africa). Wits was an English medium university (not sure about today!) and was a source of much political agitation during the Apartheid years, and a day didn’t go by when stupid liberal White South African and Black students didn’t protest about something the White NP government did or didn’t do. Today it is a cesspool of Black students – gone is the White voice, having woken up from their liberal stupor and left for overseas and to safer pastures no doubt. It continues to be a political agitator – this time in support of the haloed ANC. The article below shows the typical mindset of Black Africans. You can take them out of the bush, put them in a university, but their mindset stays the same – it’s all the White man’s fault. Yes, yes it is. We should have left them in the bush to look after themselves. Instead we forced them to become somewhat civilised, put clothes on them, attempted to educate them, fed them, provided health care, gave them jobs, looked after them, and then they turned around to bite the hand that fed them. This ‘professor’ states that post-independent African countries inherited deeply corrupt institutions, laws and values from the colonial and apartheid governments. And this is why these countries are in such a mess today. The White man is to blame for teaching Blacks how to be corrupt. Back in reality, the reason colonialists and the Afrikaners ran these countries is because African Blacks are useless at running governments and countries – as they prove over and over today. Colonialists ran many African countries, trying to educate the native Black populations – eventually all of them gave up and admitted defeat. There was no hope. They usually handed over fully functioning, organised, civilised countries, with roads, buildings, and wealth over to the Black leaders, all to be squandered within years. In South Africa, a virtual first-world country was given to the ANC in guilt – and they have run it successfully, into the ground. And then we have these ‘professors’ who try and blame people who tried to do good. As I’ve said over and over, no good deed goes unpunished and boy are South Africans being punished. Well Mr Professor, I’m guessing that this is the rubbish you’ll be lecturing to your students? And good luck with that. Until Black Africans can take personal responsibility for their actions there is no hope for your people. You can give all the negative anti-White lectures you like, but the bottom line is that your people are incapable of running anything remotely successfully. Your wonderful ANC has been in power now for 19 years and they’ve stolen so much money that the country now has to beg from the world to fund their infrastructure projects, which will once again be a source of corruption and stealing for the ANC. After 19 years, Blacks still scratch in the dirt for food, people are murdered like never before, and the public health  and educations systems are crumbling before our eyes. This after being handed a country that was fully functioning. Apartheid lasted 48 years, so I guess the ANC has another 30-odd years to blame Apartheid before the Black people  start wondering why nothing has been done to save them – as the ANC promised before taking over the reins to the country. Enjoy the next 30 years ANC – you and your people thoroughly deserve it!

 

Most well-intentioned corruption-busting remedies in Africa fail because the root causes are often poorly understood. Post-independence African countries inherited deeply corrupt institutions, laws and values from colonial and apartheid governments.

Instead of changing these for the better, African ruling parties and leaders entrenched these deeply compromised governance systems.

In most African colonies, the colonial elite centralised political, economic and civic power, reserving top jobs in the public and private sector, and education only to fellow colonials. In the colony, the institutions that should traditionally serve as watchdogs against corruption – the judiciary, police, security services and laws – selectively served only the elite. These institutions were more often subservient to the all-powerful colonial administrator or governor.

The colonial private sector, producing in most cases for export to the imperial market, was usually deeply dependent on the colonial government for licences, contracts and subsidies and rarely held the colonial government accountable.

With few exceptions, the colonial media were equally bridled.

At independence the African colonial elite were now often replaced by another narrow elite, this time the independence movement aristocracy – the dominant independence leader and dominant “struggle” families, or the dominant ethnic group or political faction.

African independence movements are often highly centralised or strongly dominated by one leader and his political, ethnic or regional faction. The dominant structural make-up of these movements means that they can seamlessly fit into a similar centralised political culture of the colonial government.

At independence, the indigenous communities of most African countries were relatively poor, unskilled and without any significant holdings in the private sector.

Very few grassroots cadres of independence movements had professional careers outside the struggle. They have to be given jobs after the struggle. This situation is fertile for corruption.

The newly acquired state bureaucracy, military, judiciary, nationalised private sector were often seen as the “spoils” of victory of the independence struggle. The whole process often becomes corrupted with struggle aristocracies dishing out patronage – jobs, government tenders and newly nationalised private companies – to their political allies, ethnic group or region.

Giving jobs to members of the same faction, ethnic group or region means the idea of merit-based appointments is thrown out of the window. This means that even if the newly empowered independence movement launched economic development programmes to transform the colonial economy, such reforms are hardly ever going to have any impact given that unqualified cronies are managing key public institutions.

Jobless cadres are also forced to seek out the patronage of leaders who have control over the distribution of the “spoils”.

In most cases, cadres critical of the dominant leaders or policies are likely to be excluded from work in the public and private sectors.

Very few African countries at independence had a significant private sector. Those that had a large private sector more often than not saw it nationalised.

Partly for these reasons, the private sector in post-independence African countries is usually docile is unlikely to demand accountability from the government.

In some instances the liberation movement government embarks on a policy of creating a “capitalist class” or new “indigenous” business owners, black economic empowerment (BEE) or indigenisation programmes.

In many such instances political capital forms the basis of these attempts at creating indigenous capitalists: political leaders either get stakes in newly privatised public companies, or get state tenders to supply services for the government, or get slices of private companies owned by former colonials, minority groups or foreign companies.

Those who benefit from BEE, indigenisation or privatisation programmes will not hold African governments accountable.

Before independence, the small colonial elite often lived lives of conspicuous consumption – expensive mansions, exclusive shopping trips in the mother country capital, lavish parties. A culture of hard work was often absent.

Sadly, many of the post-independence African elite – both the political and economic empowerment class – took the colonial elite’s conspicuous consumption standard as the standard of “success”.

Not surprisingly, some of the poor also want to emulate this “bling” lifestyle – and may not see any problem with leaders living like this, if they themselves remain poor.

During struggles for liberation, progressive civil groups usually join the liberation as part of an anti-colonial alliance. At independence most liberation movements argued that civil society had now played its historic role and should be “demobilised”, or some are often incorporated as “desks” or “leagues” of the now governing party.

During the struggle, independence movements were by their nature secretive. They often had to act in secrecy and subterfuge to foil the secret or security police of the colonial or white-minority governments. Sadly, in power, most govern with obsessive secrecy, which encourages corruption.

Liberation and independence leaders were often put on a pedestal by supporters. This often continues after independence – and allows the leader to get away with corruption.

The colonial system of legal unfairness necessarily forced many among the oppressed to find ways to escape the (unjust) laws and rules. Unless independence in the post-colonial period set clear examples of following the rule of law, the masses will continue such practices

In some African countries, the main opposition parties are either associated with the colonial or the minority governments, or had opposed independence.

But opposition parties that eventually come to power in Africa have often offered few alternatives to the corrupt regimes of independence movements.

Most African ruling parties and leaders lack the political will to genuinely tackle corruption. This will have to change.

Sadly, enforcement and compliance in African public sectors has often been very low – opening up the system for corruption. The corruption-fighting capacity of existing institutions dealing with corruption must also be strengthened.

African ruling parties must punish bad behaviour of their leaders and members, legally, socially and politically, and reward good behaviour. Only if that is done publicly will the government restore the moral authority to deal credibly with transgressions from ordinary citizens. This will help to compel ordinary citizens to follow the rules.

African ruling parties must bring in a new calibre of leadership at all levels – competent, honest and decent. A system of merit must be brought into the internal party elections.

Africans need to actively encourage new kinds of leaders, with a new value system – not solely based on struggle credentials.

The solution is more exposure of corruption by the media. Right now, the perception across Africa is that whistle-blowers are more likely to be prosecuted than the corrupt individuals.

African public officials often dismissed international organisations’ corruption reports on Africa, saying these reports are infused by Western bias, which overlook corruption in Western countries and focus only developing countries.

Of course this is true to some extent. However, that should be a separate debate and should not downplay the real serious issue of corruption at home.

Blaming the legacy of colonialism and apartheid – although certainly with us – has become an easy answer for not acting against corruption. This will have to change.

Source

Toulouse shootings: race, religion and murder

This is such sweet revenge. Fiachra Gibbons wrote a comment piece in the UK The Guardian lamenting how the Right is responsible for whipping up hatred for minorities in France, especially Muslims, and how 7 people are dead a a result, shot by some Right wing nutter neo-Nazi group! When are so called journalists going to learn their lesson and stop writing these kinds of articles before anything is known about the criminal/s? In his haste to smear the Right as the intolerant, racist, xenophobes that he thinks we are, he has shown himself up exactly for what HE is – a typical Left non-thinking idiot. He even went so far as to suggest that the Algerian killed, who was in paratrooper uniform, touches a ‘raw nerve’ with the old guard on the Right! Back at the real ranch, the criminal is what most suspected – a radical Muslim ‘warrior’ out for revenge. Oh dear, the Left have once again made fools of themselves as only they can do – with class! Well done son. Keep writing your special articles so that we can mock you some more in the future. Oh, and I’m not expecting Mr Gibbons to publish a retraction of the trash article – that’s the style of the Left – take a dump and leave it there for someone else to clean up.

Mr Fiachra Gibbons

 The Toulouse killings have come at a time when French politicians use a language of hatred 

Over the past few years of recession and regression, it has become a trite truism of European politics that you can’t go wrong going to the right. Politicians across the continent have found a new magic formula for electoral success and survival by playing on fears of foreigners and particularly of Islam – the wink and a nod that says that immigration has been the root of our social and economic decline. This is by no means an exclusively rightwing vice. Anyone who has heard the Dutch Labour party recently will have difficulty putting light between them and the demagogue Geert Wilders.

Until today, they might have tried to argue that there was no harm in it, that it’s healthy even, a rebalancing of the scales after two decades of biting our tongues and creeping political correctness.

The French airwaves have been full of such ugly equivocation these past few weeks as Nicolas Sarkozy has lurched his party wildly to the right in an attempt to save his skin, claiming there were “too many immigrants in France” and stoking Islamophobia with a ridiculous claim that the French were being secretly forced to eat halal; his prime minister François Fillon even said Jews and Muslims should put their dietary laws behind them and embrace modernity.

Claude Guéant, the interior minister who took personal control of the investigation, has been the most consistently xenophobic, championing the superiority of European Christian civilisation over lesser cultures who force their women to cover up – yes, observant Jews and Muslims, he meant you. The nadir came last week when Sarkozy’s new immigration chief Arno Klarsfeld – the eldest son, ironically, of Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld – called for a wall to be built between Greece and Turkey to save Europe from barbarian invaders.

Today in Toulouse we have been given a horrific illustration of where such delirious cynicism can lead. All of those who have been shot or killed in and around the city in the past eight days have had one thing in common. They are from visible minorities. They had names or faces that marked them out as not being descended, as Jean-Marie Le Pen would say, from “our ancestors the Gauls”. Their roots – both Jewish and Muslim – were in the Maghreb or the Caribbean. They were, in short, a snapshot of la France metissée – the mixed race, immigrant France that works hard and “gets up early” to empty bins and look after children; the people who die disproportionately for France yet who are also most often locked up in its prisons and crumbling banlieues.

As one father said this morning as he hugged his son to him outside the school, “They are attacking us because we are different.”

Police are a long way yet from catching, never mind understanding, what was going through the head of someone who could catch a little girl by the hair so he wouldn’t have to waste a second bullet on her. But some things are already becoming clear. He shouted no jihadist or anti-Semitic slogans, going about his grisly business in the cold, military manner oddly similar to Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian gunman who massacred 77 people at a social democrats summer camp last summer.

As with Breivik, politicians will be quick to the thesis of the lone madman. Another lone madman influenced by nothing but his own distorted mind, like the lone gang of neo-Nazis who had been quietly killing Turks and Greeks in Germany for years unbothered by the police, who preferred to put the murders down to feuds or honour killings.

What could be the link, they ask, between Jewish children and French military personnel? The link is they are both seen – and not just by a far-right fringe – as symbols of all that has sabotaged la France forte, to borrow Sarkozy’s election slogan. Confessional schools, be they Jewish or an informal weekend madrassa, are seen as actively undermining the secular Republic by activists of groups like the Bloc Identitaire and the Front National, as well as some members of Sarkozy’s UMP, and even some on the left.

A black man or a Muslim, particularly one of Algerian origin, in a paratrooper’s uniform touches a raw nerve among the old guard of the far right. It was the paratroopers who did the bulk of the dirty work to keep Algeria French, and who also tried to oust De Gaulle when he went against them.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the end of that war that left more than a million dead and two countries twisted and contorted by the pain of it in almost equal and opposite ways.

Not even Sarkozy, who has most politically to lose from these killings, is trying to hide the link with race and religion. Just as he echoed the old National Front slogan “Love France or leave it” and then denied he ever said it, he yesterday called on the French people to stand up “against hate”, having spent the past few months manically stirring it. The next 34 days will see whether he will be swept away by the storm he has helped to start.

Source

Lite Moments: How long does it take to drive 80 miles at 80 miles per hour?

This woman could get a government job, no doubt about it! Me, I would never forgive him for posting a video showing the world how dumb I was!

Memo from Johannesburg

Read the startling statistics below and see why South Africa is Doomed with a capital D. This was posted on the Gates of Vienna website which has woken up to the plight of White South Africans.  South Africa’s current population is about 50 million, of which 40 million are African Blacks, the rest made up by Whites, Coloureds (mix race), Indians, and others. So, you have millions of IQ67 supporting and voting for the ANC. Election after election the Blacks vote for the ANC – no matter what they’ve done to further impoverish their own people. And still today we see in the stats below that only 1/3 of respondents are unwilling to live under ‘undemocratic’ rule in exchange for housing and jobs; which means that 2/3 are willing to be bent over a barrel for any free thing the government can provide. See why they’re doomed? It if wasn’t obvious before, maybe it will be now. 

 

Ra5cal from Johannesburg just sent us the following message with the latest poll results from South Africa:

An update on the situation in South Africa which came to me via an NY Times twitter feed (no links yet).

At the Afrobarometer survey launch in South Africa. Lots of interesting data on public attitudes in SA:

• 71% say using force or violence during a protest is wrong.

  [Ironic, as service delivery protests are often violent/destructive. Also, this means 29% of 40 million South Africans support violent protest.]
  

• 38% said the government should be able to restrict any information it wants, 48% said only for national security.

  [Interesting, as it points out that 86% of South Africans support the government’s plan to restrict information access.]
  

• Only 1/3 of respondents unwilling to live under undemocratic rule in exchange for housing, jobs.

  [Does this mean 2/3 support autocratic rule if they will be given work and a roof over their heads?]

If this were a referendum, the results would show that the majority of South Africans (and looking at the percentages, this most likely means a certain population group) support a Zimbabwe-style one-party government that will redistribute assets to the people.

It also means that more than ten million South Africans are willing to resort to violence to get what they want.

We are talking about a looming post-Apartheid failure on democracy, education and human rights on a massive scale.

It really saddens me to read these stats, because on the one hand it shows that the government has its work cut out for it if it is to turn the tide on ignorance. Yet it is the same ANC majority-led government that has perpetuated — and is still perpetuating — this cycle of ignorance and violence to serve its own ends

This means there is no happy ending.

Source 

Bloomberg Strikes Again: NYC Bans Food Donations To The Homeless

So New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks that homeless people – you know, those lost people walking the street looking through trash cans for anything they can find, including thrown-out food – care about the salt, fat and fiber content of the donated food at homeless shelters. Thank you Mr Bloomberg! I’m sure these starving people thank you too. And I’m sure those who donate their extra food, and those who take the time to collect this food and make the meals on behalf of the homeless shelters also thank you for looking out for the homeless. I mean, which millionaire liberal wouldn’t do exactly the same thing for their fellow helpless neighbour? At least Mr Bloomberg can sleep at night in his nice warm bed, knowing he’s saved the starving, homeless people from ingesting evil salt and fat – and who could forget the lovely fiber! Now, I’m not sure if I’m the right person to break this to Mr Bloomberg, but here goes. Mr Bloomberg, I don’t think that starving people really give a toss about the salt, fat or fiber content of their free meals – just in case you were wondering. Get a frigging life man.

Hey Bloomberg, what’s the salt content of that meal?

NEW YORK — Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s food police have struck again!
Outlawed are food donations to homeless shelters because the city can’t assess their salt, fat and fiber content.

Glenn Richter arrived at a West Side synagogue on Monday to collect surplus bagels — fresh nutritious bagels — to donate to the poor. However, under a new edict from Bloomberg’s food police he can no longer donate the food to city homeless shelters.

It’s the “no bagels for you” edict.

“I can’t give you something that’s a supplement to the food you already have? Sorry that’s wrong,” Richter said.

Richter has been collecting food from places like the Ohav Zedek synagogue and bringing it to homeless shelters for more than 20 years, but recently his donation, including a “cholent” or carrot stew, was turned away because the Bloomberg administration wants to monitor the salt, fat and fiber eaten by the homeless.

Richter said he was stunned. He said his family has eaten the same food forever and flourished.

“My father lived to 97; my grandfather lived to 97, and they all enjoyed it and somehow we’re being told that this is no good and I think there is a degree of management that becomes micromanagement and when you cross that line simply what you’re doing is wrong,” Richter said.

But Mayor Bloomberg, a salt-aholic himself, was unapologetic.

“For the things that we run because of all sorts of safety reasons, we just have a policy it is my understanding of not taking donations,” Bloomberg said.

Told that his administration recently enacted the policy, the mayor was Grinch-like.

“If they did in the past they shouldn’t have done it and we shouldn’t have accepted it,” Bloomberg said.

Richter said that over the years he’s delivered more than two tons of food to the homeless. He said Mayor Bloomberg is eating away at his ability to do good.

The ban on food donations was made by an inter-agency task force that includes the departments of Health and Homeless Services.

Source

UK: Truth about your tax bill

The UK government is to send every tax payer a personal annual statement showing where their tax pounds have been spent. Depressingly it will show that the bulk – a whopping 33% of your annual taxes – are spent on welfare. So, one third of your taxes are given to people who mostly don’t bother to go out and work. The government takes 28% of your money in taxes – nearly a third of what you earn; which roughly means for every £3 you earn, they take £1 for themselves in taxes. Ain’t life grand? We are nothing but tax serfs to these governments. They are ready to take and redistribute to those who don’t want to support themselves so that they get their vote to stay in power. Buying power has taken on a new meaning! What happened to the good old days when your money was yours and not the governments and when did this change? Since welfare rolled in, wealth has rolled out and these same welfare countries are in debt up to their eyeballs trying to sustain the farce. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of supporting people who chose not to work and contribute to society. How much more must we be bled dry by these appalling welfare systems?


Hat tip: Mark

 

Every taxpayer is to get a personal annual statement revealing how each pound taken from them by the Revenue is spent.

George Osborne will announce the radical move in tomorrow’s Budget, saying every worker has the right to know how their taxes are spent once the money enters the public purse.

In some cases, the results are likely to prove startling. 

A higher-rate taxpayer earning £50,000 this year would be told they paid £14,183 in tax and National Insurance – of which around a third, £4,727.67, is spent on welfare.

At the same time, £2,469.68 is spent on health, £1,848.73 on education, £818.52 on defence and £705.62 on public order and safety. A further £141.12 is given to foreign aid and £70.56 is handed to the EU.

A Treasury source said: ‘It’s quite right that people know how much tax they pay and  what it’s spent on.’

The Chancellor believes that revealing exactly how the money from Britain’s 29million taxpayers is used will change for ever public attitudes to Government spending.

Tory ministers are also hopeful that if the public is more aware of how much they really contribute, they will be more inclined to vote for parties which favour lower taxes.

And they believe making more taxpayers aware that the basic rate is 31p, not 20p – once national insurance is included – would help transform voters’ relationship with the state.

The Chancellor is also considering even more radical reform, which would see income tax and National Insurance merged. As well as saving businesses billions in administration costs, Labour would not be able to use increased National Insurance contributions as a politically cost-free way of raising money to spend in areas such as the NHS.

Treasury Minister David Gauke said: ‘For a lot of people, the tax line on their pay slip is the only time they see just how much they’re paying in tax, but the Government doesn’t think that’s good enough. 

‘We want to make tax more transparent and we want people to be more engaged with their own tax affairs. We plan to lift the lid on tax so that people understand how much they are paying, what their overall tax rate is and what they should be paying.’ 

Conservative MP Ben Gummer, who has championed the idea of personal statements, said: ‘Few of us would part with more than a few pence without a record of how it was spent. From supermarket receipts to electricity bills, we expect an itemised breakdown of where our money goes.

‘Yet for our largest monthly payment, to the taxman, we get just two numbers printed on a pay slip. We are not told the overall value of our taxation obligation. 

‘We are not told what proportion of our income it represents. Crucially, we are not told how the Government spends the money we are made to give it. This must change.

Source

French police corner school shootings suspect

I love it when I’m right, which, according to many who know me, isn’t very often. Three Jewish children, a rabbi, and 3 soldiers have been shot and killed in Toulouse, France over the last few days, and the media ran with the story that neo-Nazi’s were responsible – they even published pixelated photos of the ‘suspects’. My immediate thought was ‘BS’, this is the work of some nutty Muslim. Today we learn that the suspect is in fact a member of Al-Qaeda and has declared himself a mujaheddin or Islamic warrior, fighting to avenge the death of Palestinian children killed during conflicts with Israel. At the time of posting the article below, the police were still trying to arrest the suspect who is holed up in a house. So many were eager to believe that right-wing extremists were responsible for these murders (in fact, Nazi’s are radical Lefty’s). Too funny. Now they’ll have to publish the truth – probably somewhere on page 13 – for all to see. I wonder how long this will make the news now? What surprises me is that France is willing to admit that a Muslim is responsible for these murders. The French must be in election mode!

 

TOULOUSE, France — French police surrounded a house Wednesday where a man suspected of a series of deadly shootings was holed up, claiming he had carried out the attacks to avenge Palestinian children.

Two officers were wounded as shots rang out in the ongoing operation to arrest the suspect, thought to be a French national of North African origin who declared that he was a member of the Al-Qaeda network, officials said.

Armed officers investigating three recent attacks in which a scooter-riding serial killer gunned down seven people in cold blood, including three Jewish children, sealed off an address in the Cote Pavee residential district of the southern city of Toulouse.

Shots rang out periodically, an AFP reporter at the scene said. The area was cordoned off by police, including members of the RAID special weapons squad. Interior Minister Claude Gueant said the siege was continuing.

Gueant said the 24-year-old suspect had spoken to officers through his door, and had declared himself to be a “mujaheedeen” or Islamic warrior fighting to avenge Palestinian children killed in the conflict with Israel.

The victims of the attacks were three soldiers, three Jewish children and a rabbi and the police raid came on the day that they were to be buried.

The minister confirmed two officers had been lightly wounded in the raid, during which the suspect had shot through a door.

“The suspect’s mother was brought to the scene. She was asked to make contact with her son, to reason with him, but she did not want to, saying she had little influence on him,” Gueant said.

“This person has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past … and says he belongs to Al-Qaeda and says he wanted to avenge Palestinian children and to attack the French army,” he added.

“He has links with people involved in jihadism and salafism,” he added, referring to two strains of Muslim thought that have influenced Al-Qaeda.

Gueant said the suspect’s brother had been detained while checks were carried out, although he confirmed that only one suspect had been at the scenes of the three shooting attacks carried out since March 11.

“Today there are several operations being carried out at the same time in the Toulouse metropolitan area,” prosecutor Olivier Christen said.

Neighbours leaving the cordoned area said the suspect was on the first storey of a small building on the usually quiet housing estate. They said the first shots had run out around 3:00 a.m. (0200 GMT).

He is thought to be a 24-year-old man who had previously travelled to the lawless border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan which is known to house al-Qaeda safehouses, one of the officials told AFP.

“He was in the DCRI’s sights, as were others, after the first two attacks,” an official said, referring to France’s domestic intelligence service, adding: “Then the criminal investigation police brought in crucial evidence.”

Another source close to the inquiry said police were confident they had tracked down the right suspect and added: “He’s one of those people who have come back from warzones that always worry the intelligence services.”

If the suspect is proved to have been responsible for the killings, it would bring to an end one of the most intense manhunts in French history and help calm tensions after the series of attacks disrupted a presidential election.

The shootings began on March 11, when a paratrooper of North African origin arranged to meet a man in Toulouse to sell him a scooter which he had advertised online, revealing in the ad his military status.

Imad Ibn Ziaten, a 30-year-old staff sergeant in the 1st Airborne Transportation Regiment, was shot in the head at close range with a .45 calibre pistol, a method that was to become the suspect’s signature.

Four days later three more paratroopers from another regiment were gunned down — two of them fatally — in the same fashion in a street in the garrison town of Montauban, 45 kilometres (29 miles) away.

The dead — Corporal Abel Chennouf, 25, and Private First Class Mohammed Legouade, 23, both of the 17t Parachute Engineering Regiment — were French soldiers of North African Arab origin.

Arab soldiers are prized targets for groups like Al-Qaeda, which regards Muslims who fight for Western armies as traitors.

Then on Monday the shooter, still wearing a motorcycle helmet and riding a scooter, attacked the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, killing a religious studies teacher, his toddler sons and a seven-year-old girl.

Anti-terrorist magistrates said the same gun and make of scooter was used in all three attacks and noted that the three attacks were carried out at precise four-day intervals.

Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 4, and seven-year-old Miriam Monsonego arrived at Ben Gurion international airport near Tel Aviv shortly before dawn. They were to be buried later in the day.

The slain French soldiers were also to be buried later in the day, in Montauban, at a ceremony to be attended by Presidency Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist rival for the presidency Francois Hollande.

Ibn Ziaten will be buried in Morocco, the Moroccan consul general in Toulouse was quoted as saying on Tuesday.

Both Sarkozy and Hollande temporarily suspended their campaigns following Monday’s attack, as France was traumatised by an unprecedented series of hate crimes. The first round of the vote is due on April 22, with a run-off on May 6.

The three Nazi ‘Right-Winger’s’ police questioned initially in connection with the murders!

Source

Dire finances leave Detroit stalled

Ahhh, Detroit, bastion of the Black dream. In case you’ve missed it, the Democrats put Blacks in charge of Detroit a few decades ago and now the city is on the brink of oblivion. Another liberal success story. The Republican Governor of Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder, has warned that time is running out for the Mayor and the City Council and his next course of action will be to appoint an emergency manager to run the city. Detroit has received over $1 trillion in financial support over the years to keep the farce of a successful Black-run city going. But now the scraggly chickens have come home to roost. Gone is all that support money. Gone is all the pension money, police, fire and emergency money. Gone, gone, gone. Now Mayor Dave Bing has said that he would be ‘nuts’ to accept an oversight board. Other Detroiters are angry that the Governor wants to take over the city. Well, I say let them go bankrupt. Let them run out of money for the salaries. Let Detroit become a true ghost town, run by Black gangs. If that’s what will keep Mr Bing and his fellow Detroiters happy then by all means keep running the city into the ground. Luckily Obama is broke so no more free money will be sent to Detroit to keep the dogs at bay. Have at it Mr Bing. Detroit is going down under your watch and I will be eating my popcorn and watching you sink. 

 

Despite assurances from Clint Eastwood and Eminem, Detroit’s rebirth may be on hold, as the city is on a Greece-like track to run out of money before summer, and things are getting increasingly testy between the state’s Republican governor and the city’s Democratic mayor.

Although the automotive sector and some other parts of the city’s business picture have bounced back in recent years, Detroit city government finances are still on an unsustainable course, and the city does not have a viable fiscal plan to avoid running out of money in May.

Last week, the city rejected a proposed consent agreement that would have given a nine-member state-appointed oversight board a voice in city government and started a war of words with the state government, which has its own deadline set for next week.

Mayor Dave Bing said it would be “nuts” to think he would accept the oversight board. “When I did read it, I was appalled.” Mr. Bing and the City Council were expected to meet this week to come up with their own plan, though such efforts have failed in the past.

The political conundrum — the city won’t cede power, but seemingly can’t solve its problems — means analysts and activists here are increasingly resigned to the possibility that Michigan will step in and humiliate its biggest city by appointing an emergency manager to take over its finances, essentially turning Detroit into an American version of Greece.

“Something has to happen. I think what everybody agrees is that the status quo is not sustainable. The city is out of money,” said Michigan State University economist Charles Ballard. “I’m sympathetic to the consent agreement in the sense that right now it seems that it’s the only thing on the table. Local governments don’t like to be told what to do, so it’s understandable that there is reluctance in parts of the city.

“It reminds me a lot of the debt crisis in Europe,” Mr. Ballard said. “The Greeks are resentful for this feeling they are being told what to do by the Germans, but the status quo was not tenable.”

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has repeatedly warned that time is running out and that while it’s not his preferred option, the state would appoint an emergency manager and strip power from the mayor and City Council if necessary. On March 26, an emergency review team he put into place months ago must come back with recommendations on the need for a financial takeover.

That law letting the state do that has been used successfully in such other Michigan cities as Ecorseand Benton Harbor. Detroit’s public school district has been under an emergency financial manager for several years in a reorganization widely considered to have been painful but successful.

Doing nothing to protect city services and keep the city out of bankruptcy is not an option, Mr. Snyder said.

“It’s not about [Mayor Bing] and I. It’s about showing results for citizens,” the governor said Friday in a WDHB radio interview with host Mildred Gaddis. “I have no interest in terms of interfering in Detroit at all. It’s not Michigan versus Detroit. We are in this together.”

The governor has planned town-hall meetings to get citizen input and to help educate residents about the city’s financial problems in advance of any decision.

The notion of the state running its largest city and the image it sends to the nation and world, however, has angered many Detroiters, including some civic and religious leaders, who decry big-foot tactics from Lansing — even as money needed to fund police, fire and emergency services and even pension payments — continues to evaporate.

Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley told city readers Friday that time has run out and that the mayor has been too slow to offer solutions.

“Bing failed to fix the mess because he was operating at 33⅓ rpm while the crisis was running at 78,” she wrote. “(That’s a reference to the vinyl records on my grandmother’s stereo years ago. The 33s ran slow. The 78s ran fast. And the 45s were Motown).

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USA: THE WELFARE STATE: RHETORIC VS. REALITY

Another good post by Thomas Sowell. Mr Sowell, a Black economist and realist, just loves him some liberals! In the post below, he points out how the Democrats have managed to control the Black vote by using political rhetoric alone – backed up with no action apart from destruction. As he states, no city is more liberal than San Francisco, yet the number of Blacks living there has halved since 1970. Isn’t that interesting? It seems liberals are champions for the Black man, but only when it’s NIMBY – or, not in my back yard. Liberals have managed to capture the Black vote by imposing welfare policies since the 1960’s. Since then, the Black sense of family has all but gone, leaving over 75% single-mom households with multiple children, from different fathers. Not only has the Black family disintegrated, but the unemployment rate has risen and the criminal rates for Blacks has increased under these new liberal welfare policies – all to ‘free’ the Black man. Where are the liberals now to take their bow? Well, obviously hard at work on their next set of welfare dependency policies. Whilst the Blacks fall for this crap, the Democrats take their vote and blame the Conservatives for all that’s wrong in the world. And the cycle repeats itself. Why, it’s almost as if Blacks can’t think for themselves.

 

One of the things that turned up, during a long-overdue cleanup of my office was an old yellowed copy of the New York Times dated July 24, 1992. One of the front-page headlines said: “White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80′s, Census Shows.”

The 1980s? Wasn’t that the years of the Reagan administration, the “decade of greed,” the era of “neglect” of the poor and minorities, if not “covert racism”?

More recently, during the administration of America’s first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center has the headline, “Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics.”

While the median net worth of whites was 10 times the median net worth of blacks in 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, the ratio was 19-to-1 in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. With Hispanics, the ratio was 8-to-1 in 1988 and 15-to-1 in 2009.

Race is just one of the areas in which the rhetoric and the reality often go in opposite directions. Political rhetoric is intended to do one thing – win votes. Whether the policies that accompany that rhetoric make people better off or worse off is far less of a concern to politicians, if any concern at all.

Democrats receive the overwhelming bulk of the black vote by rhetoric and by presenting what they have done as the big reason blacks have advanced. So long as most blacks and whites alike mistake rhetoric for reality, this political game can go on.

A Manhattan Institute study last year by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor showed that, while the residential segregation of blacks has generally been declining from the middle of the 20th century to the present, it was rising during the first half of the 20th century. The net result is that blacks in 2010 were almost as residentially unsegregated as they were back in 1890.

There are complex reasons behind such things, but the bottom line is plain. The many laws, programs and policies designed to integrate residential housing cannot be automatically assumed to translate into residentially integrated housing. Government is not the sole factor, nor necessarily the biggest factor, no matter what impression political rhetoric gives.

No city is more liberal in its rhetoric and policies than San Francisco. Yet there are less than half as many blacks living in San Francisco today as there were in 1970.

Nor is San Francisco unique. A number of other very liberal California counties saw their black populations drop by 10,000 people or more, just between the 1990 and 2000 censuses – even when the total population of these counties was growing.

One of the many reasons why rhetoric does not automatically translate into reality is that the ramifications of so many government policies produce results completely different from what was claimed, or even believed, when these policies were imposed.

The poverty rate among blacks was nearly cut in half in the 20 years prior to the 1960s, a record unmatched since then, despite the expansion of welfare-state policies in the 1960s.

Unemployment among black 16- and 17-year-old males was 12 percent back in 1950. Yet unemployment rates among black 16- and 17-year-old males has not been less than 30 percent for any year since 1970 – and has been over 40 percent in some of those years.

Not only was unemployment among blacks in general lower before the liberal welfare-state policies expanded in the 1960s, rates of imprisonment of blacks were also lower then, and most black children were raised in two-parent families. At one time, a higher percentage of blacks than whites were married and working.

None of these facts fits liberal social dogmas.

While many politicians and “leaders” have claimed credit for black progress, no one seems to be willing to take the blame for the retrogressions represented by higher unemployment rates, higher crime rates and higher rates of imprisonment today. Or for the disintegration of the black family, which survived centuries of slavery and generations of government-imposed discrimination in the Jim Crow era, but began coming apart in the wake of the expansion of the liberal welfare state and its accompanying social dogmas.

The time is long overdue to start looking beyond the prevailing political rhetoric to the hard realities.

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UK: Is carbon cutting a waste of time?

It seems it costs a lot to worship at the temple of Gaia. Just ask Britain how much as they’ve been worshiping at the temple for decades and are only now realising their stupidity. For years they’ve shipped their manufacturing overseas so that their ‘carbon footprint’ would reduce. What happened as a result? Well, their footprint increased by 20% as they’ve had to import the goods they no longer manufacture. Clever hey? And then to top it all, the government has also saddled the people with green taxes on just about everything so that they can reduce their carbon dioxide production. Has it worked? Not on your Nelly. It’s only managed to make countries like China and India wealthy, whilst making fools of the UK. See, China has no problem with burning coal for cheap electricity – unlike Western countries who cry just thinking about it. China is booming whilst the rest of the world are counting their carbon dioxide emissions. The new Green’s are the old Reds – nothing complicated there. Their Trojan horse of choice is the fashionable ‘poor’ environment. And make no mistake, Governments know this, yet they chose to impose these disastrous carbon taxes not for the environment, but for their own pockets – to save their overspending butts. Governments in the UK and Australia are rejoicing that they now have a wonderful excuse to slam the people for more money and what better way than to guilt the people into saving the planet. After all, show me a government which doesn’t like a new tax which they can pass off as saving a planet. And the world has warmed a measly 1degree in 100 years. How about adapting rather than taxing? It’s far cheaper and would be much more successful seeing as we can do nothing to stop the sun warming or cooling the planet!

 

Ministers were accused of saddling consumers with pointless green taxes last night – as new figures revealed surging imports from developing countries that rely on ‘dirty’ power.

Successive governments have boasted that a cocktail of green taxes and expensive wind farms has helped to curb carbon dioxide emissions blamed for global warming.

But new official figures reveal that Britain’s so-called ‘carbon footprint’ has increased by 20 per cent in the last two decades as we import ever more from developing countries like China that rely on dirty coal-fired power stations.

The revelation will fuel criticism that imposing huge costs on British industry to ‘go green’ has simply shifted emissions – and jobs – overseas.

The figures will also pile pressure on George Osborne to use this week’s Budget to roll back the costly green measures imposed on consumers and industry in recent years.

Tory MP Dominic Raab said the figures raised serious questions about the value of punitive taxes aimed at curbing carbon emissions in this country.

Mr Raab said: ‘The toxic mix of green tariffs and subsidies inherited from Labour is punishing the squeezed middle by hiking electricity bills, but doing little to combat global carbon emissions.

‘We are consuming more carbon than ever, while countries like China and India are laughing at the economic price British consumers are paying. We need an environmental policy that makes wider economic sense.’

A new study by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) reveals that carbon dioxide emissions relating to imported goods have doubled in the last 20 years as Britain’s manufacturing industry has declined.

Imports now account for almost half of the UK’s total carbon footprint. The surge in imports is so great that Britain’s overall carbon footprint has increased by 20 per cent.

A large proportion of the imports come from developing countries, particularly China, which have refused to sign up to binding targets to cut carbon emissions.

The figures will provide ammunition to the Chancellor who has vowed to tone down the Government’s obsession with the green agenda.

Mr Osborne sparked a furious backlash from green groups and the Liberal Democrats last year when he pledged that in future Britain would cut carbon emissions ‘no slower, but also no faster’ than other European countries.

In a speech to the Conservative Party conference he said: ‘We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business.’

Green policies have become increasingly controversial in recent years. Electricity prices are already 15 per cent higher than they would be as a result of the push to use costly new renewable sources, such as wind farms.

The Government’s own figures suggest green measures will have pushed up electricity costs by 27 per cent by 2020.

Matthew Sinclair, of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said the figures underlined the folly of imposing unilateral national measures to tackle a global issue.

Mr Sinclair said: ‘The rise in the emissions produced supplying the British market shows why politicians proud of the draconian regulations and expensive taxes they have put in place, thinking that they have led to a fall in our emissions, are fooling themselves.

‘Not only is the tiny share of global emissions produced in Britain – less than two per cent of the total – almost irrelevant to overall global emissions, but as our targets are all framed in terms of emissions produced here, they can be satisfied without cutting total emissions at all if industry is simply relocated to other countries.’

A Defra study suggests that Britain’s carbon footprint surged by 35 per cent between 1995 and 2005, mostly because of the increase in imports. It fell back by nine per cent between 2008 and 2009 as the recession forced consumers to cut back spending and brought the construction industry to a halt.

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