Greetings folks. After a brief and enjoyable respite, our phalanx of researchers on a bender in Puerto Vallarta, the BHC is back on track, albeit with a somewhat abbreviated session this week as we were far too removed from the horrors and mayhem to keep up with much of it, which of course, is the point of such a trip. We do have a guest contributor this week and a report direct from Malawi on the putative food crisis there. Haiti is handed back to the junta, job markets continue to languish and Ashcroft gets a hint from his own disgusted body.

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Maize for Mercedes

In our continuing effort to bring readers the circumstances of the real world rather than those reported by mainstream media, our field correspondent in Africa brings us a report on the heals of a story from Reuters on a potential food crisis in Malawi.

BHC Wire Services
Lilongwe - Last year was particularily interesting; a food crisis was announced after the government sold off all the maize reserves. What was not mentioned is that the EU people said to sell off "some" of the reserves as they were getting old and in danger of rotting if kept much longer, then they told the Malawian government the very important words: "When you sell the maize, keep the MONEY in the Federal Reserve, in case next year's crop is insufficient to feed the nation...." But why save 10's of millions of US$ if you can buy Mercedes Benz's and fly off to London and buy property and shop at Harrod's? Seems like a crazy idea if you're a Malawian politician!!! But wait, the plot thickens...

Malawi then announces a severe food shortage. The World Food Program (unfortunately not a great organization, and frankly, they benefit hugely from just such disasters) sets up shop. First order of business - hire many Americans and Europeans and make sure every one of them has a brand new shiny white Land Cruiser with WFP plastered all over it, and pay these folks more each and every day than the average Malawian makes in a year.

Now comes the side splitter...

WFP sets up maize flour distribution sites throughout the country, expecting line ups of starving Malawians with kids crying and flies crawling in their noses and eyes for the TV cameras.

Nobody shows up!

What the?!

hmmm...

Better hire more folks to figure out what is going on, and an independent investigation is launched. Shiny white Landcruisers have to finally get put into 4x4 and go to the villages. Meetings are held with village chiefs and what do they find? The villages maize stores are full! All these little rondavels made of mud/brick/thatch, a crude silo, have much maize stored.

What happened?

It was a scam. A group of government ministers "bought" all the maize stores, at about 12kwacha a kilo, the reportedly "sold" maize stores were not sold to Zambia and The Congo etc., but to local Ministers from the ruling party. The maize never even left the silos! A fancy Landcruiser drives up to the National Grain Reserve silos and does a check. It's all there! The catch is though, the price of maize has now risen to over 20kwacha a kilo, and is being sold on the black market to the areas that indeed did have a shortage. By the time the WFP even set up shop and finished leasing space and buying trucks, most transactions were completed, ministers were richer, the people were poorer and the reports of people eating dirt and bark faded away into the ether.

What to do with a 2 year lease and 40 new trucks? Become a development NGO, of course. So as it stands now, WFP is trying to justify it's existence here by getting in the way of all the other development agencies, and underbidding projects, and of course hiring more folks to fill special needs in education, water works etc. All in all, pretty much a nightmare.

So we shall see what happens this year. It has been raining a ton, and the maize looks pretty good so far. Not bad in a country that shouldn't even be growing maize, as it is so difficult to grow and is very low interms of productivity per sq km.

It would seem the average Malawian is merely a course filter for money that passes from the donor nations to the Indian shop keepers. Everything for sale here is through an Indian shop keeper. Hardware, clothes (all the "donated" clothing from churches etc is brokered by the Indians and Asians and sold in bundles to Malawians, who then set up a stall at the "Bend-over Market" in city center!), food etc. Or higher end shops are owned by South African whites who saw that us expats will pay anything for Olive Oil and good toilet paper!!!

All in all, pretty bleak. The people seem happy though, as they don't actually know just how they are being royally screwed by their government. To anyone who has never seen a TV or Magazine, a Mercedes and Prada shoes look like a car and any old pair of shoes. Isn't Harrod's just another Bend-Over Market...?


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Crush the Threat

Readers of the BHC will recall our recent item about the strange media coverage of the uprising in Haiti and the obvious lack of discussion about the actual reasons for the actions of the rebels. There was unqualified silence in mainstream reportage on this issue, except, of course, here at the BHC. Well, a couple of weeks later and week after Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted, what are we seeing now? Thousands of pro-Aristide protestors conducting demonstrations outside the palace. Hmmm, what's really going here? The media would have us infer that the rebellion was a popular uprising and yet it was being led, and may have comprised nothing but, former military leaders who had been deposed by US forces in 1994 when Americans reinstalled the democratically elected Aristide. So why is the US now sitting back and letting democracy get stomped? Listening to Bush, one would believe that democracy is all America wants for the world. Didn't we just invade a country because of a brutal military dictatorship?

Aristide was elected in 1990 in general elections and promptly removed by a military coup in 1991 which remained in power and had seriously terrorised the country for three years until the US moved to replant the popularly elected president. He was elected again in 2000 with some 90% of the popular vote. Again, the media would have us think, with their blithely unsubstantiated statements that gangs of presidential thugs roamed the Haitian countryside, pillaging and plundering everything in their path, that Aristide had gone mad with power. But this surely didn't make any sense to anyone who knew anything about the man.

As readers may recall from the comments on The BHC, Vol 14, some discussion arose that Aristide had become a growing thorn to the US for refusing to abide IMF requirements which would insist that Haiti "privatise", i.e. sell to some rapacious US firm like Enron, many or all public utilities and cut back on education, health care and any of those other pinko, lefty entitlements free market wackos hate so much.* Let us not forget that one of the biggest stakeholders in the IMF is the US Treasury (though how it finances much of anything these days is surely one of the grand mysteries of modern times) and when the IMF dictates to some struggling, third-world country that public resources be privatised, it is usually a US company which comes in and does the privatising. Enron was the quintessential privitiser when IMF structural adjustments were made in Bolivia, Venezuala, Argentina, etc. One word will recall just how well that all worked out: riots. Aristide certainly was not about to abandon his people to that fate. Now it may all happen anyway, as the very same brutal junta the US booted out in '94 is now being reinserted by the very same US today.

What is that that Bush is always saying, something about spreading peace and democracy? Well, he's spreading something, alright.

Doubt this? Readers are encouraged to this op-ed by Peter Hallward.

*Readers are encouraged to look at Globalisation and Its Discontents, J. Stieglitz, 2002
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Troubadors of Trouble

The US Department of Labour was at it again with those "gloomy gusses" issuing their latest report on Friday. None of it was good news. A mere 21,000 jobs were created last month, all of them in government. Not only that, but the DoL revised its own numbers for previous reports on November and December, downward. November's number was adjusted from 16,000 new jobs to 8,000 and December's went from 112,000 to 97,000, with most of those jobs likely taking the form of department store elves and Santas, which the BHC does not consider a long term employment prospect. Cynically, Wall Street went on a bit of tear, since those clowns see the silver lining by imagining that such poor employment performance would direct the Fed to keep interest rates low. Yeeha! Party time!

And aren't those tax cuts working out just great?


The Houston Chronicle, Mar 6, 2004

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Galling

In witnessing and reporting John Ashcroft's constant and continuous assault on the civil liberties of American citizens, we here at the BHC have always contended that Ashcroft's gall is manifestly unmitigated by...anything. Now it seems Ashcroft's own body is rendering the same opinion, as it has spontaneously secreted a hardened nodule of the stuff and unpleasantly deposited it in his pancreas, with the expectation that this calcified wad of rancor be expunged from his system, rendering him somewhat more compassionate and humane. There are no reports yet on the size of the gallstone, but the BHC expects that several more of these stones will be produced before Ashcroft's gall is brought down to an acceptable level.


Read the story...

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Cerveza, cono, mas cerveza!