Thursday, August 23, 2012

Killing Cancer Cells With Weed Plant Anti-Cancer Drug

A new anticancer drug made from a weed-like plant that grows naturally in the Mediterranean region has been shown to effectively destroy cancer cells in mice, according to a study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The drug, developed by researchers at John Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, in collaboration with Danish researchers, is able to move - undetected by normal cells - through the bloodstream until activated by specific cancer proteins.

According to the researchers, a three-day course of the new drug, called G202, reduced the size of human prostate tumors grown in mice by an average of 50% in 30 days.

In addition, G202 was found to be more effective at reducing tumors than the chemotherapy drug docetaxel. They found that G202 reduced 7 out of 9 human prostate tumors in mice by more than 50% in 21 days, while docetaxel only reduced 1 out of 8 tumors by more than 50%.

Furthermore, in models of human breast cancer, bladder cancer, and kidney cancer, G202 was shown to produce at least 50% regression.

Physicians at Johns Hopkins, University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas-San Antonio then conducted a phase I clinical trial in order to evaluate the safety of G202 in 29 patients with advanced cancer. The researchers are currently planning a phase II trial to test G202 in patients suffering from liver cancer and prostate cancer.

G202 is made from a weed called Thapsia garganica that grows naturally in the Mediterranean region. The plant produces a product called thapsigargin, that has been known for thousands of years to be toxic to animals.

Samuel Denmeade, M.D., professor of oncology, urology, pharmacology and molecular sciences, explained:

"Our goal was to try to re-engineer this very toxic natural plant product into a drug we might use to treat human cancer. We achieved this by creating a format that requires modification by cells to release the active drug."


The researchers chemically modified thapsigargin and created a form that acts like a hand grenade with an intact pin. After G202 is injected, it moves through the bloodstream until it locates cancer cells and hits a protein called prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA). PSMA then "pulls the pin" on G202, by releasing cell-killing agents into the tumor and blood vessels that feed it.

Specifically, G202 inhibits the function of the SERCA pump, a protein that is vital for cell survival. According to the researchers, as G202 is targeted to the SERCA pump, it will be difficult for tumor cells to become resistant to the drug, as they cannot stop making the protein.

John Isaacs, Ph.D., professor of oncology, urology, chemical and biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins said: "The exciting thing is that the cancer itself is activating its own demise."

Written by Christine Kearney

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PBS documentary sheds light on marijuana’s cancer-killing properties

The cancer-killing properties of marijuana were the subject of discussion in a PBS documentary that aired this week to little media fanfare.
While using marijuana to kill cancer may sound like a wild claim to some, it struck Dr. Prakash Nagarkatti as a great idea. In his studies as professor of pathology and microbiology for the University of South Carolina, he tested synthetic cannabis drugs on cancer cells and developed a formula that was able to completely eradicate cancer cells in a test tube.







A follow-up on mice afflicted with cancer found that up to 30 percent in the test group completely rejected their disease, while others had their tumors significantly reduced. The same drug is now being tested on humans with Leukemia.
But it’s not just Dr. Nagarkatti who sees the medical value of marijuana: it’s the whole pharmaceutical industry. And that’s another point the documentary makes, examining the patents various companies have filed, and what they claim marijuana-based drugs could one day be used to treat.
The video below is just an excerpt from the full documentary, which originally aired in Montana amid a debate about repealing that state’s medical marijuana law.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Dow Chemical's Toxic Legacy Taints 2012 London Olympics

Olympic Partner Refuses to Take Responsibility for Industrial Disaster; 100,000 Continue to Suffer



(Washington, D.C.) – Deep in the heart of east London lies the Olympic stadium. Surrounding the 80,000 seat arena is a controversial, $11 million fabric wrap provided by one of the world's largest chemical manufacturers, Dow Chemicals.
While the wrap itself, a series of triangular white panels, looks plain and inoffensive, the chemical giant behind it has a somewhat darker legacy.


Almost 30 years ago, in December 1984, the Indian city of Bhopal was the scene of one of the largest industrial disasters in history. A toxic gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant killed between 7,000 and 10,000 men, women and children in the immediate aftermath. Another 15,000 or so died in the following years, and more than 100,000 are estimated to continue to suffer from serious health problems as a result of the leak.


"Young children are forced to give up school and work because their parents have been affected by the gas," Safreen, a 17-year-old activist, told Amnesty International when the organization recently visited Bhopal.
Since 2001, Dow has been 100% owner of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), the company whose Indian subsidiary operated the Bhopal plant. UCC walked away from Bhopal without cleaning up or disclosing the exact nature of the gas that leaked. No investigation has since been launched into why the leak happened or the impact it has had on people's lives. Survivors have not been given the medical care they need, nor fair compensation.
Despite this, UCC and its owner Dow, continue to deny any responsibility for the ongoing tragedy.

For more information about this Disaster go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster.

US Funded Death Squads in El Salvador Casts Shadow Over GOP Ticket


Paul Ryan is getting foreign policy briefings from Elliot Abrams, who actively covered-up atrocities in El Salvador.
August 16, 2012  
Amidst reports that Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital with funds from investors tied to 1980s Salvadoran death squads, his new running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is getting foreign policy briefings from a man who actively covered-up some of the worst atrocities committed by those same death squads. The GOP's vice-presidential candidate also earned his political stripes working under neoconservative Republicans who funneled billions in U.S. aid to those military hit-men. Though the war in El Salvador was just one chapter in history, Romney and Ryan's relationship with that war may provide a snapshot into their worldview.

Between 1979 and 1992, an estimated 75,000 people were killed in the conflict in El Salvador and countless others were "disappeared" or displaced, an astonishing number for a country the size of Massachusetts. A United Nations Truth Commission  estimated that the right-wing, military-led government was responsible for 85 percent of the violence while the left-wing insurgency fighting against vast economic and political inequality, including farmers, teachers, priests and union activists, was responsible for only 5 percent. Much of the violence was attributable to clandestine military or paramilitary death squads, which committed countless assassinations and acts of brutal violence against suspected political dissidents.

Recent reports suggest that some of the same members of the Salvadoran oligarchy that backed the death squads gave Romney the start up funds for Bain Capital.

Romney's Early Bain Capital Funders Tied to Salvadoran Death Squads.
Last week, the Huffington Post's Ryan Grim and Cole Stangler reported on how Romney went to Miami in 1983, at the height of El Salvador's civil war, to raise $9 million from Salvadoran expatriate families to start Bain Capital. This seed money amounted to 40 percent of Bain's startup funds. Although Romney claimed that he had vetted the backgrounds of the investors, some of their families had been identified by the U.S. ambassador and others as closely tied to either death squads or death squad leader and ARENA Party founder Robert d'Aubuisson (known as "Blowtorch Bob" for his use of blowtorches to torture political prisoners).

D'Aubuisson was later found responsible for ordering the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, a prominent advocate for the poor and critic of the Salvadoran government (who the Vatican has now placed in the process of canonization to become a saint). In the United States, though, the Reagan administration foreign policy team would actively deny d'Aubisson's involvement in the assassination, as well as the Salvadoran government's involvement in other human rights atrocities, so as to justify a heavy flow of military aid to the country's government as part
of Reagan's Cold War-era policy to suppress any chance of another Cuba emerging in Latin America. A key player in those official denials was Elliot Abrams, an Assistant Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan who still boasts that he  "supervised U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean."

In recent months, Abrams has been advising Romney's Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan on foreign policy.Abrams Key Denier of Human Rights Abuses by Salvadoran Government.
Of the Romero assassination, Abrams  told the Washington Post in 1993  that "anybody who thinks you're going to find a cable that says that Roberto d'Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool." But as the Post noted in that same article, the U.S. Embassy sent at least two such cables to Washington fingering d'Aubuisson -- the December 21, 1981 cable, for example, describes: "A meeting, chaired by Maj. Roberto d'Aubuisson, during which the murder of Archbishop Romero was planned. During the meeting, some of the participants drew lots for the privilege of killing the archbishop."
best known for denying one of the worst atrocities of the war, the massacre at El Mozote, where in December 1981 U.S-trained government soldiers marched into a village and murdered around 800 civilians, many of whom were women and children. The men were tortured before being shot, and girls as young as 10 were raped before having their throats slit. Abrams, who at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, dismissed reports published in the New York Times and Washington Post about the massacre, telling a Senate committee tasked with certifying the Salvadoran government's human rights record that the reports of deaths "were not credible" and suggesting the guerrillas had "significantly misused" the stories for propaganda. The U.N. Truth Commission later confirmed the newspapers' reports on the massacre, and the Salvadoran government (which elected its first left-wing president ever in 2009) officially apologized for the event in December of last year.


These and other denials helped justify another ten years of United States funding for the Salvadoran military and its death squads. The tiny country would receive $6 billion from the U.S. over the course of its civil war, making it the second-highest recipient of U.S. aid behind Israel during that period, despite mounting death tolls and continued atrocities.brams has remained unrepentant about U.S. policy in El Salvador,  calling it "one of fabulous achievement." He was convicted in 1991 of two misdemeanors for unlawfully withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned by the first President Bush.Abrams, Neocons Passing the Torch to VP Pick Ryan.
This week,The Daily Beast  first reported  that Abrams' latest act is advising Republican GOP candidate Ryan on foreign policy. Abrams told the website Ryan "knows more about foreign policy than people may think, in view of his concentration on the economy." Other right-wing foreign policy experts toldThe Daily Beast that despite Ryan's professed fiscal conservatism, he, like Reagan, supports spending billions or trillions to preserve U.S. military power and international influence.Ryan has long been mentored by neoconservative Republican leaders who advanced U.S. policy in El Salvador. His first job in D.C. was as an aide to Sen. Bob Kasten of Wisconsin, a cheerleader for sending billions to El Salvador's brutal military government and who in the 1980s chaired the Senate foreign operations appropriations subcommittee responsible for approving those funds.

After Kasten lost his seat to Russ Feingold in 1992, Ryan became a speechwriter for the right-wing think tank Empower America, which was founded by Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Jack Kemp. As a foreign policy adviser to Reagan in 1980 Kirkpatrick famously defended the rape, murder, and torture of four American Catholic missionaries (three of whom were nuns and one a lay missionary) at the hands of El Salvador's government forces, claiming "the nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists." Kirkpatrick went on to become Reagan's UN Ambassador. Kemp, who Ryan  recently identified  as a key mentor, was also a major supporter of U.S. funding to El Salvador's military government.Even if Romney can distance himself from the death squad-linked Salvadoran investors that provided the seed money for his vast wealth, Ryan's political upbringing and his being mentored by a man of Abrams' pedigree makes it clear that the tragedies of El Salvador's civil war and this dark chapter in U.S. history will continue to cast a shadow over the Romney - Ryan campaign.



Sad But True: Corporate Crime Does Pay


Almost daily we read about another apparently stiff financial penalty meted out for corporate malfeasance. This year corporations are on track to pay as much as $8 billion to resolve charges of defrauding the government, a record sum, according to the Department of Justice.  Last year big business paid the SEC $2.8 billion to settle disputes.  
Sounds like an awful lot of money. And it is, for you and me.  But is it a lot of money for corporate lawbreakers?  The best way to determine that is to see whether the penalties have deterred them from further wrongdoing.     

The empirical evidence argues they don’t. A 2011 New York Times analysis of enforcement actions during the last 15 years found at least 51 cases in which 19 Wall Street firms had broken antifraud laws they had agreed never to breach.  Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, among others, have settled fraud cases by stipulating they would never again violate an antifraud law, only to do so again and again and again.  Bank of America’s securities unit has agreed four times since 2005 not to violate a major antifraud statute, and another four times not to violate a separate law. Merrill Lynch, which Bank of America acquired in 2008, has separately agreed not to violate the same two statutes seven times since 1999.
Outside the financial sector the story is similar. Erika Kelton at Forbes reportsthat Pfizer paid $152 million in 2008; $49 million a few months later; a record-setting $2.3 billion in 2009 and $14.5 million last year. Each time it legally promised to adhere to federal law in the future.  Each time it broke that promise.
The SEC could bring contempt of court charges against serial offenders, but it doesn’t. Earlier this year the SEC revealed it has not brought any contempt charges against large financial firms in the last 10 years.  Adding insult to insult the SEC doesn’t even publicly refer to previous cases when filing new charges.  
We know that CEOs of big corporations never go to jail.  We probably didn’t know they often benefit financially even when the corporations under their control violate the law. GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty recently received a significant pay boost to roughly $16.5 million just four months after Glaxo announced it will pay $3 billion to settle federal allegations of illegal marketing of many of its prescription drugs. Johnson & Johnson Chairman and CEO William Weldon received a 55 percent increase in his annual performance bonus for 2011 and a pay raise despite a settlement J&J is negotiating with the Justice Department that could run as high as $1.8 billion.
What level of penalty might deter corporate crime? The Economist magazine recently addressed that question.  It used the common sense framework proposed by University of Chicago economist Gary Becker in an influential 1968 essay.  Becker proposed that criminals weigh the expected costs and benefits of breaking the law. The expected cost of lawless behavior is the product of two things: the chance of being caught and the severity of the punishment if caught.
Purdue Economics Professors John M. Connor and C. Gustav Helmersexamined the market impact of over 280 private international cartels from 1990 to 2005 and the fines imposed on them by various governments. They estimated these criminal conspiracies in restraint of trade raised prices by $260-550 billion.  The median overcharge was about 25 percent of affected commerce. 
Thus a fine about 25 percent of revenue would repay the damage done.  But that’s assuming wrongdoing is caught every time.  The Economist suggests that catching one in three violations would constitute a good track record for regulators. That would mean a fine of 75 percent of revenue would be needed to deter future violations.  But the study found that actual fines ranged only between 1.4 percent and 4.9 percent.Last year’s SEC settlement regarding Citigroup’s fraudulent mortgage investment practices fits that pattern. The settlement was for $285 million, less than 4 percent of Citigroup’s $76 billion in revenues.
Often federal penalties are so low they might be viewed as an invitation to break the law.  According to the Times, Citigroup had cheated investors out of more than $700 million, more than twice what it paid in penalties.As for Glaxo’s $3 billion settlement, George Lundberg, for 17-years Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association writes, “The penalty sounds like a lot of money but that company made probably 10 times that much from its illegal actions.”   What can be done?  A first step might be for the media to stop reporting simply the gross settlement figure and instead give us the information that allows us to decide whether the punishment fits the crime.  A few days ago a brief story in the New York Times business section admirably achieved this goal. The Times reported that in 2006 Morgan Stanley entered into a complex swap agreement with the New York electricity provider KeySpan that gave it a stake in the profits of a competitor.  This enabled the two companies to push up the price of electricity.  Morgan Stanley broke the law.  On August 7 a federal judge approved the settlement between the Justice Department and Morgan Stanley.   
Here’s the cost benefit analysis. The total cost to New Yorkers in higher utility bills because of the price fixing came to $300 million.  Morgan Stanley was paid $21.6 million for handling the swap agreement.  And the financial penalty imposed on Morgan Stanley?  An inconceivably low $4.8 million.  In addition the bank didn’t have to admit any wrongdoing.  There will be no further prosecutionAnyone who read this story had all the facts necessary to conclude that something is terribly, even criminally wrong here.  The Times is to be commended for going that extra step and providing a full cost-benefit analysis.  I hope it can become a template for all political and business reporters.

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    Uncle Sam Needs YOU for a Bailout: 6 Reasons Another Big Banking Crisis Is Coming Our Way


    By Alexander Arapoglou Jerri-Lynn Scofield

    Surprise, surprise! Last week, the Justice Department announced it wasn’t going to prosecute Goldman Sachs or its employees for its shady activities during the mortgage crisis. The same day, Goldman disclosed in a regulatory filing that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had dropped an investigation into a troubled $1.3 billion residential mortgage-backed securities deal launched in 2006.

    Time is running out for prosecutors to file cases against big banks for activities that triggered the 2007-2009 financial crisis, since statutes of limitations set deadlines for launching prosecutions for fraud and other financial crimes. If prosecutors don’t start lawsuits before these deadlines expire, the big banks will, once again, have got off scot-free.

    Failure to pursue banks, culpable management and employees for their complicity in causing the financial crisis is one of six bad policies that ensure we’re likely to see another bust-up of a big U.S. bank -- sooner rather than later.

    Who’s going to pay the price for such a failure?  We will, of course. Uncle Sam’s policy of allowing banks to get too big to fail means we’ll all be left holding the bag when that collapse occurs — and another banking bailout is necessary.


    Who’s going to pay the price for such a failure?  We will, of course. Uncle Sam’s policy of allowing banks to get too big to fail means we’ll all be left holding the bag when that collapse occurs — and another banking bailout is necessary.

    1. Too big to fail

    Thirty years of financial deregulation have seen unprecedented concentration of the financial sector. Before, financial firms were limited both in where they could do business and the types of business they could do. This prevented a big banking blowup in the U.S. for more than 50 years.

    Banks used to be limited to owning branches within individual states.  When a bank got into trouble—and some did -- losses stayed confined. Regulators such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) could clean up the mess and preserve depositors’ assets, without unduly burdening taxpayers. But after changes culminating in the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act in 1994, those restrictions vanished.

    So some banks got steadily bigger, while the overall number shrank.  From 1990 to 2011, the number of commercial banks halved, from about 12,000 to 6,000, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

    Once upon a time, the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act limited banks to either commercial or investment banking functions. Brokerage activities were restricted, and the operations of insurance firms constrained. Problems in one area of financial activity didn’t spread to another. Bankers could not speculate with small depositors’ money. Banks competed with each other, which led to better lending terms. And they didn’t get too big, so when they screwed up, they paid the price. They failed.

    In the 1980s, financial institutions claimed that Glass-Steagall and other restrictions prevented U.S. banks from competing head-to-head with foreign banks. They lobbied hard and regulators began to allow the restrictions slowly to erode.

    Financiers like Sanford Weill, the head of the Traveler’s Group, couldn’t wait for U.S. laws to change. In 1998, he masterminded the takeover of Citicorp, a merger which combined commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance functions in one firm in a way that was technically illegal. But the merged company got a grace period—during which Weill deployed formidable lobbying muscle to dismantle Glass-Steagall. It worked. In 1999, Congress passed the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and finally buried Glass-Steagall.

    Last month, Weill gave an astounding interview to CNBC in which he admitted that “What we should probably do, is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not gonna risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not gonna be too big to fail.”

    That’s a bit like Jesus!


    Christ returning to announce that introducing Christianity was all a big mistake. The reaction from the financial mafia has been appropriately apoplectic.

    The net effect of all these rule changes – like the one that enriched Sandy Weill – was that banks became too big to fail. Fear that their failure has led regulators to go soft on the big banks, and to do anything to keep them alive.

    2. See no evil, hear no evil

    While the financial system was consolidating, another threat was looming: the “shadow banking system“ was being created. Another New Deal reform, the Investment Company Act of 1940, imposed heavy restrictions on investment companies, which were intended to protect investors from excessive risks, fraud and scams.

    But regulators decided that sophisticated investors, including the wealthy, pension funds and charities, had enough financial savvy to be allowed to invest in shadow banks that were either lightly regulated, or not at all. Such alternative investment vehicles, including hedge funds and private equity funds, were exempt from investment restrictions.

    In the last two decades, there’s been an explosive growth in shadow banks. The size of this unregulated system has increased fivefold and today is larger than the regulated financial system.

    The rationale? Sophisticated investors, it’s claimed, can look after themselves, and therefore the largely unregulated funds that cater to them don’t pose any risks to the rest of us. But that’s not proven to be the case. And, surprise, surprise, when such firms fail, guess who pays the price? We do.

    3. Calling in the cavalry, but giving them the wrong directions

    Once the U.S. decided to deregulate the financial sector, and banks got bigger, it was inevitable that the government would be called in for a rescue. Most of us were aware that in 2008, the government stepped in to bail out big banks that were destabilized by Lehman Brothers’ collapse and by the bad derivatives bets entered into by AIG Financial Products. The world financial system was at the brink, we were told, and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was necessary to save the system.

    But a decade before this bailout, U.S. financial regulators were involved in a rescue of a shadow bank, which helped set the stage for TARP.  In 1998, the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund got into trouble by placing heavily-leveraged derivatives bets during the Asian financial crisis. Hedge funds are allowed to operate with scant regulatory supervision on the rationale that they cater only to sophisticated investors who could bear the risk.

    The Federal Reserve changed its mind when it realized that LTCM’s failure was a threat to the global economy. So the Fed corralled major banks in a room, and told them to fix the problem. They dismembered LTCM and took its underperforming assets onto their books.

    The Fed’s role in this rescue sent the wrong message: that the government would be there to fix problems, and that banks and shadow banks alike didn’t have to work too hard to manage risk and to protect themselves from contagion.

    Sometimes you want government intervention to quell a banking panic, and to shore up or reboot a failed banking system. Banks need to be seized, or at minimum assessed by a neutral observer, and their balance sheets cleaned up. Investors, too, must pay a price for making foolish investment choices. Typically, existing shareholders are wiped out, while bondholders see their promises of guaranteed debt payments converted to more speculative shares of stock.

    We used to know how to do this. The Depression-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation seized failing banks, cleaned up their




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    Wednesday, August 1, 2012

    How the World Bank and the IMF destroy Africa

    The World Bank and the IMF (the International Monetary Fund) were set up during the end of the Second World War to rebuild the economies of Europe. However, in order for the world bank and the IMF to implement their policies, they (the world bank and the IMF) began offering loans to poor countries but only if the poor countries privatized their economies and allowed western corporations free access to their raw materials and markets. That was a poverty trap and many poor countries realized it when it was too late. We were already in chains. That was the beginning of much of the problems we face today in Africa. Now we are in a vicious cycle of poverty and there seems to be no way out. The western corporations flourish while the poor continue to die in poverty. In other words, the poor in Africa continue to feed the greedy rich corporations in the western world. The poor get poorer while the rich get richer. People continue to die from extreme poverty and hunger in Africa and other parts of the world but not so many people know the World Bank, The IMF and the WTO are behind almost all these. It is a new form of war whereby the rich western corporations use hunger and deaths as weapons of mass destruction. In other words, The World Bank, The IMF (the International Monetary Fund), and the WTO (the World Trade Organization) are the triple enemies of progress in almost every developing country in the world. Now let's see how the World Bank, IMF and WTO operate in Sub-Saharan Africa.

    Poor African_farmer
    Take a country like Ghana for example. Ghana is blessed with abundance of natural resources. The World Bank and the IMF are very interested in countries such as Ghana where they can easily control the natural resources and the markets. There used to be some prosperous rice farming communities in the northern parts of Ghana and the government of Ghana used to give those rice producing farmers some farming subsidies to enable them produce rice on a large scale to help feed the nation. However, the world bank and the IMF stood in and told the Ghanaian government they (the world bank and the IMF) would not give Ghana any more loans unless the Ghanaian government cut the farming subsidies the government was giving to the poor rice farmers and the main reason behind it was that, Ghana had to import rice from western countries such as the United States (a major partner of the world bank and the IMF). Now Ghana imports most of its rice from abroad at huge prices every year. So at the end of the day, Ghana owes the World Bank and the IMF huge amounts of money but the money did not remain in the Ghanaian economy because Ghana had to use the loan to import food from abroad. Meanwhile, the rice producing communities in Ghana could have helped produce enough rice to feed the nation and even export some abroad to make more profit. Now the northern communities in Ghana remain the poorest in the country with no better jobs and no opportunities at all in most parts. Young boys and girls some as young as 9 are migrating to the southern parts of the country to major cities such as Kumasi and Accra (a very dangerous journey for kids) all in search for jobs so they can take care of their poor dying families back home. Most of these kids never return home. Some die along the way and some return worse than before and all thanks to the IMF and the World Bank.
    Although the money was returned to them, we still owe them. That is why most developing countries owe the World Bank and the IMF a lot in loans. Sometimes you hear "debt cancellations" and you may think they forgive poor countries their debts but that is not how it works in reality. The World Bank and the IMF never forgive and because of the huge debts developing countries owe the World Bank, they (the World Bank, The International Monetary Fund or the IMF, The World Trade Organization or WTO, and The United States of America a major partner of the World Bank) control almost all the affairs of those poor countries. In other words, if you don't obey what the World Bank and the IMF say then you must pay back the debt and because you cannot pay back the debt, you must obey whatever they tell you to do. Any leader who doesn't obey the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, etc. is considered a "terrorist" and must be assassinated in most cases. For example, when there is an oil discovery in a developing country (that owes the World Bank) and the leader of that developing country is not ready to co-operate (so western corporations can easily take over the oil exploration), the World Bank and co quickly get rid of such a leader sometimes through war (just like what happened in Iraq). The World Bank elects their own "obedient" leaders to rule those poor countries so that they (the World Bank, IMF and co) can easily control that country's economy and market.

    Africa and the Western World: The Truth


    Africa is the land of many sounds. Africa is the rhythm of life. We dance not to the beat of the sounds but to the rhythm of the drums. We dance not just to the rhythms we hear but also to the rhythms we do not hear. Some people think they know but they do not know. Some people think they understand but they do not understand. There are several things we Africans do not know and there are several things we do not understand. There are several sounds we do not hear and there are several rhythms we cannot interpret.

    african-girl-child
     There are several things we Africans do not know but there is one thing almost all reasonable Africans know for sure. There are several things we Africans do not see but there is one thing almost all reasonable Africans can see very clearly. We have no idea what Americans are planning next and we have no idea about France's next move. Is Germany coming again? We cannot tell. What about the United Kingdom? We have no idea what their intentions are. In fact we have no idea what the western world will do next but there is one thing all Africans know for sure. There is one thing almost all reasonable Africans can say without a doubt. The Western World has nothing good to offer Africa.
    The western world took away our pounded yam and palm wine calling them unhealthy but decided to feed us with expired crackers and diluted Fanta.



    The western world took away every tooth from our mouths calling them rotten teeth but decided to feed us with solid bones and metallic chips knowing very well there is no tooth left in our mouths.
    The western world divided Africa amongst themselves without Africans ever knowing. The western world divided and keep dividing Africa yet their "good book" says "Unity is Strength". Is the western world our enemy? The answer is NO the western world is not our enemy why because Africans have no enemies. Our only enemy is time and time will tell.
    When we were kids we reasoned like kids but thank God most of us are growing up by the day and have started reasoning like adults. Thousands died in Angola during the period of war and tens of thousands died in Liberia. Thousands died in Ethiopia during the period of war and tens of thousands died in Sierra Leone. Tens of thousands died in Uganda during the period of war and hundreds of thousands died in Darfur. Just a couple of months ago thousands lost their lives and homes in Ivory Coast. Several innocent women were raped. Several innocent children were killed but throughout all these atrocities, the western world who claims to be our best friend just stood by and watched as if nothing was happening. It is true at times we fight unnecessary wars and kill our own brothers and sisters but that is just one part of the story. The other part of the story still untold is that, the western world who claims to be our best friend sponsors almost all the wars in Africa in one way or the other and the saddest part is that, most of my people are too blind to see.
    Some people will argue the western world keeps pumping huge sums of foreign aid to Africa every single year which makes the western world our very good friend. It is true the western world pumps huge sums of foreign aid to Africa every single year but what most people do not understand is that, there is no free aid. Africa receives no free aid from any western country. All the foreign aid you hear in the news are just "soft loans" western countries give to poor governments in Africa at concessional rates and NEVER for free. For every $1 a poor country in Africa receives in foreign aid, we spend about $25 in repayment. So in short, there is no free aid and Africa receives no free aid from any western country and that is the truth.
    Take the United States for example. America has already spent as official donors, about 600 billion dollars in aid to Africa over the last 50 years which is great. 600 billion in aid sounds like a very huge amount of aid but what people do not know is that, about 85% of this 600 billion dollars was spent in America on American contractors, American suppliers, etc. and not in Africa. French aid is even worse. So at the end of the day you hear these huge numbers in the news and think the western world is doing great in Africa but the truth is that, the western world does almost nothing good in Africa. So is the western world our enemy? Once again, the answer is NO the western world is not our enemy. The western world is just a very bad friend.