Article about Live8/G8 sums up the situation...

[bloom]

Africa's new best friends

The US and Britain are putting the multinational corporations that created poverty in charge of its relief

George Monbiot
Tuesday July 5, 2005

I began to realize how much trouble we were in when Hilary Benn, the secretary of state for international development, announced that he would be joining the Make Poverty History march on Saturday. What would he be chanting, I wondered? "Down with me and all I stand for"?

...Without a critique of power, our campaign, so marvellously and so disastrously inclusive, will merely enhance this effort. Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Africa's problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people's lives. Where, on the Live 8 stages and in Edinburgh, was the campaign against the G8's control of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the UN? Where was the demand for binding global laws for multinational companies?

At the Make Poverty History march, the speakers insisted that we are dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming towards our demands. It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us dancing and cheering towards theirs.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1521411,00.html

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Maybe I missed it - but it doesn't seem that this is addressed by the media over here (besides Democracy Now and such). It was interesting to have Cspan broadcasting the BBC and see what the reporters were asking over there.

I wonder if more than 1% of the US population has a clue about this stuff.

[applegrove]

1. The neocons believe that if you kill government -then the rich

corporations who get to do away with regulation, the bond with their employees, and the attack on their consumers...that then all the white light will come from them. And poor countries can look to them for any hope.

Corporations see government and international institutions as in competition with them for the minds of humanity.

It is not funny.

Human being are altogether more than the sum of the corporations (tools that were created to create jobs & capital). But the elite don't believe that about the little people.

[bloom]

2. Another article on the subject... by Naomi Klein

"Here is a better idea: Instead of Saudi Arabia's oil wealth being used to "save Africa," how about if Africa's oil wealth was used to save Africa--along with its gas, diamond, gold, platinum, chromium, ferroalloy and coal wealth?

With all this noblesse oblige focused on saving Africa from its misery, it seems like a good time to remember someone else who tried to make poverty history: Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was killed ten years ago this November by the Nigerian government, along with eight other Ogoni activists, sentenced to death by hanging. Their crime was daring to insist that Nigeria was not poor at all but rich, and that it was political decisions made in the interests of Western multinational corporations that kept its people in desperate poverty. Saro-Wiwa gave his life to the idea that the vast oil wealth of the Niger Delta must leave behind more than polluted rivers, charred farmland, rancid air and crumbling schools. He asked not for charity, pity or "relief" but for justice.

The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People demanded that Shell compensate the people from whose land it had pumped roughly $30 billion worth of oil since the 1950s. The company turned to the government for help, and the Nigerian military turned its guns on demonstrators. Before his state-ordered hanging, Saro-Wiwa told the tribunal, "I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial.... The company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come."

Ten years later, 70 percent of Nigerians still live on less than $1 a day and Shell is still making superprofits. Equatorial Guinea, which has a major oil deal with ExxonMobil, "got to keep a mere 12 percent of the oil revenues in the first year of its contract," according to a 60 Minutes report--a share so low it would have been scandalous even at the height of colonial oil pillage."

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050627&s=klein