Prometheus 6

Yes, it does.

Measuring African capital flight
Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce
2011-12-21, Issue 564

BLEEDING A CONTINENT: THE COSTS OF CAPITAL FLIGHT

Africa is bleeding money, as capital flows into the private accounts of African elites and their accomplices in Western financial centres. At the same time, the continent is in dire need of financing. For Africa to overcome widespread and extreme poverty, it needs sustained and sustainable economic growth. This will require very large increases in the levels of domestic investment, especially in infrastructure. [27]

Researchers and development institutions have invested considerable time and energy to prove that African countries need more resources to meet their infrastructure financing needs. The 2009 Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic report concluded that Africa's middle-income countries need investment of about 10 per cent of GDP per year in infrastructure alone. [28] Investment needs for low-income African countries are higher at about 15 per cent of GDP annually. To achieve these levels, the continent's investment would need to be scaled up by at least $100 billion per year to nearly double the current level.

NY Times:

The F.B.I. reports that gun dealers submitted the names of almost half-a-million customers in the six days before Christmas, with December on its way to surpassing November, which had a record tally of 1,534,414 names submitted for background checks for criminal convictions and mental health issues. Only a little more than 1 percent of buyers are typically rejected by federally licensed gun dealers. No one knows how many more firearms were purchased through the gun-show loophole that enables black marketeering.

The F.B.I. data are particularly grim given the approaching anniversary of the shooting rampage in Tucson that left Representative Gabrielle Giffords gravely shot in the head, six people dead, including a federal judge, and 13 others wounded. In the nation’s shock and grief, politicians vowed gun reforms, like a ban on the 33-round assault clips that enabled the shooter to attack a crowd in an instant, improvements in the federal background check system and to have more states track and prevent individuals with histories of mental illness — like the shooter in Tucson — from acquiring guns.

None of these have been enacted as the nation heads toward the end of another year of almost 100,000 people shot or killed with a gun.

Guns in Public, and Out of Sight
By MICHAEL LUO

Alan Simons was enjoying a Sunday morning bicycle ride with his family in Asheville, N.C., two years ago when a man in a sport utility vehicle suddenly pulled alongside him and started berating him for riding on the highway.

Mr. Simons, his 4-year-old son strapped in behind him, slowed to a halt. The driver, Charles Diez, an Asheville firefighter, stopped as well. When Mr. Simons walked over, he found himself staring down the barrel of a gun.

“Go ahead, I’ll shoot you,” Mr. Diez said, according to Mr. Simons. “I’ll kill you.”

Mr. Simons turned to leave but heard a deafening bang. A bullet had passed through his bike helmet just above his left ear, barely missing him.

Mr. Diez, as it turned out, was one of more than 240,000 people in North Carolina with a permit to carry a concealed handgun. If not for that gun, Mr. Simons is convinced, the confrontation would have ended harmlessly. “I bet it would have been a bunch of mouthing,” he said.

Mr. Diez, then 42, eventually pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill.

Across the country, it is easier than ever to carry a handgun in public. Prodded by the gun lobby, most states, including North Carolina, now require only a basic background check, and perhaps a safety class, to obtain a permit.

In state after state, guns are being allowed in places once off-limits, like bars, college campuses and houses of worship. And gun rights advocates are seeking to expand the map still further, pushing federal legislation that would require states to honor other states’ concealed weapons permits. The House approved the bill last month; the Senate is expected to take it up next year.

The bedrock argument for this movement is that permit holders are law-abiding citizens who should be able to carry guns in public to protect themselves. “These are people who have proven themselves to be among the most responsible and safe members of our community,” the federal legislation’s author, Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida, said on the House floor.

To assess that claim, The New York Times examined the permit program in North Carolina, one of a dwindling number of states where the identities of permit holders remain public. The review, encompassing the last five years, offers a rare, detailed look at how a liberalized concealed weapons law has played out in one state. And while it does not provide answers, it does raise questions.

Paul Disowns Extremists’ Views but Doesn’t Disavow the Support
By JIM RUTENBERG and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

The American Free Press, which markets books like “The Invention of the Jewish People” and “March of the Titans: A History of the White Race,” is urging its subscribers to help it send hundreds of copies of Ron Paul’s collected speeches to voters in New Hampshire. The book, it promises, will “Help Dr. Ron Paul Win the G.O.P. Nomination in 2012!”

Don Black, director of the white nationalist Web site Stormfront, said in an interview that several dozen of his members were volunteering for Mr. Paul’s presidential campaign, and a site forum titled “Why is Ron Paul such a favorite here?” has no fewer than 24 pages of comments. “I understand he wins many fans because his monetary policy would hurt Jews,” read one.

Far-right groups like the Militia of Montana say they are rooting for Mr. Paul as a stalwart against government tyranny.

Mr. Paul’s surprising surge in polls is creating excitement within a part of his political base that has been behind him for decades but overshadowed by his newer fans on college campuses and in some liberal precincts who are taken with his antiwar, anti-drug-laws messages.

The white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy have not exactly been warmly welcomed. “I wouldn’t be happy with that,” Mr. Paul said in an interview Friday when asked about getting help from volunteers with anti-Jewish or antiblack views.

But he did not disavow their support. “If they want to endorse me, they’re endorsing what I do or say — it has nothing to do with endorsing what they say,” said Mr. Paul, who is now running strong in Iowa for the Republican nomination.

The libertarian movement in American politics has long had two overlapping but distinct strains. One, backed to some degree by wealthy interests, is focused largely on economic freedom and dedicated to reducing taxes and regulation through smaller government. The other is more focused on personal liberty and constraints on government built into the Constitution, which at its extreme has helped fuel militant antigovernment sentiment.

Mr. Paul has operated at the nexus of the two, often espousing positions at odds with most of the Republican Party but assembling a diverse and loyal following attracted by his adherence to libertarian principles.

Jake Mescher, a freshman organizer for Mr. Paul at Drake University in Des Moines, predicted that the newsletters would not reduce the ardor of his supporters. “I’ve heard of that four or five times, but it really has not made me wary,” Mr. Mescher said. “He has nothing in his record to suggest that that is part of his personal beliefs as a member of Congress or a presidential candidate.”

New Focus on Incendiary Words in Paul’s Newsletters
By JIM RUTENBERG and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Emerging as a real Republican contender in Iowa, Representative Ron Paul of Texas is receiving new focus for decades-old unbylined columns in his political newsletters that included racist, anti-gay and anti-Israel passages that he has since disavowed.

The latest issue of The Weekly Standard, a leading conservative publication, reprised reports of incendiary language in Mr. Paul’s newsletters that were published about 20 years ago.

A 1992 passage from the Ron Paul Political Report about the Los Angeles riots read, “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.” A passage in another newsletter asserted that people with AIDS should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva”; in 1990 one of his publications criticized Ronald Reagan for having gone along with the creation of the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which it called “Hate Whitey Day.”

The magazine article largely matched a similar report in The New Republic in 2008, and it was written by the same author, James Kirchick. The passages were plucked from a variety of newsletters that Mr. Paul’s consulting business published during his years out of Congress, all of them featuring his name: Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Survival Report and Ron Paul Investment Letter.

Mr. Paul did not respond to an interview request, but repudiated the writings in 2008. Likening himself to a major news publisher, he said he did not vet every article that was featured in his newsletters. “I absolutely, honestly do not know who wrote those things,” Mr. Paul said in an interview on CNN at the time, adding that he did not monitor the publications closely because he was busy with a medical practice and “speeches around the country.”

December 20, 2011, 10:03 am
Wanted: A Ron Paul for Policing
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

I don’t support Ron Paul and I can’t imagine how his libertarian philosophy could possibly translate into effective governing, especially when the crippled economy is crying out for effective government. But I appreciate the novelty he has brought to the Republican primaries, and the way he sometimes breaks with right-wing orthodoxy. When the other presidential aspirants compete to out-tough each other on foreign policy, for example, I think it’s useful to have Mr. Paul jump in and say—as he did at the last debate—that the “greatest danger” is a president who “will overreact.”

I bring this up because a couple of news stories I read recently have made me want to hear Ron Paul on criminal justice, or someone like him — someone who commands national attention, preferably on the right because that’s more effective when it comes to law and order, who’s willing to express concern about overreaction in policing.

A study published on Monday in “Pediatrics” (and reported widely) indicates that nearly one in three Americans will be arrested by age 23. A previous study, conducted 44 years ago, had put that figure at 22 percent. That’s a depressing, but not exactly surprising, increase, which the authors attribute to a justice system that is more aggressive than it used to be. Local police departments pursue minor offenses, including drug violations, more vigorously than in the past. It’s the broken windows theory run amok.

The threat to democracy can also come from other quarters
Leonard Gentle
2011-12-15, Issue 563

Technocrats and the judiciary aren’t any more likely to make decisions based on the people’s wishes than elected politicians, cautions Leonard Gentle. Democracy ‘is a matter of constant contestation in which ordinary people either actively engage in and expand its terrain – or their power and choices become more and more constrained by powerful and vested elites’.

First they came for Papandreou - and I didn't speak out because I thought the Greeks are just lazy tax-dodgers.

Then they came for Berlusconi - and I didn't speak out because I thought he was just a racist and sexist old roué.

Then they came for Zuma - and I didn't speak out because he can’t apply his mind, and he’s still running the show.

Then they took away my vote - and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?
By NICHOLAS K. PEART

WHEN I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.

One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk.

Less than two years later, in the spring of 2008, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped and frisked me, again. And for no apparent reason. This time I was leaving my grandmother’s home in Flatbush, Brooklyn; a squad car passed me as I walked down East 49th Street to the bus stop. The car backed up. Three officers jumped out. Not again. The officers ordered me to stand, hands against a garage door, fished my wallet out of my pocket and looked at my ID. Then they let me go.

I was stopped again in September of 2010. This time I was just walking home from the gym. It was the same routine: I was stopped, frisked, searched, ID’d and let go.

These experiences changed the way I felt about the police. After the third incident I worried when police cars drove by; I was afraid I would be stopped and searched or that something worse would happen. I dress better if I go downtown. I don’t hang out with friends outside my neighborhood in Harlem as much as I used to. Essentially, I incorporated into my daily life the sense that I might find myself up against a wall or on the ground with an officer’s gun at my head. For a black man in his 20s like me, it’s just a fact of life in New York.

Here are a few other facts: last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague “furtive movements” as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means. These stops are part of a larger, more widespread problem — a racially discriminatory system of stop-and-frisk in the N.Y.P.D. The police use the excuse that they’re fighting crime to continue the practice, but no one has ever actually proved that it reduces crime or makes the city safer. Those of us who live in the neighborhoods where stop-and-frisks are a basic fact of daily life don’t feel safer as a result. ...

Some of his football coaches, hired to lead an all-white team decades ago, expressed little regret about the school’s past.

“Things changed. Not for the better. Not for the worse. They just changed,” says Walter Addleman, who has coached the team for more than 30 years....

“We were defending people’s right to educate the races differently,” J. Barrye Wall told a historian in 1979. “We lost in court — the South lost — but it’s still not settled.”

“We’re goddamned if we’re going to tell everyone that we were hypocrites all those years,” Fuqua’s attorney, George Leonard, said at a federal court hearing in 1978. “Fundamentally, we believe blacks deserve a different type of education than whites.”

In 1981, school headmaster Robert T. Redd told a historian: “Most blacks simply do not have the ability to do quality schoolwork.”

Fuqua School looks to African American football star to shatter racist legacy
By Kevin Sieff, Published: December 11

FARMVILLE, Va. — Nearly 50 years after it opened as a sanctuary for white students in a county that resisted school desegregation to the very end, the Fuqua School wanted badly to prove its racist days were over.

The private school in this town on the banks of the Appomattox River accepted its first black student in the late 1980s. But the black community here still knew Fuqua as central Virginia’s most famous “segregation academy.”

It was still viewed, well into the 21st century, as a symbol of defiance to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. It was still seen as a place where black students were unwelcome.

To shed that image, Fuqua needed a black student ambassador.

So in 2008 the school’s president, Ruth Murphy, sat down with Charles Williams, a freshman from the local public high school. Football coaches had arranged the meeting. Williams happened to be a quarterback with a powerful throwing arm who could burst through tacklers. He was faster and stronger than boys years older.

The two met in Murphy’s office and considered each other.

“All I’d heard was that this was the ‘white school,’ ” Williams recalled. “I was from the ‘black school.’ I didn’t really know what to do or how to act.”

Murphy, a sparrow of a woman, also felt a bit unsure. “Here was this big strong guy. He was only 14, but he looked like a 25-year-old drug dealer,” she recalled in an interview. When asked later what she meant by that description, Murphy acknowledged that it was a poor choice of words but said that she meant to convey his “maturity and intensity.”

Murphy laid out her offer. Williams could receive Fuqua’s first full minority scholarship, covering the $7,300 tuition. But there was a condition: He would have to promote Fuqua among Farmville’s black residents.

Being There to See—With the Challenge of Being Heard
By Simeon Booker

A Freedom Rider bus was firebombed near Anniston, Alabama in 1961. Photo by The Associated Press.

Some of the 13,000 blacks at the Mississippi voting rights rally on April 29, 1955 probably knew the Rev. George W. Lee was taking a risk when he compared the Delta to hell, telling them to pray they would make it through alive. Lee was from Belzoni, where whites had a particularly bad reputation for dealing with blacks who didn't "know their place." But he was not the only speaker whose rhetoric fired up the largest voting rights rally ever held in the South—and the first since the Supreme Court, one year earlier, had declared segregated schools unconstitutional. Detroit Congressman Charles Diggs was there, too, under the huge tent in the black township of Mound Bayou, warning that time was "running out" for Jim Crow in Mississippi.

Even though tensions were rising in the South following the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the first of the white Citizens' Councils to organize against it had just sprung up in neighboring Sunflower County, Mississippi, no mainstream press covered the rally. Nor did they cover Lee's gangland-style murder one week later, although it, too, was a first—the first civil rights murder since Brown.

Nothing in my background prepared me for the raw hatred and state-condoned terrorism I encountered on my first forays into the Mississippi Delta on assignment for Jet magazine in the mid-1950's. I learned quickly that for a black reporter to cover a civil rights story in the Deep South and live to tell about it, I had to blend in. I wore old clothes, carried a preacher's Bible on the front seat of my car, and spent nights in the homes of clergymen and undertakers.

Africa and the West in global economy
An interview with Dr Rosetta Codling
Susan Majekodunmi
2011-12-08, Issue 562

Africans in the continent and the diaspora have been exploited for centuries in a sinister globalisation that only benefits the West. In this interview, African-American scholar Rosetta Codling wonders: ‘When will real global trade be realised, where all parties reap the same benefits?’

Rats help each other.

In a simple experiment, researchers at the University of Chicago sought to find out whether a rat would release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could. The answer was yes.

The free rat, often hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater efficiency over time. It would release the other animal even if there wasn’t the payoff of a reunion with it. Astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive — which is a lot to expect of a rat.

The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.

“There is nothing in it for them except for whatever feeling they get from helping another individual,” said Peggy Mason, the neurobiologist who conducted the experiment along with graduate student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and fellow researcher Jean Decety.