David Craig, on January 29th, 2020(Wednesday/ Thursday blog)
I’ve got some great news. There are no poor countries in the world. There are no countries which do not have sufficient natural resources and agricultural land to feed and house their people and to build schools, universities, hospitals, power plants, roads and all the other stuff a country needs to give its people a decent standard of living.
This means we can stop all foreign aid immediately. There isn’t a single country which needs it. That will save Britain over £13bn a year – £433 a year for every taxpayer. That’s got to be good news.
Though there is one smallish problem. Although every country has the resources to give its people a decent standard of living, unfortunately in over 100 countries most of those resources are being looted by a tiny elite leaving over 90% of the people living in excrement-covered poverty.
There are many ways these elites are looting their countries. But here let’s look at three of the most commonly-used and most lucrative.
“The Africa Special”
I’ve called this one “The Africa Special” as it’s probably most commonly used in Africa, though a few of the ‘Stans also seem to like it.
It’s pretty simple. The president’s son or one of the president’s cronies decides he would like to buy a few more luxury properties in London, Florida or New York or perhaps buy a couple of sports teams or a luxury yacht that’s for sale. He rings up the governor of the country’s central bank and asks if there’s any money.
“I’m afraid not,” the bank governor replies, “the president took all we had – over $500m – last week.”
“That’s not the answer I wanted,” warns the president’s son or close crony.
“But it’s ok,” the bank governor says in fear, “tomorrow we have around $300m in foreign aid arriving to build a hospital, 6 clinics and 4 schools.”
“That’s better,” says the president’s son or close crony, “when it comes, move it to my Cayman Islands bank account.”
The money gets moved, there’s nothing left to build the hospital or clinics or schools and the aid donors keep very quiet indeed about what has happened as they wouldn’t want ordinary Western taxpayers to find out how the billions they pay to help poorer countries are looted. And anyway, it would be waaaccciiisssttt to expose this form of theft.
“The Oligarch”
I’ve named this one “The Oligarch”. It’s found throughout Africa but also in Russia and all the former countries of the Soviet Union, especially the thoroughly rotten Ukraine.
The classic situation is that when the country was socialist, all its main resources – mines, oil fields, agricultural land, power plants, etc etc – belonged to the state (supposedly the people). When the country breaks away from socialism, somehow all these resources mysteriously become owned by a very small group of oligarchs usually using obscure offshore companies to hide their ownership. The oligarchs rapidly become immensely wealthy – billionaires or multi-billionaires.
Moreover, some oligarchs are granted monopolies on things like imported medicines, imported food, imported raw materials. They then use their monopolistic control to push up prices and, yippee, they become billionaires too.
The vast amounts of money these oligarchs strip from their countries is quickly shifted into offshore bank accounts just in case there’s a change in regime and any attempt to recover the stolen tens or hundreds of billions.
“The Bob the Builder”
I’ve called this little trick “The Bob the Builder”. Here, instead of our money being looted directly, some attempt is made to build whatever the money was intended for. This is usually because so much of our aid money has been looted in the past that the donor countries are demanding some visible and tangible results.
A country gets a few hundred million to build a hospital, some clinics, some schools, a power plant and access roads. The recipient government puts the work out to tender and invites three companies to put in bids. Three bids are received – one for say $95m, one for say $110m and one for $200m. The committee reviewing the three bids diligently assesses which provides the best value for the donors’ money and naturally chooses the bid for $200m as the company which put in this bid is owned by a Cayman Islands company which is owned by a Liechtenstein Company which is owned by a Panamanian Company which is owned by the president’s son.
The winning company gets to work demanding a first payment of $50m to buy materials and equipment. Around $30m of that is immediately transferred to one one the president’s son’s many offshore bank accounts. Nevertheless, the work starts and the foundations for the buildings are laid. But as the winning company has no incentive to do proper work, the foundations are made with cheap sub-standard concrete, old rusted iron reinforcements and, to save money, are not deep and solid enough.
Next walls and a couple of floors are installed. But as the foundations are not strong enough, the walls start cracking and work has to stop as the walls would be unable to support a roof. The winning company then demands another $50m to continue the work. Another $30m is sent off to the president’s son’s bank accounts. But the rainy season has arrived and the heavy rains wash away much of the soil under the inadequate foundations.
As for the access roads – instead of being properly constructed, some tarmac is laid onto the dirt tracks that were originally there, the rains come, the soil under the tarmac is washed away and the roads collapse.
Let’s not forget the power plant. This is actually built, the generators are installed and are soon working. But nobody thinks about maintenance. So, within a few months the generators have all broken down and nobody can work out how to repair them. A few months later some enterprising locals break into the building and start dismantling everything there to sell for scrap metal.
Conclusion
You do not cure an alcoholic by giving them ever more alcohol to drink.
Likewise you do not stop a kleptocracy by giving it ever more money to steal.
It’s time to stop all foreign aid, stop all donations to any charities working in Third-World countries and it’s time to deal with the real issue – the mass looting of more than 100 countries by the thieves and robbers who have seized power.
Category: 
Superb David but, I fear, all too horrifyingly accurate
Sorry, I forgot to add ‘but we mustn’t forget the Biden Method’
The ‘Biden Method’ as you ca;l it is actually just what I call ‘The Oligarch’. Some (IMHO) utterly corrupt Ukrainian oligarch got control of some (or all?) of Ukraine’s gas production and bought political protection by stuffing the pockets of Joe Biden’s son (Hunter Biden) with some of the money he had stolen from his country
As if the natives haven’t already got insurmountable problems with their own leaders, seems soon they will all be wallowing up to their necks in sh*t!
(Mind you, advanced societies like in some Californian cities have a similar problem as they’ve opened their state to millions of illegal’s apart from additional millions of homeless.)
This from AP last year:
As Africa faces a population boom unmatched anywhere in the world, millions of people are moving to fast-growing cities while decades-old public facilities crumble under the pressure.
Sewage is a scourge for residents of this community on the outskirts of Uganda’s capital, Kampala. There are no public toilets for some 1,200 people. Mud tinged with feces washes into homes during heavy rains.
The sanitation crisis echoes that of cities across the developing world. Some 2.5 billion people, most of them in Africa or Asia, lack access to an adequate toilet, United Nations figures show. Governments are increasingly depending on private businesses and philanthropic groups to help manage human waste in cities that were never planned to handle so many people.
One of the fastest-growing cities in the world, Kampala is home to at least 1.5 million people but authorities say over 3 million pass through daily, usually for work. Yet there are fewer than 800 pay toilets and only 14 free ones, many of them dilapidated with walls often smeared with feces.
Many people rush to malls to relieve themselves. Even in the buildings of government agencies the toilets are often kept under lock and key, apparently to discourage intruders.
Kampala’s urban sewer system covers less than 10 percent of the population, authorities say. When pit latrines and septic tanks are not safely built, they pose a serious health risk. They leak fecal waste that contaminates swamps and Lake Victoria, the city’s main water source, especially during the rainy season.
In Nairobi occupants of the huge squatter camp surrounding the city defecate into a plastic bag and throw it as far as possible It lands, of course in the next cluster of shacks. Some years ago the bbc hosted a documentary in Nairobi, the cruelty amazing – a poor father had to bribe contractors to get a days work to pay more bribes at a broken down clinic to get treatment for his sick child. I doubt we will get any sensible decisions from this government The blond bombshell has failed his first test by allowing Huawei’s ‘limited’ access to the health damaging 5G.
I don’t agree with your initial remarks.The UK does not have enough natural resources and I doubt we could feed ourselves. We had the natural resources in Victorian times – coal and iron. But now we do not have the materials we need without importing them. We still have coal reserves but they are now effectively locked in the ground. We failed to develop a viable nuclear industry and would have to import the fuel but now we have to buy the technology. Imports of materials and food have to be paid for by our exports. One look at our trade balance since the last war tells a story of a failing country. The National Debt confirms this failure.
Our own government is just as corrupt as the Africans, but they are subtle about it. Our democracy is a complete sham. It is a means to exercise control over us and it is effectively a slow means of achieving a totalitarian Marxist state. Only Thatcher saw this problem, but even she did not see the threats to freedom that the UN and EU have created. Boris is no different to Blair. He has bought votes with the promise of spending money he hasn’t got and when it is spent we will see no benefit. The money will go into the pockets of the rich. Our government has introduced energy policies and carbon taxes that are making energy unaffordable to households and businesses. It has destroyed the competitive energy market which is now worse than under nationalisation since the government now dictates the plant to be built and the price of energy, through regulation and taxation. The money goes to the rich and we now have an unaffordable and increasingly unreliable national grid system. There was a large failure last August and there will be more. Germany and Denmark have the most expenditure energy in Europe making them more and more uncompetitive and this is entirely because of the farcical belief in a climate crisis.
The western governments have created an unstable financial system by giving banks the means to print worthless fiat money. The west has experienced financial crashes and it is always the taxpayers who bail out the system
I suspect that the West wants to keep Africa where it is. It does have the natural resources and could feed itself. The Africans need education and help in overthrowing their dictators. If they did they could develop a successful and competitive economy. Neither western governments or businesses want the competition and aid ensures that nothing changes in Africa. The Chinese are investing in mining to save their own reserves but they are doing nothing for the Africans, since they don’t want competition either.
I doubt Africans can ever develop a successful and competitive economy.
From ScienceDirect:
Wicherts, Dolan, and van der Maas (2009) contend that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is about 80. A critical evaluation of the studies presented by WDM shows that many of these are based on unrepresentative elite samples. We show that studies of 29 acceptably representative samples on tests other than the Progressive Matrices give a sub-Saharan Africa IQ of 69; studies of the most satisfactory representative samples on the Standard Progressive Matrices give an IQ of 66; studies of 23 acceptably representative samples on the Colored Progressive Matrices give an IQ of 71. The international studies of mathematics, science, and reading give a sub-Saharan African IQ of 66. The four data sets can be averaged to give an IQ of 68 as the best reading of the IQ in sub-Saharan Africa.
Of course maybe as some black politician said:
“Our lack of progress can all be easily blamed on colonialism and white supremacy. Before the white man came and destroyed their advanced civilizations, sub-Saharan Africans were so smart that they didn’t even need things such as written languages and technology.”
William, I’m am not inclined to write off an entire continent on the basis of IQ tests. Look what Mugabe did to destroy his country. You can argue that the white farmers were an important factor but people were not starving and living in fear. It takes time to make advances as we have seen in China but it is not going to happen with the corrupt African leaders. Western investment in China was a very important factor but nobody is going to invest in Africa because they will lose everything.
Returning to IQ, what has it done for the west? There must be billions of people who now believe we can control the climate and it will turn the west into a basket case if it continues. This is mass insanity and the UN is at the centre of it. It should be doing everything to ensure the entire world population has a good standard of living and this is achieved through wealth creation, and only wealth for all and protecting it for future generations will ensure peace. Politicians like poverty because it gives them control over us.
We live in a global economy and there will be problems if some countries are isolated. Africans should be moving to a better existence, as should Iran, Iraq etc. The differences in living standards in the UK should also be a concern and we do not have an answer to that. Political slogans like “northern power house” achieve nothing. We need wealth creators and all we have in the UK is governments who encourage state dependence and Boris has been elected on that basis. The economist Thomas Sowell when asked about how wealth is created has said governments should keep out of it, which is of course what happened in Victorian times and in the USA in the past.
You book “The Great University Con” adds another dimension to the corruption taking place in this country and the USA.
The liberal globalists have dumbed-down education, obviously in order to draw in immigrants, which is obviously aimed at weakening the nation state and destroying unique cultures.
Obviously no nation, such as the UK, that is mostly dependent on its people for its prosperity and well-being would ever even consider dumbing-down its education system.
When I was in school in the 60s and early 70s, great efforts were being made in the UK to keep us up to or ahead of the standard of education in the USSR. China had not yet been tooled up by the USA in order to benefit from the cheap labour and did not feature in those fears.
But now we need the highest standard of education mostly in order to be able to compete with the Chinese.
However, our education system has been devalued to such an extent that howls of outrage and riots are bound to greet any attempt to reverse that woeful state of affairs from the students conned into believing in their academic abilities, who should never have made it into university in the first place.
Moral of the story: it is usually far, far, far easier to establish a great confidence trick that it is to get out of its grip.
Here is an excellent discussion on our own decadence. Two hours long, all of it is well-worth watching, in my opinion. The results of psychometric research done into determining what type of people are hard-wired to be politically correct told me why the liberal globalists are engaged in feminising as much as possible of the West.
Modern Times: Camille Paglia & Jordan B. Peterson –
“PC is sucking the vitality out of our culture.”