Poem by Sam Hamod: For Our Children

The Obamas in Africa at the Door of No Return

For Our Children

why is it easier

to spill the blood

of a Pakistani or Wazirstani child,

without tears, but with

pride, while

shedding tears, words of sorrow and anger

for a child killed in Newtown, USA

why should there  be blood

of any child spilled

for any reason

by anyone

at any time

why were the children

of Falluajah, in Iraq

smashed in their beds

by firebombing missiles,

jets, tanks

why do the children of Gaza

suffer endless airstrikes

from Israeli planes, burning

their flesh, their blood boiling

as they die, or the bright and shiny

cluster bombs left by the Israelis

in southern Lebanon, so that children

might think of themselves as play

as they exploded in their hands

and what of the wedding parties

in Afghanistan, men, women

and children drone bombed into pieces

because someone was told, he was only

doing his duty, while Obama and Bush

feasted on American beef and pig, even

considering giving these cyberkillers

“medals for combat, “

words on a page

or even protests by the hundreds

of thousands seem to have no effect

when it comes to bombing children,

especially if they are not of your country,

at least not in the minds

or hearts of  Bush, Obama, Truman or Churchill,

they have tears, as do the millions in America

and England only when it’s their children--

somehow

someone forgot to mention to them

that all children, are the children

of all of us

their time of innocence

and life is to be preserved, not

destroyed, not burned to death

as they were in Dresden and Cologne,

 in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Waziristan, or Mogadishu,

Fallujah or Basra—with no evidence against them,

having committed no crimes,

with no trial, not even tears from our presidents,

as they award medals to their generals, and

 though they succeed

in killing children, their campaigns fail, but

that is of no matter,  they still crow

as craven ravens of death of how they

have destroyed the enemy,  in each child

but we forget about them in America

they are so far away in space or time

and we hear more about our movie

or singing stars and their philandering lives,

but children have no money or power

at times, at early morning,

I wonder

if there will not be battalions of

ghost children

speaking dozens of languages

who will join hands

spirits

descend upon

Obama, Bush, Clinton, Sharon, Truman, Churchill,

and all their generals of land and air,

and take them away,downward

into another sphere

or will it be the children

of Obama who will someday

realize what their father did

to other children,  while he beamed

at his two young, living and healthy daughters, while

ordering another strike, another strike, another

strike, another strike, and another

without  evidence, without  trial,  just

making his decisions

in his usual vacuum of suspicion, where

like noise, there is no telling if it’s purely noise

or some new type of escape

some pretense of music,  just as the songs

of missiles and drones lull people hypnotically like Cybele,

toward the rocks of their fate,

where someday, they will look

in a mirror

and not believe

the horror they have done

c: sam hamod, 7.3.13

-- 

drsamhamod@gmail.com

dr. sam hamod, editor, www.contemporaryworldliterature.com

                        editor, www.todaysalternativenews.com

China Opens News Bureau in Africa

Beijing – A Chinese official meets African journalists. China presence in the continent is growing.

China has not only out contracted America for Africa's natural resources, but has established a corps of African journalists for its China TV that is providing an alternative news source to Western media that perpetuates the world of make believe that Africa is in darkness, a hopeless basket case, a continent full of disease, ignorance and poverty. In truth, Africa is one of the richest continents in the world and African journalists are showing the positive as well as the negative. --Marvin X

 CCTV Speeds up Overseas Bureau Programs

2010-01-12r 10:23 BJT

Recently, relevant departments under CCTV have collaborated with each other in speeding up the construction of overseas bureau programs. At present, central overseas bureaus in Africa and Latin America have entered the stage of site identification and bureau design and construction are set to start specifically. Overseas bureau programs in the Middle East, Asia-Pacific region and Russia have entered the application and approval procedure and pre-study work including site selection, local employee recruitment, institution registration and legal environment. In addition, CCTV is about to initiate its overseas bureau programs in North Korea, South Korea, Singapore, Pakistan, Indonesia, Spain, Nigeria, Cuba, Argentina, Israel and Iran.

China-Africa media cooperation -- a joint force for truth

BEIJING/NAIROBI, April 22 (Xinhua) -- For more than 150 years, global information has flown in the opposite direction of wealth: The latter is normally from the poor to the rich while the former is evidently the other way round.

For decades, developing countries have fought what appeared to be a losing battle against Western dominance in global information flow. Thanks to the epochal rise of the developing world, a rebalancing is hopefully taking place.

That change is setting the stage for China and Africa to have their voices heard and tell the true stories happening in their parts of the world.

It was against this backdrop that Li Changchun, China's top publicity administrator, sat down at a seminar in Nairobi on Thursday with members of Chinese and African media communities to explore ways of boosting China-African journalistic exchanges.

Although they are geographically far apart, China and Africa have long learned about each other through Western media. However, Western reports did not always reflect the truth, said Li, who is a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

Therefore, it is necessary for the two media communities to establish direct links, the senior Chinese official said.

WESTERN DOMINANCE AND BIAS

Western media outlets have played a dominant role in global information flow and in setting news agendas, thus shaping public opinion on a wide variety of issues, according to a 2009 article published in Qiushi (Seeking Truth), a semimonthly journal of the CPC Central Committee.

Western media organizations, with their vast financial resources, have deployed reporters worldwide to collect information that fits within the framework of Western values, and then disseminated those stories to countries that could not afford to send their own news staff overseas, the journal said.

By monopolizing the global news market, Western media organizations had marginalized voices from the rest of the world. Western media groups produced more than 90 percent of international news stories, it said.

Using their dominant position, Western media outlets tended to project negative images of developing nations such as China and African countries.

Back in 2005, Rwandan President Paul Kagame slammed Western media for portraying Africa as a continent beset with bad governance, civil wars, and other ills while ignoring the positive developments in the region.

Referring to negative Western reports concerning Africa, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo once said some people would describe a glass partially filled with water as "half full" while others with ulterior motives would call it "half empty."

As a matter of fact, Western media organizations have long described Africa as the "dark continent" or the "failed continent," a vast land plagued by war, diseases and corruption.

Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times reporter, won a Pulitzer Prize for his in-depth reports about the crisis in Sudan's Darfur area.

In his writings, Kristof called Africa "the continent where nothing, or almost nothing, works."

Meanwhile, Western journalists rarely have positive views about China. They label China as "neo-colonialist" or an "energy-predator" because of its booming economic ties with Africa.

Yet many Africans do not see things that way. South African President Jacob Zuma said during a visit to China last August that describing China's engagement with Africa as "neo-colonialism" was untruthful.

Pierre Essama Essomba, president of the Media Council of Cameroon, said that past Western colonizers left "nothing good in our country." By contrast, he said, China has helped Cameroon build conference centers, schools, hospitals and highways in the past three decades.

Many people in China and Africa think that the moment has come for their countries to project their own images. And the only possible way to break the Western monopoly, they say, is through China-Africa media cooperation.

King Obama in Africa, Day late, dollar short!

Obama, King of Africa and the World, must see the Door of No Return for his crimes against humanity, along with Chad's Hissene Habre, Haiti's Baby Doc and Guatemala's Rios Montt ! --Marvin X

AFRICA INVESTMENT-Can Obama's Africa Power plan hold a candle to China?

* U.S. $7 billion initiative follows big Chinese projects

* Obama hints U.S. investment will create markets, jobs

By Ed Stoddard

JOHANNESBURG, July 2 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama's $7 billion plan to shine "light where currently there's darkness" in Africa by doubling access to power on the world's poorest continent was billed as a highlight of his African tour.

He announced the Power Africa initiative in Cape Town on Sunday in a speech which he also urged the fast-growing but still troubled region to follow the shining example of South Africa's anti-apartheid hero Nelson Mandela.

But Obama's proposal, which aims to partner U.S. government financing with private sector investment, may look low-wattage compared with China's already ongoing big electricity projects on the world's least-developed - and least lit - continent.

Beijing has been lighting the way in Africa with billions of dollars of promised power investment and projects. As with other infrastructure development opportunities in Africa, Washington seems to be arriving late to the party.

Visiting Africa in March, China's President Xi Jinping renewed an offer of $20 billion in loans to "help African countries turn resource endowment into development strength".

A major chunk of this Chinese money is aimed at connecting up African economies with electricity, from Zambia to Ethiopia.

"The major thrust of the Chinese infrastructure spend in Africa has been in the power sector. It is tens of billions of dollars," said Martyn Davies, the chief executive of Frontier Advisory, a strategy and investment advisory company.

The Asian giant has a huge appetite for African resources from copper to oil and they cannot be extracted without power.

China's Sichuan Hongda Co. Ltd. signed a $3 billion deal with Tanzania in 2011 to mine coal and iron ore and build a 600-megawatt (MW) coal-fired power plant in the country's south. The centrepiece among an array of Chinese power projects in Ethiopia is the $4.1 billion Grand Renaissance Dam.

NOT JUST A MINE, BUT A MARKET

Satellite imagery of "Africa at Night" shows a mostly dark continent, the main exceptions being the region's dominant economy South Africa, the more developed North African Mediterranean coast, and scattered pinpricks of light in the oil-producing Gulf of Guinea, which includes Nigeria.

More than a century after the invention of the light bulb, the World Bank says only one in four people have access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the region will require more than $300 billion in investment to achieve universal electricity access by 2030.

In numbers of projects and investment pledges, China seems well ahead of America at the moment in the race to add more bright spots to Africa's nocturnal gloom. Some Chinese projects, for example a hyro-power project in Ghana that started producing 130 MW a month ago, have already come on line.

Power plants cannot be built overnight and it may take years for similar U.S. initiatives in Africa to be up and running.

This may put America at a disadvantage to China in the scramble for African resources.

But Obama clearly hinted American investment may be better for Africa than Chinese investment in creating industries and jobs on the continent - not just sucking our resources - with more of a focus on a potential consumers' market.

"Our primary interest when it comes to working with Africa on energy issues has to do with how do we power Africa so that it can be an effective market creating jobs and opportunity," Obama told a news conference in South Africa on Saturday.

"We also then have somebody to trade with and sell iPods to, and airplanes, and all kinds of good stuff," he added.

"Obama seemed to be taking more of a Brazilian approach to Africa. A lot of Brazilian policy is looking at what Brazil can sell to the African market," said Alex Vines, head of the Africa Programme at UK-based Chatham House.

Stressing rising oil, natural gas and clean energy production in the United States, Obama told his South African audience: "Frankly, we don't need energy from Africa".

Oil exports from Africa's top producer Nigeria to the United States have fallen from over a million barrels per day (bpd) in 2010 to 383,000 now, the U.S. Energy Information Agency says. Angola's U.S. exports in the same period dropped to 172,000 bpd from 393,000 as the domestic U.S. shale gas boom has taken off.

"THE MORE THE MERRIER"

While he made a point of saying he did not view Beijing's trade and investment surge as a threat to U.S. interests - "the more the merrier" was his take on foreign economic involvement in Africa - Obama could not resist a veiled mild jibe at the way Chinese companies conduct their businesses there.

"If somebody says they want to come build something here, are they hiring African workers? If somebody says that they want to help you develop your natural resources, how much of the money is staying in Africa?" Obama said.

This echoed complaints from some government and business circles in Africa that Chinese companies often bring in their own workforces to develop resource-related infrastructure projects, creating few new jobs, let alone value-adding processing or manufacturing industries.

The U.S. initiative, called Power Africa, will see Washington commit more than $7 billion over the next five years with the stated goal to "double access to power in sub-Saharan Africa," according to the White House. This includes up to $5 billion being made available by the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

Over $9 billion in U.S. private sector investments have also been committed to support development of more than 8,000 MW.

But not everyone was happy. Outspoken American real estate mogul Donald Trump called Obama's Power Africa plan "crazy".

"Every penny of the $7 billion going to Africa as per Obama will be stolen - corruption is rampant! ... We should be concerned about the American worker & invest here," Trump tweeted on his @realDonaldTrump Twitter Account. (Additional reporting by Sureka Asbury and Pascal Fletcher in Johannesburg, Fumbuka Ng'wanakilala in Dar es Salaam, Aaron Maasho in Addis Ababa and Kwasi Kpodo in Accra; Editing by Pascal Fletcher)

Egypt and the process of revolution

Marvin X at memorial for Little Malcolm Shabazz, Oakland CA

photo Reginald James/Courtesy of Shabazz Family

During the 60s, we thought revolution would come overnight, that capitalism and imperialism would be destroyed, that North American Africans would achieve independence and separation into a nation of our own. Of course we were starry eyed idealists, under the cloud of marijuana smoke called romanticism. We had the people, the masses, but we were no match for the power of the USA, and yet we confronted the USA with our pistols and shotguns, fought a valiant and noble fight but were ultimately defeated by the US cointelpro, the US program to undermine and defeat the Black Liberation  movement, although the movement had its own internal contradictions, ideologically and classic psychopathic personalities.

Often we forgot the long struggle that preceded us (chattel slavery, segregation, failed reconstruction, KKK terrorists, civil rights)  ever since we were kidnapped and marched through the Door of No Return. In our romanticism, we just knew Black Power would be successful, not understanding that opportunists were among us, awaiting the moment when they could materially benefit from the struggle for freedom, justice and equality, self determination and nationhood. Of course, we all wanted something from the revolution. As Dr. Hare says, revolution are for something. But some take it to the extreme by being greedy, they want it all for themselves. Our movement was beset with reactionary opportunists who grabbed the money, the jobs, the housing, political positions and other opportunities
to insure the true believers, the struggling masses, foot soldiers never would or could benefit in a substantial way.

Egypt is now enduring the process of revolution, the transformation from slavery to freedom. They may have confused getting rid of Pharaoh Mubarak with immediate freedom and democracy. The opportunists had time to secure their gains, the army, businessmen, those steeped in religiosity, especially the Muslim Brotherhood who had fought the modern phoraohs for decades. Have they had time to secure anything politically and economically, especially with the filthy hands of the USA and Israel playing backfield in motion? Has either side made a truthful effort at political compromise, for we know in politics no one gets everything they want. But when 16 million people march on you, leaders had better pay attention, depart the prayer room to the street and listen. The people may have a truth or two for you!
--Marvin X
7/2/13