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Archive for the 'Geo-Politics' Tag
51 post(s) are associated with this Tag
Development Aid: The Investment Banks of the Humanitarian Sector
We had some discussions during the last weeks and a few times we ended up with the same question:
Are there institutions / instruments in the Humanitarian / Non-Profit sector that could be compared to the mess in the banking sector specifically with the Investment banks - a species which in that habitat by today got almost extinct.
And yes we found them.
Created during the last decade on the back of the MDG, many have been installed with targets like deregulation of development funding (yes this did happen - aka budgetary aid aka the thin line along institutionalized corruption), avoidance of regulatory frameworks (e.g. via PPPs), avoidance of multi-national oversight across geo-political blocks (to go around the UN) or to just create the illusion of acting / transparency.
And these organizations share many properties with private sector Investment banks:
Fancy names - most of them answer to names like global, facility, fund, emergency plan. They are almost completely unregulated and their activities are at best opaque…
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USA: Scaring people all the way around
Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart reminds us of the similarity between G.W.Bush’s big bailout speech and his Iraq invasion speech five years ago.
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Corruption: At least USD 13 Billion Iraq Aid wasted or stolen
The Washington Post today (link below) has a very interesting report on fraud, corruption and waste surrounding the U.S. Iraq reconstruction program.
Salam Adhoob, the former chief investigator of the Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity (the equivalent to the U.S. FBI) estimated in a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee yesterday, that out of the about USD 50 Billion U.S. taxpayer money that has so far been disbursed to the Iraq reconstruction program, at least USD 13 Billion have been wasted or stolen through various fraud schemes.
The former chief investigator and head of a 200 strong auditors team was one of three Iraqis testifying before the committee yesterday - all providing evidence of widespread corruption and waste up to the point, as one of them said, that Iraqi government officials are financing al-Qaeda terrorists through some of these schemes.
An additional USD 9 Billion were estimated…
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Animation: Uncle Sam & 911
Interesting animation of Uncle Sam talking to his 9-11 “watch dog” about getting common sense back into life and retiring the “dog” - if it wouldn’t be so fictitious after all…
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Movie: No End in Sight
This is a must see movie for everybody interested in the events surrounding the Iraq crisis and US occupation.
“No End in Sight” by director Charles Ferguson is the winner of the special jury price last year at the Sundance Film Festival and chosen by Stephen Hunter, Washington Post as #1 film of the year 2007. It’s available in full length online via Google Video.
Anybody who believes that nothing of that was known before the “war” should read the…
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Internet warfare: All Georgia Government web sites down
About a month ago the website of Georgia’s President was under a distributed denial of service attack and offline for some time. Based on forensic analysis it became clear that the root of these attacks were to be found in Russia.
Now with a state of war declared as it seems all official Government web sites of Georgia are not responding, not reachable or do not display any content…
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Today: Remember Hiroshima
On this day in 1945 80,000 people were killed instantly and thousands more have died from injuries or illness attributed to the nuclear attacks on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later with the bombing of Nagasaki ten thousands more of mostly civilian population in Japan was killed with the second atomic bomb dropped by the US…
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Sexual assault in the US military
When you are just starting to believe that you have heard all the mind blowing stories about the US military in Iraq, what their contractors do, the enormous corruption and abuse going on at that place and there can’t be anything worse in their closets anymore you see a story like this.
GAO released a report last week and the CNN has written an editorial on the report and the House panel investigating the way the cases are handled. Rep. Jane Harman, D-California said that her “jaw dropped” when she was told that 4 of 10 women serving in the US military have been raped or otherwise sexually harassed by “fellow” US soldiers. And the GAO report indicates that…
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USA: Congratulations on the one Millionth Terrorist
We have “recently reported” that Nobel Price Laureate Nelson Mandela has just - after years of diplomatic quarreling - been removed from the infamous US List of terrorist suspects.
Now this week ACLU is reporting another record related to this “list” - the list has just hit the size of one million records. Put this in relation to numbers reported on various other crimes from burglary to official war crime numbers together with the complete swipe of human / civil rights linked to that list and even a blind man should be able to see that there is something wrong here…
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Video: How fair is fairtrade?
This short video / interview looks at some general aspects of the concept of fair trade and the brand with the same name.
Welcome to a very unfair edition of the Telegraph’s video show “Holy Cows”.
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