Bob Geldof: Choice quote from a deranged man

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"Tomorrow 280 million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny . . ."

‘Africa Needs Justice Not Charity’

Britain’s annual contribution to the debt write-off will amount to between $70 million and $96 million, which is much less than the Blair government spends on its occupation of Iraq each year, and just a shade more than the $67.1 million it forks out each year in payments to maintain Queen Betty Windsor and her dysfunctional family.

Washington will need only find between $130 million and $175 million a year, which is almost three times less than it spends each year just to run its Baghdad embassy. The total 10-year cost for the United States is around what Washington will spend to build a new embassy in the Iraqi capital. Washington alone spends $2 billion a month to wage war in Iraq.

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The A.J.S. statement declared: “The costs of structural adjustment programs and creditor-imposed conditionality far outweigh the amount of debt to be cancelled. Are we to cheer when these additional promises can go the same route of other G-8 pledges, i.e. unfulfilled? Should we applaud when the 18 countries affected represent a tiny fraction of the world’s poor? Are we to praise the when these debts are not being serviced in any case (because of the countries’ inability to pay), and when they would have been repudiated a long time ago as illegitimate debts if our governments had real political and economic independence. The illegitimacy of the debt resides in that they were incurred by dictatorships of various kinds, were used in consolidating and furthering their undemocratic regimes against the interests of their people and in implementing policies that have put millions of lives at risk.”

The Southern African People’s Solidarity Network on June 17 bluntly stated: “the so-called debt cancellations … will lead to further accumulation of debts these countries still have to toe the line and respond to demands to open up their economies for more exploitation, capital flight and other related imbalances that come with further liberalization.”

MORE http://www.worldpress.org/Africa/2107.cfm