Subject: Pambazuka News 800: After Trump: Defying neoliberalism and impunity
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Thursday, November 24, 2016
USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pambazuka News 800: After Trump: Defying neoliberalism and impunity
Much of the whining about the American working class falling victim to neoliberal globalization is rooted in American exceptionalism. Everyone else has supposedly reaped a windfall from neoliberal free trade. It is a narrative with very little sympathy for, or solidarity with, the victims of globalization around the world - particularly in Africa.
Trump's success means mass deportation, massive military spending, continuation and escalation of global war, a conservative Supreme Court, a justice department and security system dedicated to growing the Bush/Obama-era surveillance state and waging war on activists; fiscal policies that will accelerate income inequality; massive cuts in social spending, and a lot more. Concrete strategies for popular organizing are needed to resist this. 
The US electoral system shows a profound disjuncture between law and legitimacy. A system that so disenfranchises the masses of Americans is illegitimate. Democratic elections must be based on the popular vote.
Between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, evidence shows clearly that it is Clinton who is the imperialist ideologist. Despite denials by the West, imperialism is an existential reality of our time. In the last three decades or so, it has existed as free trade globalization. Imperialism will persist under Trump.
The fact of the matter is that all US presidents are one and the same, irrespective of whether they are Democrats or Republicans. They follow US foreign policy hook, line and sinker. As some of their leaders said, the US has interests, not friends. To them, this world is about a fight for resources, not about benevolence.
Large amounts of the money raised globally by Bill Clinton after the earthquake, and pledged by the U.S. under Hillary Clinton, simply disappeared without a trace, its whereabouts unknown. A whopping $465 million of the relief money went through the Pentagon, which spent it on deployment of 20,000 U.S. troops, many of whom never set foot on Haitian soil. What the Clintons did to Haiti was callous, selfish and indefensible.
If it boggles the mind that a bigoted politician spewing hatred, misogyny and division could win the American Presidency, what does one make of a justice system that grants freedom to the murderers of an elderly woman who allegedly blasphemed Islam? Nigeria is busy destroying the very thin fabric that holds it together.
Despite his thoroughly professorial lifestyle, Sam was a lively figure who always made time for his family and a broad range of people. His immense contribution to scholarship, particularly on the thorny land question in Zimbabwe, remains outstanding. His tragic death following a road crash last year points to the fragility of life and to the need for Africa to celebrate its scholars while alive.
Mild-mannered and almost self-effacing, the son of the renowned Nigerian environmentalist was yet the owner of a sharp intellect that was not afraid to adopt and keep positions that seemed right to him. What the rest of the world thought was not that relevant to him.
Morocco this week stormed out of the Africa-Arab Summit in Equatorial Guinea to protest the presence of Western Sahara, which it has forcefully and illegally occupied for over 40 years. This incident yet again demonstrates Morocco's hidden agenda in seeking re-admission to the African Union: to use the continental body to deny the Saharawi people their universally recognized right to self-determination.
Tax evasion merits serious attention and global efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. But there is a clear lack of willingness by the beneficiaries to support such efforts. A resolution on tax evasion and the need to return the stolen assets to the so-called "developing" countries was adopted at the UN Council of Human Rights on 24 March 2016. No European state voted in favour.
The artistic rebirth of Anta Diop indicates Adé Olufeko's attempts to pull the astute figure from the grasps of academic dialogue and fringes of mainstream journalism, and place him within the consciousness of everyday people, most of who crave objective enlightenment on African discourses.
The 15th Session of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute is going at The Hague, the seat of the International Criminal Court. A network of civil society organisations in Kenya delivered the following statement to the Assembly:
In the past one-and-half years President Buhari has rolled out, on many occasions, the full strength of his country's security forces to violently suppress the peaceful nonviolent Biafran independence movement. Now, the Buhari regime is working with foreign governments to crush pro-Biafra activism in the Diaspora.
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