South Africa to transfer all mineral rights to the Government

Some people will never learn from history.

mining companies argue that the bill violates property rights

Apparently, they haven't figured out that there are no property rights in a communist mobocracy.

"Don't worry, the Chinese will come in to help them out, in exchange for naval bases. "

ouch. the possible truth hurts.

Yet again the relentless march to dismantle the parliamentary democracies of Southern Africa continues. The whole area is toast.

The problem with Africa is they simply don't learn period. An entire continent basically non-productive. The state of California probably grows more food and creates more wealth than the entire African continent.

I don't guess it would do any good to sing a few verses of 'Give me hope Joanna' Mugabe's way?

That's the beginning of the end for South Africa if they sign that into law. I suppose it's been the beginning of the end for a few years now- but this just puts an official stamp on it. I hate to see it. Sub Saharan Africa will be a chaotic shambles soon (as if it isn't now). But at least before people always had South Africa to flee to when it got bad. They'll have to flee the continent altogether when South Africa falls.

Even the preacher who works for Jesus
The archbishop who's a peaceful man
together say that the freedom fighters
will overcome the very strong.

I wanna know if you're blind Joanna
if you want to hear the sound of drums
Can't you see that the tide is turning
Don't make we wait till the mourning comes

Give me hope Joanna...

I suppose they got what they wanted...</jaded cynicism>

Mugabe = Mbeki (jeesh- time to go to bed)

Nationalization?

Theft by any other name.

The chinese are spooking me. At this rate, they will run the world in 2 decades.

Yair.

Right.

The abjectly-corrupt, invading, colonizing, mass-mudering mob of 250 psychopathological, thieving, lying, looting gangster bastards that calls itself "china" -- and which has never been able to get over the fact [And never will!] that not long ago a handfull of Englishmen in a few wooden ships at the end of a ten thousand miles long supply line took on one of its predessor gangs and whipped its arse -- nor in all of its much-vaunted '5000 years of "civilization"' create, innovate, produce and/or manufacture a single desirable good or service -- nor could successfully invade the paltry 22 million population FRee Republic of China -- nore could lift its much vaunted 1.3 billion population from the middle age squalor in which it subsists -- nor could quit the more than 2 million square kilometres of other peoples' country it brutally occupies and colonises -- nor can resist murdering thousands of its brualized subjects every year -- nor robbing them through the years of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars -- nor stop its hero Mao Tze Tung brutally raping hundreds of small girls -- will soon run the world?

Like Hell, it will.

Twenty billion slaves will not defeat Our Beloved FRaternal Republic -- Our NATION of FRee Men!

Those slaves, as you call them, work their tails off. A dictator of a nation of such emmense size and productivity could wield an incredible hammer. Nothing to sneeze at, I would say.

This worked so well for the Mexicans!

But the Minerals and Energy Minister, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, told the BBC the bill "will help attract more investment to South Africa because it will create more opportunities on a more level playing field".

This kind of stupidity can't be taught. South Africa...the giant flushing sound.

BTTT

And they're yammering for millions in foreign aid. Until they reform themselves, all aid to Africa is like flushing dollar bills down the toilet.

But will the Chinese keep any "African aboriginals" around after they colonize the continent?

The damn fools will eventually starve themselves to death, at this rate.

That's the plan.

<< Those slaves ..... work their tails off. >>

Those slaves -- and regardless of whether it's OK with you, I will continue to call them what they are and leave the fantasies and lunatic projections to others -- had better work their bloody tails off or; in the medieval squalor in which more than 99.999% of them are forced to subsist; the miserable bastards would starve to death.

And or be mass murdered by their owners whose body count already exceeds ninety millions and is still rising.

Want a real analogy in place of your projected fantasy?

Have a bit of a think about why four hundred million Arab nazis cannot dislodge and/or even seriously inconvenience six million Israelis.

And then revisit your suggestion that 1.3 billion Hoo Flung Dung slaves will ever line the Ohio's banks and have a drink.

Ain't never gunna happen, Bucko.

And here's some more food for thought:

Book Review by John Derbyshire
Navigate up

Journalism
The Washington Times
April 14th, 2002
Dream On

The China Dream
By Joe Studwell
Atlantic Monthly Press; 360 pp. $27

The dream of Joe Studwell’s title is the dream of the China market: of 1.3 billion consumers just waiting to be sold clothes, medicine, cars, toothpaste, or whatever else the dreamer has to offer. As an English writer of the 1840s put it: “If we could only persuade every person in China to lengthen his shirttail by a foot, we could keep the mills of Lancashire working round the clock.” The dream has been dreamed by many westerners across many centuries. For a very few — the opium merchants of the 19th century, the fast-food franchisers of our own time — it has actually come true. Much, much more often, it has proved to be only a dream, the waking from which has sometimes been abrupt and unpleasant.

In recent years there have been three cycles of dreaming and waking for foreign businessmen eager to tap into the China market. The first cycle began in the early 1980s, after a 50-year period when dreaming about China was out of fashion altogether. With the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping’s faction following Mao’s death, it became clear that the fantasy economics of the Mao period had definitely been abandoned. So far as industry was concerned, they had mostly been abandoned in favor of the kind of incentivized state socialism attempted in Eastern Europe twenty years before. This was not much noticed, however. What was noticed was Deng’s maxim “to get rich is glorious,” and the revitalization of Chinese agriculture that followed the retreat from collective farming, and the surge in disposable incomes among urban Chinese from a Mao-era base very close to zero. Western businessmen, dreaming the dream, poured in to set up “joint ventures” with Chinese partners. The massacres of June 1989 are a convenient punctuation mark for the end of this first dream cycle. Many businessmen had already woken even before that, though; the book Beijing Jeep, published earlier that same year, told the dismal story of a typical “joint venture” fiasco.

The atmosphere of widespread state terror that followed the massacres offered a splendid opportunity for the Chinese government to administer some unpleasant medicine to an overheated economy. When this had been done to the leadership’s satisfaction, Deng started the second cycle of dreaming with his famous “southern tour” of early 1992, in which he urged his countrymen to go for maximum economicgrowth. Following the massacres it was clear that the Communist Party had no intention of going away; but it seemed, from Deng’s 1992 speeches, that it might be willing to leave the economy alone. This all happened just as the rising fad for “globalization” was seizing the attention of western business people. Once again, the dream took flight.

The actual experience of western business in China during the 1990s was closely watched by Joe Studwell, a writer on business and economics — he is founder and editor-in-chief of the excellent China Economic Quarterly — who lived in China for the entire decade. He saw the 1990s flood of dreamers arrive, bright-eyed and eager to engage this new, busy China. He watched the bright eyes glaze over as the reality of China gradually revealed itself to them. Signed agreements and “memoranda of understanding” turned out to be worthless; court rulings were not enforced; state-owned enterprises were exempt from costly environmental regulations; expensive licenses, processed by lackadaisical bureaucrats, were required at everyturn; counterfeiting and abuse of intellectual property rights were rampant; the early-1990s purchasing-power models for the disposable income of the Chinese turned out to be too optimistic; ad hoc technical standards were used to impede trade; local management personnel were scarce, and of poor quality. As difficulties multiplied, the dream faded.

Then, in December last year, China’s accession to the World Trade Organization became official. As this author points out:
The government committed to the WTO from a position of weakness, not strength, because of quiet desperation, not unified political resolve. It reached for an outside force to do a job it was failing to do itself — the deregulation and de-bureaucratization of China’s economy.

WTO accession arrived just as serious disillusion was setting in among foreign investors in China. There are signs that it has initiated a third cycle of dreaming. Certainly the Chinese government hopes this is so. Knowing that they cannot solve their country’s economic problems without making political reforms they are unwilling to contemplate, China’s communists hope that the standards implicit in WTO membership, and the compulsory procedures for resolving disputes between members, will, all by themselves, force China’s domestic economy to shape up. Joe Studwell shows convincingly why this is unlikely to happen.

The China Dream will inevitably be compared with last fall’s book on the same topic, Gordon Chang’s The Coming Collapse of China (which I reviewed in these pages 8/12/01). Studwell’s book is lighter on cultural insights than Chang’s, but better organized and richer in hard economic facts. He notes, and abundantly documents, such large and intractable truths as the following:
* For all the talk of reform, of retreat from socialism, of the unleashing of the energies of the Chinese people, and so on, government payrolls increased all through the 1980s and 1990s.

* From being debt-free in 1979, China is now saddled with liabilities that will soon make her the world’s most indebted nation.

* “Given the state’s determination to micromanage economic activity, there [is] almost no strictly legal way for foreign investors to make money.”

Studwell offers two possibilities for China’s near future: a long period of stagnation and low growth like the one Japan has been enduring, or a major fiscal crisis, with runs on the banks followed by Latin-American levels of instability and social disorder. He notes that neither scenario offers a very exact analogy to China: a stagnant debt-crushed economy with a per capita GNP of $25K per annum is not the same thing as one with $1K per annum, and Argentina has never had either Chinese levels of social and political control or modern China’s imperial responsibilities and hegemonic ambitions.

The author’s advice to foreign investors is to use the country as a manufacturing base for exports (if you can squeeze in among all the overseas-Chinese doing exactly that), but to engage in the domestic market only with utmost caution. It sounds right to me, though given the violence of regime change in China, and the xenophobic outbursts that traditionally accompany such change, I would add one more thing: keep a suitcase packed and ready under your bed at all times.

I lived in Africa for some time. The people are wonderful. The governments are dictatorial, corrupt and hardly concerned about the welfare of their peoples. Those governments have made an entire mess of the continent - after which they blame the West for their problems. Nothing will change until ordinary Africans demand such - as Americans did in the late 1700s.

I ran across this item from a lefty site called "One World.org". Check out the wording these people use- terms like "landless peoples" and this ominous passage:

...white farmers who continue to occupy 85 percent of the country's land to prevent poor black and landless people from exercising their rights to land, life, justice and dignity...

6/6/2002
National Land Committee and Landless People's Movement Press Statement

"Ermelo Six walk free.but apartheid remains in Ermelo"

The National Land Committee - a national network of 10 land rights civil society organisations working with poor and landless communities struggling to access land reform across South Africa - and the Landless People's Movement - an independent national movement of landless people demanding land reform - celebrate the freedom of the Ermelo Six following the State's dismissal of charges yesterday, but demand the urgent transformation of the apartheid rural injustice system that remains the order of Ermelo.

The Ermelo Six - including four LPM leaders and two NLC land activists - were among 100 people illegally arrested on 26 April, 2002 after the conclusion of a peaceful and legitimate march to the Department of Land Affairs to demand land and the transformation of the rural injustice system. The protesters were charged en masse with "illegal march and illegal gathering", despite having complied with the administrative requirements associated with the Constitutional right to Freedom of Assembly. Within an hour, the Ermelo Magistrate's Court had dismissed the charges against all but six of those arrested.

Yesterday, the State finally withdrew its charges against the remaining six, admitting that it had no case against the accused. In so doing, the State has implied its acceptance of the principle that the exercise of the fundamental Constitutional right to Freedom of Assembly as defined by the Regulation of Gatherings Act 205 of 1993 requires no more than the administrative notification of the relevant authorities - in other words that protesters are not required to obtain "permission" to exercise their right. This implied admission is an important victory for all South Africans attempting to exercise their right to protest in a democratic context but faced with apartheid-era interpretations of this right by police and other officials.

The NLC and LPM welcome the State's decision, but condemn the ignorant and racist abuse of power by the rural injustice system which allowed the arrests to be effected and the case to be pursued. The Ermelo Six travelled long distances to appear in court three times on these malicious charges, but were never even asked to plead before the charges were dismissed - making the case a clear attempt by the Ermelo rural injustice system to impose a burden on those daring to challenge the apartheid order in the town.

Racist utterances by the handful of white police who effectively run the Ermelo police station - despite the presence of a black station commander - and one prosecutor's decision to proceed with the case simply because the accused "knew too much about their rights" are just some of the indicators of the lack of transformation in this microcosm of rural South Africa.

Apartheid still lives in Ermelo - and throughout rural South Africa - as police, army commandos, prosecutors and magistrates conspire with the 60,000 white farmers who continue to occupy 85% of the country's land to prevent poor black and landless people from exercising their rights to land, life, justice and dignity.

The NLC and LPM demand the immediate resolution of the demands made by the landless people arrested in Ermelo on the 26 April. They are:

1) That every land claimant in our march receives individual attention today from the Ermelo DLA office, including the opening of our files and an immediate response on the status of each of our claims;

2) That the government must take back the land that is unused, underutilized, and unproductive; as well as the land of abusive, indebted or absentee land owners. If the government does not do this, we will have to do it ourselves. If the government does not know where such land is, they can ask us and we will gladly tell them;

3) That the government must specifically take back the land which has been turned into game reserves - and from which people have been evicted to make way for animals - because this land is unproductive;

4) That the government must immediately stop all evictions and make all evictions illegal (impose a moratorium on evictions) until a proper Land Summit is held as agreed to in Durban in November 2001 at the Land Tenure Conference;

5) That the United Nations launches an investigation into gross human rights violations on farms in our region in particular and across South Africa as a follow up to the Human Rights Watch report of 2001;

6) That the laws affecting landless people, including the Extension of Security of Tenure Act, the Land Reform (Labour Tenants) Act and the property rights clause of the Constitution are urgently reviewed in consultation with the landless. This review cannot be done by bureaucrats in Pretoria - the government must come down to the people to find out what is needed;

7) That the commando system inherited from apartheid is immediately abolished and private security companies replaced by a fair and effective police service which serves the whole community - not just the white farmers;

8) That Operation Gijimatsotsi must be replaced by an investigation of farm abuses by the Scorpions who have the power to investigate the role of the police and to take back the property of criminal farm abusers;

9) That the Department of Land Affairs must take responsibility for ensuring that our demands are met, including those demands that involve other departments, in terms of the principle of "cooperative governance".

ISSUED BY: The National Land Committee and Landless People's Movement on 6 June, 2002