Posted on 08/02/2002 8:27:49 AM PDT by dead
Harare: The final obstacle to Robert Mugabe's campaign to be rid of white farmers is crumbling as thousands of farm workers turn against their employers.
Under the President's radical land-reform program, next Thursday has been set as the deadline for most of Zimbabwe's remaining 3000 white commercial farmers to leave their homes or face up to two years in jail.
Tony Tanner, 42, a tobacco farmer 25 kilometres south of Harare, was one of the few untouched by the past 29 months of state-sponsored invasions of white-owned land. Now he has been locked in his homestead for three days by once-loyal workers.
Farmers and workers are in dispute over the level of severance pay as employers depart.
"We have paid millions in legal terminal benefits," Mr Tanner's wife, Debbie-Lyn, said. "But they want more because they say they know the Government will not help them after we leave. They have heard of workers on other farms who have been paid more.
"We can't leave the farm and the police laughed at us and told us to pay the workers. I've got two sick kids and need to get them to the doctor. There is no-one we can turn to for help."
The Tanners are under extreme pressure to pay more in order to complete the grading of the tobacco crop on their 1400-hectare farm for sale at auction, Mrs Tanner said.
At least six of their neighbours in the Bromley farming district have also been prevented from leaving their homes.
Before the disputed presidential election in March, Mr Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party established a rogue union that has led workers' uprisings on farms.
An official from the original union, the General and Agricultural and Plantation Workers' Union, said: "Many farmers don't want to sack workers, but they are forced to.
"They have to pay terminal benefits, determined by the Government, and some have not grown crops for two years and have no money. We try to mediate. Workers know they'll have no jobs next week, and they want as much as they can get now. It's extortion."
Guess who will be the first to blast headlines and show pictures of starving children when the entire economic infrastructure is destroyed.
They will demand that we send aid and military meals on wheels for these parisites too stupid to know they are eating their own!
I say tough - let them eat dirt for a while!
Even those who are still operating will never be allowed to take the crop with them.
If the crop is not siezed by fiat, it will be taken vi et armis.
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What, precisely, does it mean that "Atlas is shrugging??"
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
List Price: $8.99
Pages: 1075
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0451191145
Publisher: Signet
Atlas Shrugged (1957) is a mystery story, Ayn Rand once commented, "not about the murder of man’s body, but about the murder—and rebirth—of man’s spirit." It is the story of a man—the novel’s hero—who says that he will stop the motor of the world, and does. The deterioration of the U.S. accelerates as the story progresses. Factories, farms, shops shut down or go bankrupt in ever larger numbers. Riots break out as food supplies become scarce. Is he, then, a destroyer or the greatest of liberators? Why does he have to fight his battle, not against his enemies but against those who need him most, including the woman, Dagny Taggart, a top railroad executive, whom he passionately loves? What is the world’s motor—and the motive power of every man?
Peopled by larger-than-life heroes and villains, and charged with awesome questions of good and evil, Atlas Shrugged is a novel of tremendous scope. It presents an astounding panorama of human life—from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy (Francisco d’Anconia)—to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction (Hank Rearden)—to the philosopher who becomes a pirate (Ragnar Danneskjold)—to the composer who gives up his career on the night of his triumph (Richard Halley). Dramatizing AR’s complete philosophy, Atlas Shrugged is an intellectual revolution told in the form of an action thriller of violent events—and with a ruthlessly brilliant plot and irresistible suspense.
We do not want to spoil the plot by giving away its secret or its deeper meaning, so as a hint only we will quote here one brief exchange from the novel:
"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater the effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?"
"I…don’t know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"
"To shrug."
I dunno, because it is home and has been for three generations?
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