We have previously discussed the corrupt regime of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and his globe-trotting wife. So Mugabe and his friends and family have reportedly stolen hundreds of millions (particularly from diamond mining), but they decided to leave $217 in the bank for the rest of the country — that is far more restraint than they have been known for in the past. Now In the meantime, many are celebrating the world’s first female billionaire. She is Isobel Dos Santos. A considerable achievement to be sure until you learn that she is the daughter of Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos, the second longest-serving leader on the continent and like Mugabe has been openly draining the country of wealth for decades for his family and friends.
Zimbabwe’s finance minister Tendai Biti admitted that “[l]ast week when we paid civil servants there was $217 [left] in government coffers.” He then added the most understated observation in history “We are failing to meet our targets.” I would have to agree since a single lemonade stand could double the national finances of Zimbabwe.
President Robert Mugabe is largely responsible for the economic meltdown with his seizure of thousands of white-owned farms without any serious planning or preparation. The result was the gutting of the agricultural foundation of the country. His runaway corruption and lack of economic planning then triggered hyperinflation. In August 2008, inflation reached 11,200,000 percent. The country actually issued Z$100 trillion notes. Throughout this period, the Mugabe family continued to live in grotesque luxury while robbing the country of its resources.
The situation over in Angola is hardly better, but not surprisingly Isabel dos Santos has claimed the title of the world’s first billionaire woman — ignoring outcries over the systematic looting of that equally poor country by her family. The 40-year-old is often referred to as “the princess” in Angola and acquired this wealth through such enterprises as an Angolan bank and control of a cable television company. Her wedding reportedly costs millions with fine wines and food flown in from France. In the meantime, those unfortunate to live under the yoke of her family make an average of $2 a day.
Forbes found that Isabel dos Santos’s shares in several Portuguese firms, including a cable television company and an Angolan bank, put her on the billionaires’ list for the first time. Most of the population in the southern African nation live on about $2 a day. That of course did not stop various “you go girl” stories as people reported that the world’s finally has a billionaire woman.
The continued corruption in these countries raises the continual question of our spending aid that is used to prop up these regimes. These leaders hold their people hostage. If we cut off aid, the people starve. Yet, our aid is used to sustain what are simply criminal enterprises by these families.
Source: Atlantic Wire
Any chance our “good and descent” friends the Swiss might be involved in having some nice juicy bank accounts? Why do we tolerate secret Swiss bank accounts for people like this? There are way too many cases of government officials coming away with $100s of millions on salaries that don’t come anywhere near that amount. But the Swiss are such “good and descent” people. BS. They are collaborators.
That’s why I’m low balling it, Tony. It’s a severe rehab job at this point.
@Gene: Do not forget, when acquiring a company, you acquire its debt and liabilities as well as its assets….
Also, I’d like to offer $500 for the country of Zimbabwe, no questions asked, as is, under the condition the Mugabe and his entire family leave and never come back.
The company we keep
House Democratic leaders are working hard to enact legislation this week to replicate the eavesdropping policies of Russia and Zimbabwe.
By Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday, Jun 17, 2008
http://www.salon.com/2008/06/17/company_2/
Excerpt:
What kind of monsters would spy on their own citizens without warrants even when the law requires warrants, and then not even punish those who broke the law? Russian Communist KGB thugs — that’s who would do such a horrible thing, our State Department complained in 2006. Note, too — as our Congress attempts to legalize warrantless eavesdropping here — that our State Department complained about Russia’s surveillance abuses even though the law there permits such spying “only with judicial permission.”
Finally, in August of 2007, Zimbabwe passed a law allowing its President to eavesdrop on telephone conversations with no warrants — exactly what our Congress is about to do — and this is what opposition leaders in that country said about that new law:
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe on Friday signed into law the controversial Interception of Communications Bill, which gives his government the authority to eavesdrop on phone and Internet communications and read physical mail.
The legislation has drawn outspoken opposition from the political opposition and civil society organizations as trampling on the civil rights of Zimbabweans.
Spokesman Nelson Chamisa of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change faction of Morgan Tsvangirai called it an addition to “the dictator’s tool kit” . . .
Secretary General Welshman Ncube of the MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara called it a “final straw to the curtailment to the liberties of Zimbabweans.”
Human rights lawyer Otto Saki told VOA that the law interferes and undermines the enjoyment of rights enshrined in the constitution and is a sign Mr. Mugabe wants to consolidate his power by “any means necessary or unnecessary.”
But in reply to that uproar, the Mugabe government had what one must admit was a good response:
But Communications Minister Christopher Mushowe said Zimbabwe is not unique in the world in passing such legislation, citing electronic eavesdropping programs in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa, among other countries.
That’s the company Steny Hoyer and the Blue Dogs in Congress are working hard this week to ensure we continue to keep, as they devote themselves to legalizing warrantless eavesdropping and immunizing corporations that broke the law. The details of the campaign to stop that will be posted here shortly.
Yep. Tony C. has it right.
======
Tomgram: William Astore, The Business of America Is Kleptocracy
Posted by William Astore at 4:00pm, April 20, 2010.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175235/william_astore_American_kleptocracy
Excerpts:
Recall, if you care to, those pallets stacked with hundreds of millions of dollars that the Bush administration sent to Iraq and which, Houdini-like, simply disappeared. Think of the ever-rising cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now in excess of a trillion dollars, and just whose pockets are full, thanks to them.
If you want to know the true state of our government and where it’s heading, follow the money (if you can) and remain vigilant: our kleptocratic Houdinis are hard at work, seeking to make yet more money vanish from your pockets — and reappear in theirs.
From Each According to His Gullibility — To Each According to His Greed
Never has the old adage my father used to repeat to me — “the rich get richer and the poor poorer” — seemed fresher or truer. If you want confirmation of just where we are today, for instance, consider this passage from a recent piece by Tony Judt:
In 2005, 21.2 percent of U.S. national income accrued to just 1 percent of earners. Contrast 1968, when the CEO of General Motors took home, in pay and benefits, about sixty-six times the amount paid to a typical GM worker. Today the CEO of Wal-Mart earns nine hundred times the wages of his average employee. Indeed, the wealth of the Wal-Mart founder’s family in 2005 was estimated at about the same ($90 billion) as that of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population: 120 million people.
Wealth concentration is only one aspect of our increasingly kleptocratic system. War profiteering by corporations (however well disguised as heartfelt support for our heroic warfighters) is another. Meanwhile, retired senior military officers typically line up to cash in on the kleptocratic equivalent of welfare, peddling their “expertise” in return for impressive corporate and Pentagon payouts that supplement their six-figure pensions. Even that putative champion of the Carhartt-wearing common folk, Sarah Palin, pocketed a cool $12 million last year without putting the slightest dent in her populist bona fides.
Based on such stories, now legion, perhaps we should rewrite George Orwell’s famous tagline from Animal Farm as: All animals are equal, but a few are so much more equal than others.
…
I’m Shocked, Shocked, to Find Profiteering Going on Here
An old Roman maxim enjoins us to “let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” Within our kleptocracy, the prevailing attitude is an insouciant “We’ll get ours, though the heavens fall.” This mindset marks the decline of our polity. A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what.
Is it any surprise then that, in seeking to export our form of government to Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve produced not two model democracies, but two emerging kleptocracies, fueled respectively by oil and opium?
When we confront corruption in Iraq or Afghanistan, are we not like the police chief in the classic movie Casablanca who is shocked, shocked to find gambling going on at Rick’s Café, even as he accepts his winnings?
Why then do we bother to feign shock when Iraqi and Afghan elites, a tiny minority, seek to enrich themselves at the expense of the majority?
Shouldn’t we be flattered? Imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery. Isn’t it?”
William J. Astore is a TomDispatch regular; he teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology and served in the Air Force for 20 years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He may be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.
At this point Tony, I think you are supposed to yell out “Bingo!”
Tony, you are absolutely correct.
This is the end result if a government were to be designed by Ayn Rand. In other words, the ultimate evolution of that philosophy.
@Bron: He is not a collectivist, he is a psychopath. He isn’t redistributing money to his people, he is stealing it from them for himself and his family. He is the natural outcome of too much freedom, the result is no freedom at all. He is the natural outcome of a government failing to protect the weak from the strong: The psychopaths take over, declare themselves all powerful, and loot the peasants. It is called a kleptocracy.
Follow..
Obama Pledges $73 Million to Zimbabwe
By Michael A. Fletcher
2009
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/06/12/obama_pledges_73_million_to_zi.html
President Obama announced today that the United States will provide $73 million in aid to Zimbabwe, saying the economically-wracked nation has made progress since Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai entered a power-sharing arrangement with longtime President Robert Mugabe four months ago.
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Mugabe and Tsvangirai spent US $45.5 million on travel last year, accounting for 1.2 per cent of total public expenditure -Blair article below
By David Blair
12:09AM GMT 20 Feb 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/zimbabwe/9092548/Zimbabwe-how-we-aid-profligacy.html
Suppose a government chooses to spend nothing on equipping secondary schools, while blowing 1 per cent of public expenditure on trips for the president and the prime minister. Imagine if the two men at the top of this sorry administration reckoned their own offices were more deserving recipients of taxpayers’ money than, say, capital expenditure on health and education for a country of 12 million people.
Step forward the government of Zimbabwe under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe, the ageing autocrat who will celebrate his 88th birthday tomorrow, and Morgan Tsvangirai, the former opposition leader turned prime minister. Leaf through Zimbabwe’s national budget for 2012 and you discover the grotesque sense of priorities of the two men who run one of the poorest countries in the world.
Mugabe and Tsvangirai spent US $45.5 million on travel last year, accounting for 1.2 per cent of total public expenditure (if David Cameron and Nick Clegg followed suit, their bill for foreign trips would be more than £7 billion or $11 billion).
Now where on Earth could they have learned that?
We’re like the guy from out-of-town who walks into a bar and is met by the bartender holding a lit stick of dynamite and saying’ “Unless you buy my drinks, I blow up the bar.” We quietly pass over our money. Then the next day we traipse right back in and are met with the same threat and the same result ensues since we are afraid that if we don’t do pay someone else will and thus curry the favor of the kook. Plus we’re worried about the other patrons.
Would it be so bad if the usual patrons of the bar handled this situation themselves?
BarkinDog: I dont see why you call Zimbagway a Pirate Territory. They are just broke, they dont even have a coastline do they? So how could they have pirates if they have no Carribean?
Mugabe still finds ways to “employ” his gangs of thugs… It’s been going on for a very long time. The US envoy was threatened yesterday.
U.S. Envoy Attacked By Zanu PF Thugs
http://www.thezimbabwemail.com/zimbabwe/15348-u-s-envoy-attacked-by-zanu-pf-thugs.html
“The US envoy to Zimbabwe Mr David Bruce Wharton was yesterday reportedly forced to abandon his tour of Sangano Dairy Farm in Makoni District after villagers demonstrated against his Government’s continued imposition of sanctions on the country.
The ambassador and his team allegedly left the farm in a huff after addressing the dairy project managers just for about two minutes when Zanu PF thugs carrying machets and placards arrived chanting blood and murder songs, sources told State media yesterday.” (…article continues)
They could change the name of the territory to something that sounds good, like Congo. Then take the diamond money and open an account at Walmart. Its not a bank but they could then write checks. Then they could start the Let No Diamond Be Left Behind program. If this Mugabe guy has to flea the Congo and comes to the United States we could sick Carmen Miranda Ortiz on him.
after Mugabe siezed White owned farms Zimbabwe went from exporting food stuff to importing food stuff. Mugabe is a crook.
if we are giving them aid, we should call the tune as to how it is spent.
But then we should not be giving aid to collectivist tyrants in the first place.
Pirate Territory. Not a Quote Nation State Unquote. Former Belgian colony. A diamond in the rough so to speak but I dont speak that particular sqeek. Good job Belgium. Fly over and flush.
JT: Yet, our aid is used to sustain what are simply criminal enterprises by these families.
Then the people starve anyway. The proper use of such aid is to air drop food with a relatively short shelf life; a few weeks. If the government tries to act against our humanitarian act, we call it a declaration of war and neutralize whatever they used to act against us.
The reason to select food with a shorter shelf life for air-drops is to make it more difficult to organize criminal hoarding and control of the food as a currency. Some of that will occur anyway, but it is much reduced by a quickly wasting resource that has to be eaten (or imbibed) fairly soon. If the point is to keep them from starving, drop something like vitamin bread.
Money lasts forever; bread: Not so much.