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Wikileaks Breaks $3 Billion Corruption Story
James Hardine writes Wikileaks, the website for whistleblowers, has broken one of the world's biggest corruption stories in the international press (Guardian, BBC, Forbes, Sydney Morning Herald). The site has leaked a secret report on looting by ex-president Moi of Kenya — and possibly altered the outcome of an impending national election. Moi has become a key player in political life in Kenya, and is now an essential pillar in President Kibaki's campaign for re-election in December 2007. From the Wikileaks page: 'The suppressed auditor's report reveals that currency worth billions of US dollars was looted from Kenya by President Moi and his associates. The money was laundered across the world and includes properties and shell companies in London, New York and South Africa and even a 10,000 hectare ranch in Australia.'"
Show me where socialism and government control over business activity has brought about prosperity and lifted a country out of poverty? My socialist prosperity, let me show you it: http://www.hydroquebec.com/profile/index.html
Interestingly enough, when deregulation in Ohio led to the great blackout of 2003, the Quebec grid was mostly unaffected because Hydro-Quebec keeps its grid out of sync with its neighbors because they expected something like that to happen, since the states around it are dangerously under-regulated.
And the CBC is a much more reliable source of news than any of the conglomerate-operated sources in the USA, FOX news they ain't. prosperity and lifted a country out of poverty? I can show examples for capitalism: China http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/364
It was not clear of the counterfeit powder included any toxic ingredients, but some children were reported to have died within three days of being fed the fake milk.
Others were hospitalised when their parents realised they were ill. Fuyang's People's Hospital alone received more than 60 babies who had been fed fake milk formula, according to the Beijing News.
You can't take the sky from me...
I live in Toronto, Canada. Yesterday night I was walking by the Mel Lastman's Square and a kid, probably not older than 16 was standing there distributing a socialist newspaper. Another young girl was distributing some kind of a Che Guevara pamphlet. I wish the public education put more emphasis on history and philosophy education (as well as hard sciences,) and would provide these kids with enough information and thinking abilities to understand what exactly such people as Che have done in their lives and why exactly socialist propaganda ends up going the bloody road every time it attempts to change the human nature. Then again, I was born in the former USSR and this is sort of like second nature to understand these things.
You can't handle the truth.
In 1917 Russia was an agricultural nation that lost against Germany which was fighting a two front war. Russia had previously been defeated by Japan overnight in the Russo-Japanese war. In 1850 Japan was also an agricultural nation with no industry to speak of. Japan took 100 years to become a superpower, Russia took 20. Is that enough of a historical comparison? Just remember that Communism won the second world war without help. D-Day was major, but it didn't turn the war around like Staligrad and Kursk did. Oh, and who put the first satellite in space? The first heart-lung machine? The big bang? Explained superfluidity? All that from the USSR. Now, let's look at Israel. The kibbutzim produced most of Israel's elite despite having no more then 7% of the population. So it looks like socialism does work. Now remember the 1930's? The only nations not affected by the Great Depression were the USSR and Nazi Germany. This is the historical record, and what it shows is not what you think it does.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Before 1917 Russia was a state based on slavery, it is true. Many believe that some form of a revolt was almost inevitable due to the top government not being able to do its job effectively and due to the general population's dissatisfaction with the status quo. Obviously the Russian-Japanese war did not help the matters much at all, why the Russian army was sent against Japanese machine guns with nothing more than some religious icons and crosses in their hands.
The USSR of-course has defeated the Fascist Germany, the first man in space was Yuri Gagarin and Lev Landau was at least as smart as Einstein. However you are contributing these obvious achievements to the socialist/communist regime set in place, which is a logical fallacy.
You see, after the October Revolution took place there were people (Stolypin) in the country who proposed reforms that could have turned the country around and brought it into a soft form of capitalism (small size landownership actually.) After all, the country itself was mostly agrarian.
What has actually happened was very different. My great-grandfather's 7 out of 12 children have died in Ukraine in the beginning of 1930th from hunger along with 30 million other people. So my great-grandfather was moved off his land, because he had to hire help to work in the field, this was against the communist law of the time. His remaining family and himself together with millions others were put on trains and moved to Siberia, away from their lands. His wife and one more kid died in the train during the move from diphteria. Now to some this may not mean much, but they may not understand what Ukraine actually was at the time (and still is today.) It was called the Bread Basket of the Soviet Union. For 30 million farmers to die from hunger is not something that can be explained easily, but the basics of it are these: the new communist government needed money, which it did not have, to jump start a non-existing industrial complex. The only way to do this was to take away what could be taken away from the farmers of the land and to sell it abroad, namely food. Food was taken away completely for at least 3 years in a row, which resulted in approximately 30 million deaths.
That is just one small bookmark in the novel written by the new communist regime.
Many probably do not realize this, but when Hitler attacked USSR, he hit Ukraine first. The initial reaction of the people was mixed, most were fed up with the Soviet form of government and they would have stayed away from the war completely and let the Nazi forces through, however Hitler made one of his many many blunders, he killed the civilians and he killed them in numbers and with ferocity that somehow outmatched the late doings of the Communist Party in the republic. At the end of it all Ukrainians had little choice, they had to fight the immediate danger of being exterminated.
You have cited some examples of ingenuity shown by the people of the former Soviet Union, what you have not seen though outmatches everything that you have heard off. The fate of the people of that land between 1912 and up to about the end of 1960th was terrible. From about 1970th and to the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union the life became much easier, but it was never free.
You see, the socialists do not want to free people from anything really, they want to tell the people how to live their lives too. If you weren't with 'it' in the former USSR, you were against the law, and the Communist Party set the law. There was no other party.
Personally I would rather live in a capitalist country during depression, then in a communist country in the best of times though.
You can't handle the truth.
Funny how there's no link in "related stories" to the original Slashdot post about Wikileaks. You know, the one that was all about how Wikileaks was a scam and would never get off the ground.
Gee, by far the largest country in the world managed to defeat the tiny nation of Germany, and merely by throwing wave after wave of it's own men to be slaughtered in the millions.
And even with that, I still seriously doubt the USSR would have won the war on it's own. You're completely dismissing the aid the USSR received, and amount of effort the Axis put into fighting the other Allies. England and the US weren't on the ground in Europe as early, but they were bombing the hell out of Germany, fighting in Africa, and destroying the Axis navies. If nothing else, lots planes, bombs and V1s and V2s were sent towards England, rather than Russia.
And if Japan had joined in the war attacking the USSR, instead of the USA? The "Communists" may well have run out of human chattel to throw under the tanks before the war's end.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What's the difference between you and those Holocaust deniers who say "But the Jews are lying, they haven't been N million of Jews killed by Hitler, they were only Z millions!"
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
In a lot of places in Africa, the presence of corruption at lower levels is just tacitly accepted. It's not hard to understand why when sometimes people need bribe money just to put food on their table.
The problem it's that in many cases when you deal with "donor" money, they don't consider it necessarily stealing from their people, but just getting "free" money from the donors.
I've seen it first hand on the national scale:
In Tanzania, during the midst of a severe power crisis I sat down in a cafe in Dar and had chai with the president of the Richmond Development Corperation "based" in Houston TX. They were under contract to import and install emergency power generators to the country. This was a deal worth 10s of millions of USD (This money was of course aid money, Tanzania doesn't have 10 Million in hard currency to toss about). We talked about the power situation and how nice it would be to have it fixed, about foreign aid, and about the USA and Tanzania in general. He was a very pleasant man overall, he gave me his business card and even paid my tab.
Several weeks later it came to light that RDC was basically a shell company with no real corporate presence anywhere, or capability to buy and ship generators (Google it if you want). It was purely an attempt to swindle millions of dollars (the attitude being that since it was donor money, it wasn't really taking money from Tanzania) How the heck did they win the contract in the first place? I'm sure they greased a few palms along the way.
Even on the village level, if you write a grant for a building and budget X TSH money for concrete, you can damn well be sure that someone will try their hardest to short a bag or two and pocket the money (concrete is very expensive FWIW). Receipt tracking for grants would be hell if you were not solely in charge of buying and paying for things.
Considering the harshness of life there, I can't be to angry at people for trying for a few bucks, but with that in mind, the people stealing millions are even more reprehensible.
RPCV Tanzania 2005-2007
Still have the business card and newspaper clippings
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
As for safety, all whistleblowing is dangerous, but who was ignorant on this point? Certainly not potential whistleblowers, who know as well as cornered prey that everything is on the line. Let them be the judge of how important their conscience is, or what is the best available means for acting on it.
Regarding stomping/dumping ground: Unless the so-called leaker is the alleged author of the document, the closer these two parties are, the more danger there is for the former party, which implies that the more convincing documents (from close to the alledged source) are less likely to be the result of dubious motivations (vendettas, casual hoaxes etc.) Less convincing documents, on the other hand, are just going to get "stomped" on.
Sooner or later some false and damaging information will emerge from Wikileaks. But a measure of false and damaging information emerges from every source of information, from your mouth to your textbook; in oppressive societies it is the means for remaining in power, in free societies it is the inevitable side-effect of freedom.