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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...
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.