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The continent-wide Resource Curse makes the Marikana massacre look like a picnic, and allows us to dismiss Spector’s article as the kind of idle spin-doctoring fluff one gets from the State Department’s US Information Service (his former employer). But that is not a particularly satisfying place to leave matters, for the broader assumptions about the US in Africa also need a rethink, in part because South Africa is hosting the BRICS summit in Durban next March, and we’re being subjected to rhetoric from Pretoria about a ‘new dynamic’ in the emerging market power bloc, supposedly challenging the sole-superpower system of global governance.

Thanks to White House patronage, murderous African dictators still retain power until too late, most obviously Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who is personally worth at least $40 billion (according to an ABC News report) and who was recipient of many billions of dollars in US military aid in the 18 months following Obama’s speech. As Carson’s boss Hillary Clinton remarked in 2009, ‘I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,’

Amongst the 40 were Cameroonian dictator Paul Biya, and as his office reported, ‘At the end of the two and half hours that they spent together, most of the African leaders left the dining hall visibly satisfied.’

also have some sort of response should they not heed these warnings not to proceed?,’ the official answer was chilling: ‘I think we haven’t telegraphed any response at this point.’ One reason not to annoy Jammeh was the US Central Intelligence Agency’s reliance upon a Banjul airport as a secret destination and refueling site for ‘rendition’ victims, that is, the illegal transfer of suspected terrorists to countries carrying out torture on behalf of Washington.

former US National Security Council official John Prendergast’s concern about ‘a vexing policy quandary’ in Washington’s relations with Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan: ‘All of them have served American interests or have a strong US constituency, but all have deeply troubling human rights records.’ (Whether this is a ‘vexing quandary’ or instead best described as a time-honoured tradition is up to the reader to decide.)

why launch this latest enterprise of dubious value? Well, when you have created an AfriCom, when you have staffed it with a few thousand personnel, when you have a Special Forces corps numbering 60,000, when you have a vastly expanded CIA Operations Division, and when American strategic thinking is still locked in the auto-pilot mode set in September 2001 – when all these forces are at work, there will be action.’

within a few months, that the Central Intelligence Agency was extremely active in Somalia and that mercenaries (such as Bancroft Global Development) were Washington’s hired guns, as Carson admitted to the New York Times, ‘We do not want an American footprint or boot on the ground.’ Hence, according to The Times, drones were used against the Shabab (Al-Qaeda’s allies in Somalia).

The 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian forces was clearly a proxy war, with AfriCom providing the logistics-allowing a criminal organization like al-Shabab to claim a legitimate reason for its war and brutal terror against the very people both sides claim to be freeing: the poor ordinary Somalis.’

On two occasions (1994 and 1996) I worked in the office of a man officially labeled a ‘terrorist’, a South African targeted by the CIA in the early 1960s and only taken off the US State Department’s no-entry ‘terror watch-list’ in July 2008 (!) thanks to a formal Congressional intervention.

As WikiLeaks demonstrated, Washington is choc full of pathological hypocrites.

Another source of oil disruption in Nigeria of concern to Washington was a civil society case against Shell Oil in May 2012 in which Shell argued it should have no human rights liabilities because of its corporate status, a position that the US rejected when it came to US citizens’ rights to sue. ‘But when the Supreme Court ordered a rehearing in the case, and asked whether human rights lawsuits could be brought when the abuses happened outside the US,’ according to EarthRights International’s Marco Simons, Washington actually sided with Shell. ‘Obama is saying that if a foreign government abuses human rights, we can bomb them, like we did with Libya. But we can't hold anyone accountable in court, because that would threaten international relations.’

That means wherever there is socio-ecological, religious and economic pressure, such as Uganda and Somalia, Washington’s instinct is the iron fist, followed by denialism and ‘goo-goo’ good-governance rhetoric. ‘From Carson's presentations two years in a row at the annual African Studies Association meetings, most of us felt we heard the same speeches we heard in the Bush Administration,’ says Wiley.

Horn’s evidence is not only that Kony has not been seen for years in Uganda, but that Obama also ‘quietly waived restrictions on military aid to Chad, Yemen, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’ even though their armies all have recent documented records of recruiting child soldiers.

Indeed, it is appropriate to ask why backwardness prevails in countries that are only ‘useful’ insofar as they have resources. Of course, oil and minerals are not Washington’s only economic objective. As WikiLeaks revealed after a February 2010 meeting with Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi, ‘Carson encouraged Meles to hasten steps to liberalize the telecommunications and banking industries in Ethiopia,’ according to the secret State Department cable. An additional economic objective, also revealed at that meeting, was the destruction of the Kyoto Protocol’s binding cap on greenhouse gas emissions, a project that Obama and the heads of Brazil, China, India and South Africa agreed to in Copenhagen at a UN climate summit in December 2009. As WikiLeaks demonstrated, much diplomacy in subsequent weeks was aimed at achieving buy-in even if that entailed bribery and coercion.

with Obama half-Kenyan by ancestry (a factor regularly raised by right-wing commentators who even make ridiculous claims as to the land of his birth), this treatment should not be considered as specifically anti-African; instead, it is best described as pro-corporate. For Washington’s whacking of Africa is not so different than the whacks its rulers give everywhere.

further information has become available about former constitutional law professor Obama’s personal role in civilian-killing drone warfare (including US citizen victims), cyberterrorism, warrantless eavesdropping, suppression of civil liberties, lack of transparency and other apparent contradictions. However, do these contradictions represent, as Prendergast put it, a vexing quandary – or instead, a tradition?

according to American University professor Sean Flynn, Obama ‘endorsed a set of policy proposals in its trade negotiations with developing countries that is much worse for access to medicine concerns than those of any other past administration.’

Africa and so many other examples show how the Obama Administration has become a rotten fusion of the worst instincts within neoliberalism and neoconservatism. I hope that on November 6, he soundly defeats Mitt Romney, who is worse on all counts except the ability to huckster people in Africa that Washington acts in their interests.

Last year, citing US national security interests, Obama issued a waiver so as to send more than $200 million in military aid to US-allied regimes in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, South Sudan and Yemen in spite of a 2008 US law prohibiting such funding because of their armies’ recruitment of child soldiers. According to Human Rights Watch’s Jo Becker, ‘The Obama administration has been unwilling to make even small cuts to military assistance to governments exploiting children as soldiers. Children are paying the price for its poor leadership.’

The nervousness and anxiety of the West over the future of the U.S. financial dominance was quite clear from the communique issued after the recent 2013 G8 meeting in Ireland. Most of the points in the communique issued by the White House (the Lough Erne Declaration) dealt with the challenges coming out of Africa and the role of transnational corporations plundering African resources without paying taxes.[8] Prior to the G8 meeting, the 2013 Report of the Africa Progress Panel headed by former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Anan, called on the same G8 leaders to police their corporations. The Panel had called for inter alia:

The destructive extraction of resources from Africa is old and has taken new forms, as Patrick Bond reminds us in Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation.[10] For the past six decades the World Bank domination of economic arrangements in Africa has seen the period of dramatic capital flight from Africa.[11]

The multi-billion dollar enterprise of looting Africa was at the foundation of an international system that increasingly worked on the basis of speculative capital. The World Bank and the IMF understood that the real foundations of actual resources were to be found in Africa. To conceal the looting and plunder, the West disguised the reality that Africa is a net creditor to the advanced capitalist countries (termed “donors” in neo-liberal parlance). For this reason (and to perpetuate the myths of “spurring economic growth and investment”), the United States government has been caught in a losing battle where new rising forces such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, South Korea and other states offer alternatives to the structural adjustment and austerity packages.

The fallout from the Libyan intervention has created insecurity and violence in all parts of North Africa and the Sahel, with racist elements within this Libyan uprising persecuting Africans as mercenaries.

From the writers in the US academic establishment, the NATO intervention was a success. [14] However, decent peoples in all parts of the world have been outraged by the continued violence and the support for the murderous militias by Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The persecution of the citizens of Tawergha stands as a permanent repudiation to the NATO intervention in Libya.

The previous justifications for US engagement had been part of the logic for the establishment of the US Africa Command. For a while there was the fiction that the United States was supporting growth and trade (via the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)), but the militarization of the engagement with Africa intensified after then Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force had designated African petroleum as “strategic” and colluded with Donald Rumsfeld to establish the Africa Command (AFRICOM).

In June 2012, the White House issued a new policy statement on Africa. What was striking about this new White House Statement was that there was no mention of the US Africa Command. The document was titled, “Policy towards Sub-Saharan Africa.”[16] Many Africans did not pay much attention to this old ruse of seeking to divide Africa between so called sub- Saharan Africa and North Africa. The reality of the African Union is something that the US policy makers do not want to recognize; hence the State Department maintains the nomenclature of sub-Sahara Africa.

When John Kerry spoke at the 50th anniversary of African Unity in Addis Ababa in May 2013, the U.S. Secretary of State did not mention the U.S. Africa Command or the War on Terror. Instead John Kerry spoke of the fact that his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, was part of the anti-apartheid struggles in Southern Africa when she was a student at the University of Witwatersrand.

While there are no funds to support educational exchange, in the week of June 19, 2013, the US Senate under the initiative of Republican Senator James Inhofe authorized, “the Department of Defense to obligate up to $90 million to provide logistical support to the national military forces of Uganda to mitigate or eliminate the threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and bring an end to the murderous campaign of LRA leader Joseph Kony.”[18] This clear support of the conservatives in the United States for the Yoweri Museveni government in Kampala, under the guise of fighting Kony, comes at a moment when the Museveni leadership is being challenged, even from its own officer corps. [19] More importantly, Republican Senator James Inhofe and the conservatives who initiated this new authorization are bent on supporting a regime where there are elements who believe that same-gender loving persons should be put to death.

When U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the corruption of the banks he stated, “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them.” Prosecutors, he said, must confront the problem that “if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”[21]

When Obama entered the White House in January 2009, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner advised him that prosecuting the banks would have a negative impact on the world economy.

Gary Yonge in the Guardian made the excellent argument in pointing out that Barack Obama is the Commander in Chief of the United States and is captive to US imperial power. In the article titled, “Is Obama Worse than Bush? That's Beside the Point,”[22] Yonge traced the statements of Obama the candidate to the realities of Obama as the President of the United States. His argument, that it is beside the point whether Obama is worse than Bush, is worth considering in light of the reality that the capitalist crisis facing the United States is far worse than when Bush was President 2001-2009. I will agree that the conditions of the repressive nature of the state have intensified in the midst of the global insecurity of capital, but where I would differ with Yonge would be for the progressive forces to intensify the efforts to hold the bankers accountable so that the militarists and the bankers do not take the world into other military catastrophes.

Recently, Obama appointed Susan Rice as the National Security Adviser. Rice had been groomed in anti-communism by the Madeline Albright and Clinton factions of the establishment. When Susan Rice was student at Oxford in the 1980s, she reputedly looked the other way when students such as Tajudeen Abdul Raheem were opposing apartheid. She was a member of the ignominious Bill Clinton national security team that pressured the United Nations not to intervene at the time of the Rwanda genocide in 1994.

Since those two journeys in June and July 2009, Obama has had to hide his understanding of Africa because he has been faced with a racist group called the Birthers who claim that he was born in Kenya and is therefore illegitimate as a President. There is another strong constituency that alleges that Obama is a Muslim. Obama can rightly claim his Irish heritage from his mother’s side, but is mortally afraid of making any statement that may suggest that he is familiar with the political struggles in Africa.

We know from the book by Richard Wolffe, Renegade: The Making of a President, that during the height of the Democratic Party primary battles in Iowa in January 2008, Obama had invited his sister, Auma Obama, to Iowa so that he could be kept abreast of the social forces behind the violence in Kenya at the time. When he drove around Iowa, his sister was briefing him on the issues that sparked the opposition to the theft of the elections. While preoccupied with the Iowa caucuses he was calling Kenya, reaching out to Desmond Tutu and taking an active role in seeking an end to the incredible violence that took hundreds of lives.[24] Since 2009 the Kenyans have been building a massive airport at Kisumu so that Air Force One could land in Western Kenya. This was in anticipation of the visit of Obama to visit his relatives. All of the planning for a Kenyan visit has had to be put on hold because of the outstanding questions of the initiators of the chilling violence that overtook Kenya in January 2008. Obama has instead opted to visit neighboring Tanzania.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has stated more than once that the arming of Syrian rebels will be a backdoor to the war against Iran.[27]

The Obama administration has been trapped by the history and practices of financial industry, the military intelligence corporations and the petroleum companies. From very early in 2009, the Obama administration understood that financial innovation was not socially valuable.

Those conjuring the “stress tests” are quite aware of the scholarly output as well as the activists who are now standing up for Africa.[31]

Official statements from the US Africa Command about peacekeeping and humanitarianism in Africa have been silent on the warfare and plunder in the Eastern Congo where the military allies of the United States, Rwanda and Uganda have been indicted for looting the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This week John Kerry as the Secretary of State appointed former Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin as the Special Envoy to the DRC.

The legacies of enslavement, colonialism and apartheid dominate the social landscape in Africa. Recent scholarship on the health impacts of enslavement have pointed out the contemporary health questions in the African community in the West that emanate directly from slavery. [33] Harriet Washington in the excellent book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present [34] has deepened our understanding of how many of the health practices of contemporary western medicine can be traced back to the era of enslavement.

In those fifty years, the US undermined the processes of self-determination, supported the apartheid regimes in Southern Africa (Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe along with the Portuguese colonial forces in Angola and Mozambique), supported Jonas Savimbi for over twenty years, intervened in Somalia, destabilized the DRC by supporting Mobutu Sese Seko or thirty years, and most recently supported NATO to create havoc in Libya. At the most recent meeting of the African Union in Addis Ababa in May 2013, there were clear statements from the grassroots for the immediate unification of Africa. The confidence of the Global Pan African Family was clearly on display. The Obama administration understands the deep desires for change in Africa. Many of the current leaders who occupy office in Africa are teetering on the brink of extinction. There must be a break from the old US policy towards Africa that propped up tyrants and looters. While the media is complaining about the cost of the trip, the progressive intellectuals and activists in the US and in Africa must organize to oppose militarism and plunder in Africa. This is an inopportune moment for Obama to travel to Africa unless he is going to repudiate the growing police state that he is supervising. The mainstream establishment of the United States of America has nothing substantial other than militarism to offer Africa. This trip to Africa is a PR effort to solidify his legacy and garner waning support from his base in the United States.

e Villiers said the body appointed to look at the problem favours neutralisation as the best solution to the problem of AMD. ‘Certainly, it will be an economically viable solution, if logistics such as the reservoirs needed for the neutralization to be carried out in (continuously over a very long period of time) can be sorted out, which seems unlikely at the moment. ‘The proposals by corporations to step in with their proposed solutions have apparently been shot down, because they wanted to sell the cleaned water back to Rand Water, making a profit in the process. ‘I’m not sure why mining houses are allowed to pollute while making a profit, and corporations who want to clean up are apparently expected to do so without the benefit of making a profit,’ she said.

In an interview with The Africa Report, Turton said that not only will mines evade the legal minimum requirement of the ‘polluter pays principle’ but also profit from it. ‘What’s more, that profit is all but guaranteed, because it will be underwritten by the state in the form of a mooted Public Private Partnership (PPP),’ he said. The deal allows for mining houses to access a R3.5-billion deal with no tendering process, as well as select ‘treatment’ that was described by Turton as the ‘least cost option’ via a process shrouded in secrecy, enabling the WUC to act as both consultant and reviewer.