Re: Regrettably, most blacks do not have sufficient education to enable this to any extent and they will be compelled by circumstance to lead a life of poverty.
Indeed:
The legacy of apartheid looms large in the education system. In 1999 2.8m blacks were illiterate (the figure for whites was 16,000) and 12% of the under-20s had not had any kind of education. Last year, the jobless ratio was six blacks for every white (30% of the working population are unemployed). Worse still, during the last years of the old regime, schools were perceived as an instrument of white domination. They were boycotted by a whole generation that then moved on to political struggle, delinquency and gangsterism. Reviving the desire for knowledge was therefore a major challenge for the new South Africa. [...]
66.249.93.104
However, I think that blacks are not compelled to poverty by circumstance only. The global economy which is basically a "white-yellow duumvirate" between North America, Europe, and East Asia, has no use for Africa and blacks. The international division of labor has already spawned bloated markets and bottlenecks for car manufacturers, textiles, foodstuffs, etc. Just look at the current Hong Kong WTO meeting:
December 13, 2005
WTO TRADE TALKS
Low Expectations in Hong Kong
By Matthias Streitz and Charles Hawley
In 2001, the World Trade Organization (WTO) set a high hurdle for itself at talks in Doha, Qatar. Too high it now seems. Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz says that disagreement on agricultural subsidies may torpedo current trade negotiations in Hong Kong and both the European Union and the United States are to blame.
The anti-globalization protests that accompany the World Trade Organization wherever it holds summits have become something of a tradition. But the latest six-day WTO talks starting in Hong Kong on Tuesday are as expected to be as contentious inside the convention center as on the streets.
Even WTO director General Pascal Lamy suggested supernatural powers might be required to conjure up a wide-reaching agreement on the difficult issues facing the 149-country body. Just days before the meeting began, the focus of the trade talks was already shifting away from agricultural subsidies -- a topic on which the group is hopelessly split -- toward the only slightly less fraught issue of trade development help to the world's poorest countries. [...]
service.spiegel.de
Re: For most of their lives, therefore, they will be dependent on the state and on charity...
...just like subsidized farmers in Europe and the US! As you know, the subsistance checks, food stamps, etc, France, Belgium, the US, Germany,... hand out to their jobless are nothing compared to the zillions of dollars and euros the congenitally unprofitable farmers of those countries received every year to keep their ball rolling. White farmers in Europe and America who can't compete on the market, who can't dance to the music of free trade and market prices are quietly, cushily, shielded from the market's merciless forces by their fellow white politicians.(*) At the same time, young immigrants with computer, engineering, or cooking diplomas are jobless or go bust because no bank will lend them the money to start their own businesses... Unlike our redneck farmers, they are the ones who must "adapt" to the labor market....
Gus
(*) FORTUNE INTERNATIONAL: FRENCH FARM France's Sacred Cow How one French farmer lives and thrives--thanks to EU taxpayers. By Richard Tomlinson
Christophe Hochede looks out his kitchen window at his tumbledown farmyard and counts his blessings. "Europe has the best system for allowing a region to be self-sufficient in food," says Hochede, a genial 36-year-old. "Other parts of the world should organize themselves as we do." As if to prove his point, he offers his guest a slice of homemade apple tart and decides that at three o'clock in the afternoon, it's time to open a bottle of wine.
If only the rest of the world agreed with Hochede, who raises beef cattle and grows corn and beets on a 94-acre farm in northern France. Taxpayers in Spain, Portugal, southern Italy, Ireland, and Greece--countries with large agricultural sectors--tend to back Europe's farm-support program because they get more from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) than they give. But the rest of the EU, led by Britain and Germany, which pay in more than they take out, are clamoring for change. So are farmers from the orchards of New Zealand to the cattle ranches of Argentina who want greater access to Europe's heavily protected markets. And poor countries complain that subsidies for products like sugar help keep them poor.
All told, EU taxpayers spent $135 billion--in CAP funds, price supports, and other forms of assistance--aiding the region's farmers in 2001. That equals 1.4% of Europe's GDP, a substantially larger proportion... Continue fortune.com
PART ONE Welfare Farming Crop subsidies, defended as essential to the survival of family farms, instead are destroying them, along with entire rural communities. From the Jun. 2005 Issue of FSB By Cait Murphy
The soil of the Northwest's Palouse region is among the richest in the country. Much of it is sunk in and around outcroppings of Ice Age silt dunes; farmers and ranchers here sometimes work 50-degree slopes. One of them is Read Smith, 57, who raises beef cattle and soft white wheat on his Cherry Creek Ranch. A fifth-generation farmer, Smith would like to be confident that his son Jeremy, who works the land with him, will be able to hand over the legacy to a seventh generation. But he isn't.
Modern farming has become a dire mix of frustration, hard work, low returns-and counterproductive government policies. A host of farm programs promote growing as much as possible. Some years that means a glut. Prices can drop so low that Smith loses money on every acre. So he accepts a government check to make up the difference; he took in almost $220,000 in crop subsidies from 1995 to 2003. The money helps keep him solvent, but he's furious about it. "If I get anything," he points out, "it means I'm going backward. It's an admission that the system is not working." [...] fortune.com |