We aren't taking care of our black people!

They are ‘ours’, you see. As in ‘our responsibility’.

Its a BONO project!

The shysters, liars and crooks who scared our knickers off and sold us out on global warming, climate change and carbon pollution, are no longer beating around the bush. The latest con-word is ‘climate justice’, which is the same as social justice; only this one is not watermelon green, its black!

Here’s a taste of what ‘carbon trading’ really means:

Black people  need to be “saved” and “taken care of” because they cannot take care of themselves, right?

 The power of guilt. Think about the contempt for black people who are being treated as if they have no ability to take care of themselves. And think about how pervasive this reasoning is in liberal thinking.

How your money is being squandered:

The African village where EVERY family is getting £7,500 from the British taxpayer

Turning an entire race into charity cases should be considered a war crime, instead of a humanitarian act.

As I drew up in the bustling village after a long journey, the last  21 miles bouncing along a red  dirt track riven with potholes,  a group of a dozen men sprawled in the shade on ramshackle wooden benches waved me over.

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They were farmers, resting after a hard day’s labour. Children scampered around alongside goats munching weeds, while women stirred bubbling pots outside family compounds made up of circular mud huts.

Even in this remote part of northern Ghana, the influence of British football could be seen with the presence of the odd Chelsea shirt. 

Brighter future? Villagers in Kpasenkpe, which was recently visited by rock star Bono

Kpasemkpe is going to be turned into a Millennium Village – a scheme that Britain is now contributing millions of pounds to

My translator, introducing me in the local Mampruli language, explained I came from the nation that was home to the famous team.

The farmers of this settlement, called Kpasenkpe, were not surprised to see me: ‘There have been a lot of white people coming here recently,’ said Atta Kojo, 32. ‘I think they were experts in health and education, but they never told us what they were doing. We did not understand why they were here.’

In fact, their visitors included the rock star Bono, who was there in January, together with Jeffrey Sachs, a ‘celebrity’ economist who hangs out with the likes of Angelina Jolie and Bill Clinton. Bono and Sachs are two of the world’s leading cheerleaders for international aid. 

The reason they visited — with the editor of liberal newspaper the Observer in tow — was to announce that Kpasenkpe had been chosen as their next Millennium Village.

‘You are going to see an improvement in the lives of your people,’ proclaimed Sachs in his usual messianic style. 

He promised cheering villagers that in five years they would see incomes increase, farming improve and better schools and health care.

Promises of a better future: Villagers were told they would see their incomes increase, better schools and healthcare from the scheme

Counting numbers: The project will cost £17.2million – equating to £7,500 for each of the 2,250 households

This UN-backed Millennium Village project — to which Britain is now contributing millions of pounds for the first time — began in 2004 and encompasses half a million Africans. 

It is designed to prove that targeted aid can lift such places out of poverty in just five years.But the scheme is facing mounting accusations that it is a waste of money, and is doing less to help rural Africans than it claims.

According to the project’s documents, the business plan reveals ‘total direct costs’ are expected to be £17.2 million and that the goal is ‘substantial poverty reduction’ for up to 2,250 households.

This means spending more than an astonishing £7,500 per household. To put this in perspective, this is 34 times the average annual income of households in the region.

The British Government — desperate to find ways to spend its soaring aid budgets — is handing over £11.5 million to this vainglorious venture.

Despite the austerity weighing on British families at home, spending on foreign aid — currently £8.8 billion a year — is rising by more than one-third under the Coalition. 

Increasing budgets: British aid has risen by more than a third under the coalition

Fair Trade: Worker, such as this rice farmer working in her rice paddy, have been promised better pay

Indeed, last Sunday International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell insisted they will enshrine in law the target of giving 0.7 per cent of our national income to global aid.

In this savannah region of Ghana, life is undoubtedly a struggle and many seemed delighted by such generosity from Britain.

‘We do not know why they have chosen us, but we are very lucky,’ said Babu Yakubu, a 30-year-old farmer with two wives and four children.

In Nabari, another village also set to be deluged with our aid, people were amazed to hear foreigners were spending so much on them. 

‘We are poor people,’ said Sule Mantable, 38, a father of four. ‘These are huge amounts of money.’ 
But like others, he is sceptical it will change their lives. ‘It sounds a good idea but we don’t believe it will work,’ he said. 

‘We have heard before all these promises of money for electricity, schools, hospitals and roads. Nothing ever happened.

‘Even if the money does flow from your country, it will end up in the pockets of corrupt people and politicians. We will not see any spent on our infrastructure or in our pockets.’

In Keniago, villagers were told they would need to pay £10 each to have pipes installed for communal water – a fee they can’t afford

In Afraso, instead of the promised Millennium Village school for the 1,000-strong community, there was just a pile of bricks

So what of the increasingly beleaguered British taxpayers? They are not, I’m afraid, getting value for their hard-earned money. 

Indeed, the British Government’s decision to pour money into the Millennium Villages project could hardly come at a worse time. For the move comes in the wake of a series of damning independent reports which prove these intensive efforts are failing to meet the grandiose claims made about them by the Millennium project’s organisers.

The economists’ reports, which I shall come to later, conclude that such injections of aid make little long-term difference to the world’s poorest people. 

Not only that, it is crazy to think small islands of development can be created amid seas of deprivation — as I discovered for myself when I left Kpasenkpe and drove across Ghana to see a cluster of Millennium Villages founded six years ago in the heart of the Ashanti region.

In these hamlets nestling amid rainforest, on land pock-marked by illegal gold mining carried out by youths desperate for work, I was shocked by what I found. For a start, the promised eradication of poverty and creation of self-sustaining development was obviously a failure. 

As locals repeatedly told me, they remained locked in the grind of subsistence farming. 

Unemployment was high, with few other jobs being available. There was evidence, too, of the botched schemes that so often accompany aid. 

In the village of Takorase there was a new concrete marketplace with 20 stalls; none was being used, apart from one to store bananas, another to string up T-shirts on sale and a third for a game of cards.

A water pump in Bonsaaso, Ghana, built by the Millennium Villages project

Millennium Villages Project is facing mounting criticism that it is a waste of money that it isn’t helping the people whose lives it was meant to change

Village women sold their wares in the open air beside it, where they have traditionally traded. 
‘The market stalls seem something of a white elephant,’ said Comfort Boateng, 40, a cheerful mother-of-six selling grilled fish. 

‘Half of them face the wrong way, which is not good for business.’

Even worse was what I discovered in villages such as Afraso, where according to the Millennium Village project I should have found a new school for the 1,000-strong community. Instead, there was just a pile of bricks.

Akwasi Boakye, leader of the village, explained that after repeatedly asking for a school, 140 bags of cement were dumped there last year. 

Now they must find money to pay for sand, roofing materials and wood for window frames.

So far, villagers have raised £265 — a substantial amount for these struggling people — to buy four truckloads of sand to make the bricks. 

‘We just want the school completed,’ said Mr Boakye. ‘At the last meeting a month ago, we were asked to come up with an action plan. We said we didn’t need an action plan — our priority has always been just to build the school. 

‘But they insisted, saying they needed an action plan for their files. Even though the Millennium project is here, it hasn’t exactly transformed our village. 

‘We must be grateful and say it has been a help because we have water and a toilet, but we would really have hoped for more.’

It was a similar story in Keniago, where I found the main street littered with stacks of blue piping, piles of sand and engineering devices. 

Local trade: Farmers gather dried cocoa beans to be weighed before selling them to merchants in a village outside of Kumasi, Ghana

Not benefiting: Hard working poor Ghanaian farming family in their village with maize and rice drying in the street backyard

This valuable equipment was dumped here a year ago, left lying around in fierce tropical sun and torrential rains.

Villagers were told if they wanted the pipes installed for communal water taps they must pay £10 a head — again, far more than they can afford, especially given the large families involved. They insisted they were happy to pay a monthly stipend for access to water, but to no avail.

‘We cannot afford to pay, so the pipes just sit there,’ said Adwoa Boakye, 54. ‘We are very bitter that the Millennium people are asking for this money and refusing to put the pipes in.’

The project has delivered some improvements, such as better health clinics, free school food for the poorest pupils and even communal computer centres (although the one I saw lacked internet access). But they do not come close to matching claims made by the project’s champions.

Several villagers told me they were baffled by programmes giving them such things as subsidised fertiliser or free health care, then abruptly halted. Perhaps most pertinently, others said there seemed little variation between villages in the project and their neighbours.

Ghana is one of Africa’s success stories. The former British colony is a stable democracy whose growth rate is among the world’s highest, recently boosted by oil production, and which has made such progress reducing poverty that last year it became a middle-income country.

So what of Jeffrey Sachs, the man convinced that aid can do wonders for the country’s people? 

He is an academic at Columbia University in New York, whose proselytising for aid led to his appointment as special adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. 

It also garnered him funding from financier George Soros, produced articles penned jointly with George Osborne, and a documentary on the project with Angelina Jolie, who calls Sachs ‘one of the smartest people in the world’. 

Building site: Equipment is left to gather dust in Keniago

But his grand claims for the progress of the villages that have received aid, relying on data from his own organisation, have crumbled recently in the face of painstaking evidence gathered by independent researchers.

First, two U.S. economists found that on a range of measures of development, the project was making little discernible difference. In some cases, villages outside the programme were advancing more rapidly — confirming impressions I witnessed in Ghana.

Then a Kenyan economist released the first independent evaluation, with an investigation into Sarui, the first village to receive funds in the programme. She revealed there was no significant effect on household income after five years. Most damaging was last month’s paper published by the project in The Lancet, which claimed the decline in child mortality rates was three times greater in Millennium villages. 

Unfortunately, it was published days after a World Bank study showing similar rapid falls in infant mortality across Africa, regardless of aid levels. The Lancet was forced to publish a retraction after the paper was ripped apart in rival journal Nature and savaged by bloggers for such crude manipulation of data. 

Indeed, the truth is that there has been no statistically noticeable difference between these aid-soaked villages and the rest of this country for most outcomes tested — including poverty, nutrition, education and child health. One of the Millennium project’s senior officials left his job after this humiliation.

Having visited these villages, it is hard not to conclude there is something morally disturbing about the way the sanctimonious aid lobby offers overblown visions of prosperity to some of the world’s most impoverished communities.

The institute at Columbia where Sachs is based declined to answer most questions I put to them about the Millennium Villages, telling me the information was available elsewhere. 

Erin Trowbridge, director of communications, said my ‘claims were mistaken’ regarding the school and water piping deficiencies shown to me by the villagers in Ghana.

She said the new UK-funded villages had goals beyond the reduction of extreme poverty and that our money would benefit nearly 30,000 people. ‘We are confident the project will do considerable good on many fronts at low cost per person,’ she said.

The Department for International Development said it was testing the Millennium Village approach. 
A spokesman stressed the department had commissioned the first independent evaluation to assess if the concept gave value for money and had a long-term impact.

But before handing over a seven-figure sum of British taxpayers’ money to an increasingly-derided scheme endorsed by self-aggrandising celebrities, perhaps ministers should have investigated a little more about whether  the money would actually do very much good at all.

OPPOSING COMPULSORY HEALTH INSURANCE PURCHASES IS JUST LIKE SLAVERY

Sultan Knish gets it right:

If you oppose ObamaCare, you might as well buy a slave, work him into his old age and then abandon him by the side of the road… or something.

No really. Frank Harris III at the Hartford Courant says so.

I’ll skip the part where I fisk his thesis because it’s too easy and it avoids dealing with larger pathology displayed in the article.

Talking about slavery makes folks uncomfortable. It was so long ago, I know. And doggone it Frank, what do you mean doing what you are about to do: proclaim those jilted Republicans as acting out a slave-era legacy in their opposition to the Supreme Court’s ruling that found “Obamacare” constitutional…

Those who had the least suffered the most when it came to health then, just as they do today. Life expectancy for the poor — And who was poorer than a slave? — was far below that of whites. Life expectancy for blacks today remains and has always been lower than whites. Infant mortality is high, too…

It’s 2012 and Republicans seem determined to rally their supporters against health care like the Confederacy rallied its citizens against the North’s efforts to destroy their slave-based way of life.

Let’s unpack the reasoning here.

1. Blacks were slaves then and we didn’t take care of their health.

2. We are still not taking care of their health.

Connecting A to B is the work of a man who on some level still sees black people as slaves who need to be “saved” and “taken care of” because they cannot take care of themselves.

Liberals rarely put forward this formula quite so openly, but it’s at the heart of the old elitist  liberalism. Harris is accusing us of being “irresponsible slaveowners”. We aren’t taking care of our black people.

Think about the Emancipation Proclamation, think about Juneteenth and the Fourth of July, and think about the whole rotten assumption that rather than setting everyone free, what we really need is a massive slave state for everyone built on the power of guilt. Think about the contempt for black people who are being treated as if they have no ability to take care of themselves. And think about how pervasive this reasoning is in liberal thinking.

Harris accuses us of protecting a “slave-based way of life”, but who really has the slave-based way of life? Is it the people who want slaves or the people who don’t want slaves? Is it the people who believe that we should be free or the people who believe we should be subservient to the proper authorities who will care for us?

The assumption made by Harris is the same one made by slaveowners, that  black people cannot care for themselves. That they must be wards… for their own good. Post-slavery the argument becomes that we must all be wards… for the good of black people.

How much of the welfare state squats on the obscene proposition that black people are unable to take care of themselves?

How much of the misery and troubles of black people in America comes from all the do-gooders who have helped wreck their finances and communities with freebies, subsidies, privileges and leaders who want nothing more than to control where the freebies go?

How many black children have been snatched away from their families to be raised by benevolent white people? How many imported from Africa for the same purpose?

Does it end at our borders? Absolutely not.

How many articles have there been written about the damage done to Africa’s domestic industries by the volumes of aid sent there by Westerners? Textiles, construction and agriculture are in trouble because Africa is swamped with foreign aid by white people who want to take care of all the black people who can’t take care of themselves.

Do that anywhere and it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more people are treated as unable to fend for themselves, the less likely they are to fend for themselves, and the more charity they need, until the process becomes completely unsustainable.

Turning an entire race into charity cases should be considered a war crime, instead of a humanitarian act.

Building a system of political rule based on an entire race being treated as a charity case is racism and tyranny mixed together into an ugly combination. And yet it is the basis for liberal political power.