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South Africa is a nation in transition and, as with all change, there is the inevitable fallout. One of the main areas of concern in our fledgling democracy is safety and security, an area that has taken a bit of a beating in recent years. Unemployment is one of the major catalysts of crime The big urban metropolises of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town have witnessed an unbelievable surge in population in recent years, with more and more rural persons making for the city in an crusade to find jobs. Many of these sought-after jobs have not materialised, leaving jobless rife. Unfortunately, the unenviable result of burgeoning jobless is crime. Refugees add pressure With states like Zimbabwe and the Congo facing both an economic and social meltdown, refugees have had no option but to seek for the sun elsewhere. The ‘Rainbow Nation’, with all her opportunities, has become the preferent destination of these desperate victims of war and greed, resulting in even more pressure on the fragile local economy. Avoid no-go areas in urban centres As with the vast majority of cities around the world, there are no-go areas in most South African cities but each single one of them is still a comparatively safe place to live in as long as you are vigilant and take the frequent precautions. These are five places that we think are galore of the safest places to live in South Africa. o Cape Town – Apart from being a leading international tourist Mecca, Cape Town is an exciting, modern, culturally diverse city that boasts galore of the most finelooking scenery on the planet. The inner city has seen a recent revamp, with a tremendous amount of international cash and influence being expended on it is urban renewal. Businesses, together with the city leaders, have made concerted attempts to outstanding effects to keep the city both safe and clean, and the centre of Cape Town has become one of the safest places to both live and do business in. o The Garden Route – this spectacular area amongst Cape Town and Port Elizabeth on the east coast of Africa is without a doubt one of the jewels of the nation. Apart from it is pure lifestyle, a heap of of the towns along the Garden Route are numerous of the safest places to fetch up your family. Golf estates that offer superior security measures abound in this pristine wilderness area and some of the most foremost golf real estate may be found in George and Knysna. o Port St John’s – The Transkei Wild Coast is one of the last remaining, untouched regions of incomparable beauty. Formerly a Bantustan, or black homeland, for the duration of the days of the apartheid regime, the Transkei has for the most part been forgotten by the powers to be. Port St John’s is located on the Indian Ocean coastline and offers a sleepy, sublime life style for the growing family. Schooling may be an issue later on but there are splendid high schools in nearby Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth and Durban. Regional poverty remains a challenge, so petty crime does take place but community programmes have done a lot to uplift the locals and there is now a much better understanding amidst all members of the PSJ community. o Cape St. Francis – This sea-side town is located close to Port Elizabeth and offers a quiet mercantile retreat out of season. During the holidays it is a popular destination for local tourists and becomes exceedingly busy. There are a great deal of business choices and first-class secondary and tertiary education is available in nearby PE. This is an idealisti place for both young and old. o The West Coast – The west coast of South Africa is sparsely populated, for the most part due to the fact that it is the arid and arid limb of the nation. There are assorted little towns all the way up the west coast that are both delightful and safe. Yzerfontein, Churchhaven and St. Helena Bay are in all likelihood the pick of the bunch but they all offer a relaxed and secure way of life.
252 of 274 people found the following review helpful. The opening chapter on the high-tech mechanism that the Bush camp in Florida put in place before the elections in 2000 to expunge African-Americans from voter rolls is worth the price of the book. Palast tells us how Jeb’s gang reinstated Jim Crow laws in the New South by hiring a database firm with strong ties to the Texas Republican party to compare lists of voters with lists of felons and purge names from the rolls that “matched” in only the most tenous ways. Roughly 60,000 voters, most of them Black (because the prison archipelago in the United States imprisons mostly Blacks) were stripped of the fundamental right of voting. Why take blacks off the rolls? Because, as Palast notes, better than 9 in 10 Blacks vote for Democrats. He personalizes these facts in the person of a Black minister who had met and broken bread with Jeb Bush on numerous occasions. The minister showed up to vote at his local precinct where he had been voting for over 20 years and discovered that his name had vanished from rolls. Palast goes into stunning detail on how the scam was perpertrated and shows conclusively that the Bush camp stacked the deck well before the election. Further, he proves even under these circumstances that Gore actually won in Florida.
Palast reported this high-tech lynching of Black voters rights in the Guardian (funded by public monies) before the actual election. No mainstream American media picked up on the story. When the Washington Post finally reported it, they did so months later under the cover of the Federal Election Commisions investigation into the manipulation of the election. Slate, to its credit, picked up on the story and helped with hard work of investigating the chicanery in Florida in the immediate aftermath of the elections, but as Palast notes, Slate is not the New York Times, or the Washington Post. He shows in lurid detail how the Republican power structure, including of course, the Supreme Court, swung into action under the guidance of James Baker and ended the counting on the basis of the flimsiest of legalistic doctrine. He depicts the almost comical ineptitude of a Democratic Party as it tries to take on the Repulicans. While the Democrats play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, the Republicans play to win. Anti-nausea medicine is strongly recommended for this chapter.
Palast as a young activist attended lectures by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago to better understand this radical restatement of Adam Smith’s 18th century economic laws. In this regard Palast undoubtedly agrees with media historian Robert McChesney’s analysis of Milton Friedman’s faulty understand of democracy: “As Milton Friedman puts it in his seminal “Capitalism and Freedom,” because profit-making is the essence of democracy (!), any government that puruses antimarket policies is being anit-democratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy. [Under this logic] Therefore it is best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit polictical debate to minor issues.”
Palast is particularly angry at his peers in the media. At the same time he understands that they have very little freedom to report on anything that would pose a challenge to the values of the marketplace. He notes that it is only because the Guardian and the BBC is publicly funded can he explore venality and corruption in government and business. And by the way, he takes on the left as well as the right. His chapter on Tony Blair’s government and how cheaply it can be bought demonstrates that the influence of corporate money has become so pervasive that even so-called Liberals must feed at the trough in order to fund their expensive media campaigns. The Clintonites hated him, too.
But Palast’s work is invigorating, not demobilizing. The news he reports doesn’t invite fatalistic acceptance of a corrupt system, rather it invites activism. This is probably why he is feared on both sides of the aisle. Someday, he just might get people mad enough to do more than just stand up and say I’m not going to take it anymore, but to take the next step and take back their governments from the cynical oligarchy which equates speech with money, which believes that suffrage should be defined as one dollar, one vote instead of one person, one vote. 193 of 211 people found the following review helpful. His evidence on the 2000 Florida Presidential election voting process is both astonishing and terribly troubling.
Palast also offers clear documentary evidence that Blacks were racially profiled to be eliminated from voter rolls by Florida’s voter/felon purge. Essentially, at the behest of Katherine Harris, under Jeb Bush’s close watch, Florida systematically and intentionally denied voting rights to approximately 90,000 voters whose right to vote in Florida was legally unquestionable–and over 54% of them were Black. Since Florida Blacks voted 93% for Al Gore, Palast’s remarkably detailed book makes it perfectly evident that illegally purged Black votes prevented Florida from voting overwhelmingly for Al Gore and giving Gore the presidency.
Palast also demonstrates that the issue is not one of Black incompetence. Voting machines were set to accept double voted, and therefore uncountable, ballots in Black districts, while they were set to reject double voted ballots in White districts, so Whites could recast their ballots. In other counties with heavily Black populations, the automatic protection systems which reject double voted ballots were simply turned off to “reduce costs.”
So while Bush “won” the presidency on a 5-4 Supreme Court vote which said, essentially, that Americans don’t have the Constitutional right to vote for the President, something far more sacred was lost in the Florida voting process–the right of every eligible, adult American to have his or her vote counted and to have that vote determine who will lead our country. 68 of 72 people found the following review helpful. Chief among Palast’s exposés is the illegal manner in which Florida Secretary of State, Kathleen Harris, and Governor Jeb Bush illegally denied tens of thousands of African American citizens their right to vote in the 2000 presidential election in Florida. Palast details the methods used by Bush and Harris to exclude eligible African American from voting such as manipulating database records to wrongfully categorize thousands of African Americans as felons, or wrongfully claiming that convicted felons who has completed their sentences in other states could not vote in Florida.
Palast also exposes the presidential instructions from the Clinton and Bush (Jr.) administrations that forced dedicated FBI agents to ignore any leads to Saudi terrorists that implicated the Saudi royal family, or people from that region with influential ties to the U.S. government. When it came to investigating Saudi terrorist links, according to Palast, under Clinton investigators were ordered to turn a blind eye, while under bush they were ordered to shut both eyes. While both Clinton and Bush were concerned about alienating a key American ally in the Middle East, Palast demonstrates, that the latter took more excessive steps to suppress the investigation of Saudi terrorists, since many of them had tentative links to his own family business, including those who invested in his first oil company, Arbusto, and those-mainly members of the Bin Laden family-who sat with his father (the first President Bush) on the board of the Carlysle Group. Palast does not believe George W. Bush was complicit in the attacks of September 11th, but he argues that had Clinton and Bush Jr. not interfered in FBI anti-terrorist investigations, the attacks of September 11th might well have been prevented.
The most heartbreaking chapter of this book is the one that details how the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank work in concert to systematically destroy vulnerable countries. In nation after nation, Palast details the insidious four-step program these organizations employ ostensibly to provide aid to economically beleaguered nations, when in fact the opposite occurs. In the first step, on condition of providing aid, these organizations demand that countries privatize public infrastructure components such gas, electricity, and water. In the second step, powerful banks buy up the infrastructure components and immediately make them “more efficient” by laying off the bulk of their workers. In the third step, the financiers drastically raise the cost basic materials such as water to an unaffordable level. In the third step, riots predictably occur to protest unaffordable costs of basic living material, and in the fourth step, this becomes an excuse for capital flight, which in turn severely devalues these privatized components. The end result, according to Palast is a few banks and companies get richer from being handed a cost free monopoly that they can squeeze and then discard, while countries that once had a sustainable way of life are rendered destitute.
There are, of course some exceptions to this unhappy process. Botswana, for example, simply rejected the IMF altogether. When Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, did the same thing, according to Palast, he faced an American sponsored coup that was reinforced by false or nonexistent coverage in the American consolidated corporate media.
What might astound most readers is that predatory acts of privatization in the name of progress are not limited to vulnerable third world nations. In fact, corporate and financial moguls have preyed upon Europe and the United States with mixed results. When privatization of public water works sent prices up several hundred percent in Britain, the citizens of that country simply paid their bills. In San Diego California, however, consumers simply refused to pay their drastically marked up electric bills after that utility was deregulated. Instead, they effectively boycotted their own robbery by paying bills at the old rate and organizing a political movement around the process. Unlike Ecuador, where people were shot and beaten for protesting drastic hikes in the price of drinking water, San Diegans successfully opposed the scheme.
The implied conclusion of Palast’s research, as noted in the ironic title, is that America and global capitalism are hardly democratic. Their behavior, according to Palast’s example is frighteningly similar to that of a loan shark. No matter what they give you, they will always wind up extracting more than you can possibly return. As a result we may be on the verge of experiencing an odd form of historical determinism: the decent from capitalism, back to feudalism.
Be warned that much of that material in this book is depressing, as Palast readily acknowledges. But along side the corruption and abuses chronicled here are the stories of countless individuals who either oppose such practices or who covertly assist those who do so. At the end of the book Palast provides numerous resources for anyone who wants to help oppose predatory institutional practices in their communities or other parts of the world. |
The Last Reporter