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Watch Larry Diamond, co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, explain why he believes it can at the New York Democracy Forum:
Larry Diamond – “Can the Whole World Become Democratic?”
Watch this short documentary by Scott Kilman and Roger Thurow of the Wall Street Journal about Howard Buffett’s Crusade Against African Famine
“Warren Buffett’s son, Howard Buffett, takes on a surprising, little-known role on the front lines. Mr. Buffett travels from Ghana to Togo to Benin, trying to spread approaches to farming that he’s found successful on his Illinois farm.”
Watch economist Alex Tabarrok explain at the TED Talks why he believes that “the best is yet to come” for our planet, if we only get a few things right:
“The “dismal science” truly shines in this optimistic talk, as economist Alex Tabarrok argues free trade and globalization are shaping our once-divided world into a community of idea-sharing more healthy, happy and prosperous than anyone’s predictions.”
That is the subtitle of a new book by Dambisa Moyo: Dead Aid, which I highly recommend. Moyo knows the facts – and she knows Africa.
Watch her discuss about how we can make poverty history with development expert William Easterly at the Templeton Foundation
Paul Collier is Professor of Economics at Oxford University and Department Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies.
Watch him speak about his book “The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It”, in which he “outlines four traps that the poorest countries in the world can find themselves in: the trap of civil war, the trap of being landlocked, the trap of having abundant natural resouces, and the trap of having a bad government” and explains how they can escape these traps:
Hundreds of migrants feared drowned as boat sinks off Libya
Is there no way we can make sure that a human tragedy like this won’t ever happen again? I believe there is. And so does journalist and economist Phillippe Legrain. Watch him speak about his book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them on Ireland’s RTE2 (Part 1 / 2) or on Frost over the World.
Watch Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, debate his book The Spirit of Democracy – The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World, which I very strongly recommend to anyone interested in the science of democracy and democracy movements, with some researchers from Freedom House at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs:
Watch Gary Becker, Nobel Prize winner in economics, talk to African Liberty:
They not only hurt American consumers and tax payers, but many poor farmers around the world, as Nick Gillespie explains in this short Reason TV documentary:
Agricultural Subsidies – Corporate Welfare for Farmers
“U.S. farm programs cost taxpayers billions each year, significantly raise the price of commodities such as sugar, undermine world trade agreements, and contribute to the suffering of poor farmers around the world. It’s bad public policy, especially in these troubled economic times.”
Watch how Ghanaian economist George Ayittey “unleashes a torrent of controlled anger toward corrupt leaders in Africa” – he calls them the hippos! – “and calls on the Cheetah generation” – the young, open minded, freedom loving generation! – “to take back the continent” at the Ted Talks:
Listen to Tony Leon and Marian Tupy comment on Mugabe’s rule and the world’s reaction to it for the Washington Times:
Mugabe’s election theft and illegitimacy
“Mr. Mugabe’s economic policies and repression are responsible for widespread poverty, sickness and violence that have gripped Zimbabwe, and while his rule appears to be coming to an end, Zimbabwe’s story provides a somber lesson for the rest of the world. For too long, world leaders and international institutions have temporized with African dictators and accepted flawed elections as sources of incumbents’ legitimacy. “
Watch Swedish writer Johan Norberg, author of the classic study In Defense of Global Capitalism, travel around the globe and explain to you, why globalization is the only hope for the poor and why we don’t have enough of it:
“The world is an unequal and unjust place, in which some are born into wealth and some into hunger and misery. To explore why, in this controversial Channel Four documentary the young Swedish writer Johan Norberg takes the viewers on a journey to Taiwan, Vietnam, Kenya and Brussels to see the impact of globalisation, and the consequences of its absence. It makes the case that the problem in the world is not too much capitalism, globalisation and multinationals, but too little.”
…is really Robert Mugabe’s Cholera Crisis – as Alvaro Vargas Llosa explains.
“Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has been blaming the cholera epidemic that has already killed 1,100 people and may have infected 20,000 others, along with a famine that threatens another 5 million, on—who else?—Western colonialism. But both are of his own making…”
Last week, Jewish South African Helen Suzman died at the age of 91. All her life she fought for liberty, equality, democracy and markets.
SUZMAN FOUNDATION MOURNS THE PASSING AND CELEBRATES THE LIFE OF HELEN SUZMAN
Karol Boudreaux is a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, lead researcher for Enterprise Africa!, and a member of the Working Group on Property Rights of the U.N.’s Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor.
Listen to her speak about the importance of creating property rights in Africa and her experiences in Rwanda and South Africa with EconTalk host Russ Roberts:
Karol Boudreaux on Property Rights and Incentives in Africa
“In Rwanda, she studied how a change in incentives and property rights for coffee farmers has allowed the coffee bean growers to improve quality and prosper. In South Africa’s Langa Township, she looked at how renters were allowed to become homeowners and how the ability to own changed their lives.”
Watch this heartbreaking documentary by Leah Chishugi:
“Leah Chishugi, a nurse and survivor of the genocide in Rwanda, travels into the heart of eastern Congo to record the testimony of more than 400 women and girls abused by marauding militias.”
Christmas Message from Kerry Kay, MDC-T Secretary for Welfare: “Zimbabweans will not be going home to kumusha/ekhaya this Christmas for a joyous celebration with their families – there is no money, no food, no fuel. There are no medicines and little clean water – cholera and HIV/AIDS stalks every citizen. Instead they will, no doubt, be praying to their Almightly God for deliverance from the pervading evil.
Zimbabweans go into this supposedly joyful festive season with heavy hearts. Over 300 people are still missing, having been abducted pre and post elections. Over 220 have been brutally murdered in the same period of time. 30 more have been abducted since 15th September and are still missing. The pain in their families hearts is unimaginable. We must keep them in our prayers.”
Watch Lt. General Dallaire, Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, talk about his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda at Barnes & Noble:
Watch a short video by African Liberty in which they try to answer this crucial question:
Have you ever heard of British slave and torture camps in Kenya? If not, you are not the only one. The settlers’ propaganda machine did an impressing job of hiding them from the outside world…
Watch Caroline Elkins, a historian at Harvard University and author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, set the record straight:
Colonial War Crimes in Kenya: Prospects for Reconciliation
“After years of research in London and Kenya, including interviews with hundreds of Kenyans, settlers, and former British officials, Elkins has written the first book about the eight-year British war against the Mau Mau. She concludes that the war, one of the bloodiest and most protracted decolonization struggles of the past century, was anything but the ‘civilizing mission’ portrayed by British propagandists and settlers. Instead, Britain engaged in an amazingly brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that seemed to border on outright genocide. While only 32 white settlers were killed by Mau Mau insurgents, Elkins reports that tens of thousands of Kenyans were slaughtered, perhaps up to 300,000. The British also interned the entire 1.5 million population of Kikuyu, the colony’s largest ethnic group, in barbed-wire villages, forced-labour reserves where famine and disease ran rampant, and prison camps that Elkins describes as the Kenyan ‘Gulag.’ The Kikuyu were subjected to unimaginable torture, or ’screening’, as British officials called it, which included being whipped, beaten, sodomized, castrated, burned, and forced to eat feces and drink urine. British officials later destroyed almost all official records of the campaign.”
There is only one hope left for Zimbabwe… It’s people! And they got nothing left to lose.
Watch this short documentary by the Solidarity Peace Trust:
Watch or listen to Tony Gambino, former U.S. Agency for International Development mission director in the DRC, and Colin Thomas-Jensen, policy adviser for the ENOUGH Project, discuss this question with Mauro de Lorenzo from the American Enterprise Institute:
Chronic Crisis in Eastern Congo
“The escalation of fighting in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has brought one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises back to the attention of international policymakers. In response, the United Nations (UN) Security Council has authorized three thousand additional troops to reinforce the UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC. But even if additional forces can be generated, military might alone is unlikely to end the crisis. What are the underlying causes of the chronic crisis in Eastern Congo, and what further steps might policymakers take to create a lasting solution?”
Listen to Gloria Hammond, a pastor and medical doctor who chairs the Save Darfur Coalition, talk to NPR’s Faith Matters:
Doctor Brings ‘Ministry Of Healing’ To Darfur
“Rev. Gloria White Hammond, is determined to keep Darfur’s plight on the minds of Americans and U.S. policy makers. In this week’s Faith Matters, Hammond explains her passionate feelings about what is happening in Sudan.”
Many African countries have democratised their political systems without really liberalising them, Joshua Kurlantzick explains in a well-written and very informative article published by the Boston Globe :
Democratic doubt – What happens when political freedom unleashes epic violence?
Under the brutal reign of terror and slave labor instituted by King Leopold II of Belgium, who ran the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, the population of the Congo was reduced by half – as many as 11 million natives were killed, making it by far the biggest crime of its time and one of the worst in all of history.
Watch Adam Hochschild talk about his book, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa:
Miami Book Fair International – Author Discussion with Adam Hochschild
From Publishers Weekly: “Hochschild’s superb, engrossing chronicle focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century: greedy Belgian King Leopold II’s rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885. Until 1909, he used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and committ mass murder. The hero of Hochschild’s highly personal, even gossipy narrative is Liverpool shipping agent Edmund Morel, who, having stumbled on evidence of Leopold’s atrocities, became an investigative journalist and launched an international Congo reform movement with support from Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle.”
Watch Benjamin Powell, Alvaro Vargas Llosa and George Ayittey talk about their book, Making Poor Nations Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Economic Development, at the Independent Institute :
C-Span : Making Poor Nations Rich
“Why do some nations become rich while others remain poor? Traditional mainstream economic growth theory has done little to answer this question—during most of the twentieth century the theory focused on models that assumed growth was a simple function of labor, capital, and technology. Through a collection of case studies from Asia and Africa to Latin America and Europe, Making Poor Nations Rich argues for examining the critical role entrepreneurs and the institutional environment of private property rights and economic freedom play in economic development.”
Watch Bukeni Waruzi from Witness talk about the ongoing crisis in the DRC and why he believes that the world can and should help bring peace to this war-torn nation.
