Don’t be fooled by the apparent largesse of the world’s richest nations in writing off as much as $55 billion in debt — such generosity has serious strings attached which are not immediately apparent, hidden in the blinding glow of what is meant to look like such an angelic, benign act to the impoverished around the world. It is the 21st century equivalent of the late 19th century thoughts that dictated the British Empire.

Those up for the debt ‘reduction’ are the ones (just 18 of them) who are deemed west-friendly, and multi-national welcoming.

The misconception with Africa is that its collective plight is thanks to misrule. Certainly corruption is rife — but this is thanks to the multinationals taking all the materials out of the continent, virtually for free.

As the wonderful Naomi Klein wrote last week in the Guardian: “How about if Africa’s oil wealth was used to save Africa — along with its gas, diamond, gold, platinum, chromium, ferroalloy and coal wealth?”

Ms Klein noted that come this November it will be ten years since Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian government along with eight other Ogoni activists. “Their crime was daring to insist that Nigeria was not poor at all but rich, and that political decisions made in the interests of western multinational corporations kept its people in desperate poverty,” she wrote.

“Ten years later, 70% of Nigerians still live on less than $1 a day and Shell is still making superprofits. Equatorial Guinea, which has a major oil deal with ExxonMobil, ‘got to keep a mere 12% of the oil revenues in the first year of its contract’, according to a report on the CBS news programme 60 Minutes — a share so low it would have been scandalous even at the height of colonial oil pillage.

“This is what keeps Africa poor: not a lack of political will but the tremendous profitability of the current arrangement. Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place on earth, is also its most profitable investment destination. It offers, according to the World Bank’s 2003 Global Development Finance report, ‘the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world’. Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are so unspeakably rich.”

If Africans could look west, they should gain inspiration from the ongoing revolts in Bolivia that have arisen thanks to multinationals trying to loot the nation of its gas wealth. Click here for our recent report on Bolivia.

The poorest countries in the world owe money to individual countries, the private sector and to institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Debts to multilateral institutions account for approximately one-quarter of total debt. Whatever debt is forgiven will be reimbursed in some form so that the solvency of the institutions is not threatened. Commentators have predicted that the total benefit to poor countries could be as low as $500 million a year, which is equivalent to five days debt repayments.

More grandiose talk of doubling African aid from wealthy countries to $50 billion under the existing Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative (HIPC) ‘over the next three years’ is to be paid for through a scheme devised by British finance secretary Gordon Brown, known as the International Finance Facility. This would fund debt relief by issuing bonds on the international markets, backed by government aid promises. In effect, it is a mortgage on future aid payments with guaranteed returns for investors and produces no real new money. A proposed moratorium on debt repayment is only to operate until 2015. After that, the countries concerned will still have to pay off 60 to 70 percent of what will then be a much larger debt.

In return, debtor countries have to agree to demands that all major economic and social projects be “built and delivered in conjunction with the private sector.” They must also accept the introduction of means testing in place of universal welfare provision.

None of the G7 countries come close to the UN stated goal of providing 0.7% of GDP to aid payments. This latest $55 billion effort is merely a promissory note to maintain economic control over the Dark Continent for years to come. $55 billion is barely a quarter of what has been spent on the war in Iraq thus far. Imperialism, whether it be by economic or military means, is just as strong today as it was 130 years ago — it’s just hidden better.

• D’oh. Many of this season’s must have fashion accessories —the white rubber wristband supporting the Make Poverty History campaign worn by those who like to pay a pound to charity and literally show off their huge generosity on their sleeves — have been manufactured in Chinese sweatshops flouting international and even Chinese wage laws with workers being paid as little as 9 pence an hour to knock out these conscience-improving items.

Remoulding Ronald McDonald into a paragon of fitness and nutrition is like trumpeting George Bush for his environmental and diplomatic skills. Yet that is what the people at the Golden Arches have decided to do without a hint of irony. Shortly they will unveil in a massive global ads campaign a slim line, sporty Ronald McDonald, in a desperate attempt to woo back customers.

Gone are the baggy clown clothes to be replaced by a sportier look for the fast food mascot that has represented McDonald’s for 42 of its 50 years.

Ronald McDonald, the Pied Piper of obesity, will be shown snowboarding, juggling vegetables and even playing basketball with NBA superstar Yao Ming.

In a statement, the company said Ronald McDonald is now "a global ambassador of fun, fitness and children’s well-being". The parents of 10 million American children might disagree with this lie.

For McDonald’s, which has seen its stock plunge 16 per cent since March, there’s hope their mascot’s slimmer waistline might translate into a fatter bottom line.

Following much adverse publicity, especially from Morgan Spurlock’s barf-inducing documentary Super Size Me sales have fallen dramatically at the world’s largest fast food chain, prompting the burger giant to bring out new, seemingly healthier items on their menu such as salads. However closer inspection of said salads and more specifically the ‘creamy’ dressings that accompany them show they are just as bad as the fabled Big Macs.

Just look at the calories you snarf down each time you enter the Golden Arches by clicking here. Pretty alarming isn’t it? Something as seemingly inconsequential as a Happy Meal takes up your daily recommended calorie intake and worse still leaves you hungry shortly after you have wolfed it down.

For all that’s wrong with Ronald, let the mighty McSpotlight tell you in detail. For more of our own scribblings about junk food and McDonald’s click here. And finally let’s quickly remind you of that lovely tune Ronald f***cking McDonald from a month or two ago.

The little red email has continued this week its personal environmental testing, having found out in the last issue that my global or ecological footprint is 4.9 planets — i.e. if everyone lived like me we would need close to five planet Earths for all the resources we would use up. This time round we have been measuring carbon dioxide emissions and the results are just as depressing for someone who likes to preach the art of being green.

The other day I flew from Hong Kong to Glasgow return. I have just learnt that this used up 2.11 tonnes of CO2 for just me, one single passenger. A glance at my rather busy passport shows that I have been accumulating a whole load of carbon dioxide emissions to go with the stamps. For that trip to Blighty though I can redeem myself according to the excellent Future Forests website by planting three trees. Try it for yourself, it might change the way you live. The message is plant what you plunder.

One single short haul flight produces roughly the same amount of the global warming gas as three months worth of driving a 1.4 litre car, according to Future Forests. Since none of the little red email staff drives there is some small consolation for us.

A more comprehensive carbon emissions test can be found at the brilliant Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management. Meanwhile, if you go over to this here website you will be able to see what each nation and region contributes in terms of CO2 emissions. For instance, take the UK, accounting for 1% of global population Great Britain is responsible for 2.3% of global emissions and a lot of irate Scandinavians getting hot and wet thanks to acid rain.

One more wacky way to reduce CO2 that we have read about this week hails from Britain where bus company Stagecoach has fitted a trial bus in Winchester with a tank containing sheep urine which is sprayed into exhaust fumes to reduce the level of nitrous oxide reduced.

The urine is collected by the fertiliser industry from farmyard waste and refined into pure urea, which is then sold on to be used in the green engine technology.

Ammonia from the urea reacts with nitrous oxides in the exhaust fumes and converts them to nitrogen gas and water, which is released as steam. A wacky idea certainly but it is this type of clever recycling that we must get more savvy about now that the world’s resources have peaked while the global population continues to explode and climates fluctuate.

There is so much you and I can do to reduce our emissions down to say a tonne of C02 a year. For instance, did you know that 95% of the energy used by the UK’s mobile phone chargers is wasted energy? Only 5% is actually used to charge phones, the rest is used when the charger is plugged into the wall but not switched off at the socket. That’s over 50,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions that could be avoided if we all just unplugged our chargers after use — the equivalent of almost 500 football pitches worth of forest every year.

Click here and here for some remarkable easy, cheap tips that might help your grandkids breath for a bit longer. Now, where’s that garden store for the tree saplings?

Editor’s note: In recent weeks, little red email correspondent Yahuda Bangs had become fixated with the yoga studio adverts covering the entire first section of the midlevels escalator.

He seemed to take particular offence with the life-sized portraits showing locally famous yogi “Master Kamal” performing some impossible feet of flexibility while large yellow letters beneath tout the “sexiness” of yoga.

When Yahuda wrote promising to “take that yoga Svengali down a notch”, we assumed that he intended to write an editorial about the cheap commercialization of Yoga. Apparently, he had something else in mind, as late last week Mr Bangs (likely spurred on by a bad reaction to recently prescribed experimental medications to combat the Attention Deficit Disorder for which he is famous) burst into a packed Ashtanga Yoga class being taught by Master Kamal and challenged the master to a “yoga battle”.

According to the accounts of horrified students, our correspondent strutted around the classroom shouting things like “I AM THE MOST SERENE” and “FEEL MY PRANAYAMA AND KNOW PAIN” before running like a crazed linebacker towards the front of the class. But before Bangs could reach Kamal (we assume this was his intent), he slipped on a sweaty yoga mat and landed head first, putting himself into a coma from which he has yet to recover. Thus, this week’s Angry American Abroad column on the subject "has yoga become too commercialized?" has been guest-written by Sylvia Bangs, Yahuda’s mother, who has flown into Hong Kong to assist in her son’s recovery.

… Is this thing on? Oy! I tell you, my son… who does he think he is trying to attack a man who by the looks of it can balance his entire body weight on his penis? Meshugga, and you should be ashamed for encouraging him! Canned Revolution? Who every heard of such a thing?

But I understand why he got upset in the first place; my Yahuda has always been a sensitive boy. And this block-long advertisement that runs up the entire escalator? Such dreck! Using sex to sell yoga? Feh…listen bubbie, I know a thing or two. You can’t tell to look at me today, but many years ago, before I met my darling late husband, Mordechai Bangs (God rest his soul!), I was the top-earning exotic dancer at very swank club in the meatpacking district of New York City. I remember the first thing the manager told me the night he hired me… “Sylvia,” he said “these men are here for one thing, tits and lap-dances. And that is what you are selling, but you must never admit it.” And so I learned the meaning of a word apparently not in this so-called “Master” Kamal’s dictionary, namely subtlety. A suggestive wiggle here, a wink there…

But this Kamal person, every six feet with his almost naked picture, posing and flexing and stretching and prancing? What, he learned some yoga and now he thinks he’s a Mapplethorpe model? Please! Such dreck. And on the other side is the advertisement for something called “hot yoga”? In the old days we called this torture, now someone is getting rich by making people exercise in a hot room? Meshugga!

And that’s another thing… I understand that behind all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo, some of these yoga people are cutthroat businesspeople, driving around in Rolls Royce Limousines and wearing million-dollar Rolex watches. Such a sham I tell you! But I’m just an old woman with silicone implants; nobody listens to a person like me. Anyway, I have the jet lag, and I can’t find the Fox channel on my son’s television so I’m going to stop writing now. And you should all be ashamed of yourselves for encouraging my Yahuda to be a bum! You can rot in hell for all I care…

Yahuda Bangs’ blog is at ybaaa.blogspot.com write him at yahuda.bangs@gmail.com. Maybe he’ll write back if he regains consciousness.

Effective July 24 the last of the three Canned Revolution founders to be enslaved to a corporation will be released to do his own thing. The issue of corporations and de facto slavery / imprisonment was brought up at the recent annual meeting of the British trade union GMB who demanded that warehouses supplying supermarkets across the UK stop using electronic tags to track their employees’ movements so as not to create “battery farm” style workplaces. We were always worried about the corporates tracking our emails (let alone our elongated expense bills — how we will miss that corporate Amex card!) but tagging devices is truly dictatorial, enslaving thousands to faceless corporations.

“The GMB is no Luddite organisation but we will not stand idly by to see our members reduced to automatons,” Paul Kenny, the GMB’s acting general secretary said. “The use of this technology needs to be redesigned to be an aide to the worker rather than making the worker its slave. The supermarkets that rely on just in time shelf filling rather than holding buffer stocks are incredibly profitable companies. They can well afford to operate a humanized supply chain. They should do so quickly otherwise the GMB will ensure that the shelves do not get filled.”

A report produced for the union found the warehouses are using a variety of wearable devices. Some consist of computers worn on the arm and finger and are linked to local area radio networks and to GPS systems.

“Orders from shops are beamed to warehouses workers wearing these devices to tell them which goods to pick in different parts of the warehouses, for dispatch to top up the shelves,” the report states. “The only role for the worker is to do as the computer order requires. These devices calculate how long it takes to go from one part of the warehouse to the other and what breaks the workers need and how long they need to go to the toilet. Any deviation from these times is not tolerated. In effect these devices to dispatch goods to supermarkets and shops have made workers the aid to the computer rather than the other way round. The only functions that the human do are the bits that have not yet been automated.”

GMB national officer Paul Campbell said up to 10,000 workers in the UK were now affected by tagging, but many were not prepared to co-operate and were resigning, some within hours of being told to wear tags.

Never forget: they’re watching you. Sure stacking shelves is a fairly brainless type of job, we’ve done it to earn cash in summers of yore, but to go to these automation lengths is disgraceful — as such treating humans like robots.

US-based Venture Development forecasts that global shipments of wearable computers will reach about $563m (€459m) in 2006. We’re well out of this whole being employed lark!

Oil contracts are among the most evil documents in the world. We have read this past week of one of the worst ever — between the nasty Sudanese government and a now British citizen for drilling rights in the torn asunder region of Darfur. Friedhelm Eronat is the mysterious millionaire who has signed a pact with the evil Khartoum government who have authorized the pillaging and destruction of hundreds of thousands of households in the southwest of Sudan since 2003.

The disclosure by Britain’s Channel 4 News was greeted with outrage by human rights campaigners. “From a moral point of view these people are paying a government whose senior members may end up in front of the international criminal court for war crimes,” Simon Taylor, director of Global Witness, said yesterday.

A London representative of the Darfur rebels called for oil exploration to stop until there was a peace settlement. “The only beneficiaries are the ruling elite,” Ahmad Hussein Adam told Channel 4 news. “This is going to support their military campaign against our people.”

Eronat, who lives in a £20m house in Chelsea, swapped his US passport for a British one shortly before the deal was signed with the Sudan regime in October 2003 since American citizens can not deal with Sudan thanks to sanctions in place since 1997.

Showing what a human rights horror of a deal this pact is, it emerges that Eronat and his offshore firm, Cliveden Group, is likely to have been acting on behalf of the Chinese, with the mainland’s two state run oil giants given an option to buy 50% of Eronat’s newly acquired stake in the Darfur field.

Cliveden Sudan now has the biggest share in a concession granted by Khartoum called Block C. It is almost as big as Scotland arcing across South Darfur and down into southern Sudan.

The agreement runs for 25 years. And that the consortium which includes Cliveden will — once oil is produced — pay up to $8m in bonuses to the pariah Khartoum government.

The document seen by Channel 4 News also shows how they will share the profits — starting with 70% to the government of Sudan and 13% for Cliveden Sudan.

Showing just what a lovely chap he is, Global Witness last year charged Eronat as being the owner of a Swiss company allegedly used as a conduit to pass millions of dollars from Mobil Oil to the president of Kazakhstan.

For the full transcripts of the Channel 4 exclusive click here.

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

If you fancy your luck, on the other hand…
You could try our latest competition! Yes, that’s right: another chance to be cool for free. Head on over to here to try your luck in our latest revolutionary contest.

 

Bush calls kettle black
In what has become a monthly session with reporters, Bush called “absurd” the AI report condemning the US’ treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
“It seemed to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America , people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth,” Bush said.
Retarded English aside (disassemble?!?), Bush’s accusations sound not unlike a certain world leader the little red email could mention and his “intelligence” sources that told him Iraq was chock-full of WMDs. Ah the delicious irony!

 

Fresh leaks from Downing Street
From monthly US presidential press briefings we move on to the now weekly UK government leaks. The Sunday Times should really start to think about making their weekly “they lied to us” leak into a regular column. This week’s memo story revealed that UK ministers were told they had to find an excuse to invade and occupy the world’s second largest oil reserves for the third time in a hundred years, according to The Sunday Times.
The little red email confesses to not being too sure what to make of this — evidently either Prime Muppet Fozzie Blair has annoyed Rupert Murdoch, or Gordon Brown is trying to hasten his departure. Perhaps both. Or perhaps this is an experiment designed to prove once and for all that most people in the UK don’t care that they were lied to as long as they find out after the troops have already invaded. Surely they needn’t have bothered? A cursory glance through history that takes in the unprovoked attack on the US in the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the dreadful Polish invasion of a poor unsuspecting Third Reich should have settled that without all the fuss.

 

New dictionary terms
It’s official — “Chav” is now in the dictionary.

 

Exxon dictates US’ Kyoto policy
Whitehouse staffer Philip A Cooney, who came to the Bush administration from being a lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute, has apparently been muffling the global warming alarm bells on behalf of the Energy lobby and his entirely-coincidentally-connected-big-oil-business bosses. What a surprise. Which may be why the UK is reportedly frustrated by the US’ ostrich-like attitude to the subject of G8 climate talks.

 

Yet more investigations into why twin towers fell
This look at the towers’ collapse brought an interesting little anomaly the little red email had previous missed: photos of a woman standing at the hole in the WTC on floor 94 (see pages 62 an 105 of this NIST PDF). These floors are supposedly so hot (thanks to 10,000 gallons of jet fuel) that steel was busily melting enough to cause the whole structure to collapse. All in all rather curious.

 

As if “Strap-on” John at the UN wasnt weird enough…
…take a gander at his replacement in the post of Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, Robert G. Joseph. This is a move akin to putting an alcoholic in charge of prohibition. According to Tom Barry, policy director of the International Relations Center:
“Before the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, proponents of national missile defense and a more ‘flexible’ nuclear defense strategy focused almost exclusively on the WMD threat from ‘competitor’ states such as Russia and especially China, and from ‘rogue’ states such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea.
Joseph and other hard-line strategists advocated large increases in military spending to counter these threats while paying little or no attention to the warnings that the most likely attack on the United States and its armed forces abroad would come from non-state terrorist networks.”

 

Hockey with Jules Winnfield
The Ice hockey coach in this short film seems rather familiar, but we can’t quite place him.

 

Talking of sports: an interesting Beijing 2008 fact
Few newspapers or architects mention the grand boulevard intended to connect the Olympic village to Beijing’s historic centre.
It is being designed by Albert Speer, a well-respected architect but also the son and namesake of the man who built Nazi Berlin, including a similar boulevard for the 1936 Olympics. Will there be a junior Riefenstahl doing the official film, with Hu Jintao descending from the clouds in a JU-52?

 

Norwegian Army’s findings on Kosovo & the UN
A hard-hitting view of the whole morass from Norway’s Military Police on the ground.

 

Calling all adbusters
This week’s adbust — Nemo Sushi from banane.be — is a slightly tenuous adbust, but a fairly topical piece given the continuing scandal surrounding Hong Kong Disneyland’s continuing pledge to serve shark’s fin soup at their hotel:

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

Christ for hired killers
If Yahuda Bangs thought the Yoga guy was out of line, wait until he gets a load of these boys: Force Ministries. We suspect the old “Thou shalt not kill” rule and the big JC’s “turn the other cheek” teachings are going to take a bit of a back seat in the sermons, as they’d be a bit of a tough sell here. Indeed the whole “What Would Jesus Do?” question would be best skipped over for this flock. The little red email has often speculated that perhaps the reason why American right-wingers are so angry and humourless is the fact that they profess to worship and emulate a guy who was an outstanding example of a wishy-washy, long-haired, peacenik, pinko, liberal, communist hippy. In short — everything they hate: it’s got to irk them somewhat.

 

Of the summoning of UFO’s, turbans, the Prophet Yaweh and matters cognate
Well after a little mainstream hypocrisy, let’s get down to the really weird. Prophet Yahweh has resurrected the lost, ancient art of summoning UFOs and actual spaceships on command. Over 1,000 sightings have appeared to him since 1979. The Prophet Yaweh’s direct contact with the angels of YAHWEH apparently did not stop his site from being sabotaged, or indeed warn him about it. Still, no one said this omniscient gig was going to be easy. Join him at his new site if you dare — but don’t blame us if you end up at a bring-your-own-poison suicide party with a glass of “cool-aid” in your hand surrounded by people shouting “Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!”.

 

The Little Red Email Osama bin Laden Sweepstakes Shirt Contest!
Don’t forget: if you fancy a free Canned Revolution t-shirt, you can win one by simply guessing the date of Osama’s media debut as a US prisoner. Send your expected date of bin Laden’s first television appearance as an American prisoner to osamasweepstakes@cannedrevolution.com.