Police State Economics

What have we learned from the economic crisis? That we live in the the tightening web of a police state. That contingencies for this period have been put in place since the Clinton era. We kno that between Bill Maher, Arianna Huffington and Paul Krugman, the liberals continue to get it wrong. We kno that liberal politicians lack the resolve to put away the GOP, because that means liquidating their relationship to finance bankers who manipulated us into this crisis.

The liberal reactionary police state leaves us to ponder such philosophical questions as Eliot Spitzer. He was run out of office on ethics violations last year. So did the former governor and attorney general of New York spill the beans on the Federal Reserve because he got deposed or was he discredited in office to preempt his expose of the Fed? Spitzer recently said that the Federal Reserve is a “Ponzi scheme” that created “bubble after bubble” in the US economy and needs to be held accountable for its actions. Nobody can really say Spitzer is lying, but for millions of fence sitters, the ethics violations put him in a trick bag.

Another casualty of the financial crisis, hundreds of individual retirement accounts (IRAs) set up thru Fiserv lost over $1 billion from just three Ponzi schemes. One law professor said that tapping into IRAs “would be almost like running your Ponzi scheme through the police department.” Simple enuf, since the police remain busy arresting black Harvard professors for breaking into their own homes.

Police state, bitches. As in the arrest of  Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. As in the conviction and imprisonment of NPDUM organizer Ajamu Bandele. Or the execution of Oscar Grant on a BART platform. Police state, operating in a tightening web of economic foils and snags, designed to take down African people.

Some people shouldn’t even be able to own homes, let alone nice ones in blended communities. Because as the skyrocketing mortgage fraud pushes a new trend towards abandoned cities and homeless families the need for police increases. With only three percent of the world population and twenty-five percent of its prison population, the United States has anticipated the period of social turmoil headed our way.

Indeed, the Oreo prez blinks, wavers, swerves in a racist game of chicken, one gut check away from at least letting us think he thinks for himself. Skippy Gates, whose mission to “de-ghettoize black studies”, left himself as the only black scholar working on his project. But black folks kno why we came to his side when the pigs jumped him, and we will do it again. African people must no longer support neo-colonialism, yet we will always fight against racist, bloodsucking Imperialism.

Police state in the for-profit System. People get the opportunity to sue when it messes up your lives. That is supposed to provide a modicum of satisfaction. In a perfectly flawed System that eradicates our existence as social beings, suing cannot even be considered a form of reparative justice. You need to rise up. The ruling class knows that. You just aint copping to it. Wake up, people.

Martellus Bennett: Cooning for America

Dallas Cowboy’s Video Shows

Disrespect to Civil Rights Leaders

 (link) 

 

 

 

12:31 PM CDT on Thursday, July 16, 2009  

Column by JEAN-JACQUES TAYLOR / The Dallas Morning News | jjtaylor@dallasnews.com

• E-mail

Martellus Bennett doesn’t care what you think.

Not one bit.

He doesn’t care what the Cowboys think either, so don’t feel bad. Actually, he doesn’t care what anyone thinks.

It’s obvious.

At one level that’s not a bad thing. You have to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything, as the saying goes. And you certainly can’t go through life trying to please other folks because you’ll never be able to do it.

But Bennett should have more respect for the sacrifices that tens of thousands of African-Americans have made so that he can do and say whatever foolish things he wants on MartyB TV.

Not just the sacrifices by people we hear about all of the time, such as Rosa Parks, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Chaney, but the anonymous folks who held sit-ins and organized marches and protests so that my kids can splash around freely at Cedar Hill’s Uptown Village on a muggy Sunday afternoon with a kaleidoscope of races.

Clearly, Bennett lacks this respect.

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You know what’s sad? Marty B isn’t a bad person. He’s a likable guy with charisma who could be doing something considerably more creative than videotaping what he called a “Black Olympics” – a fried chicken-eating, watermelon-eating and Kool-Aid-drinking contest with his brother – and putting it on YouTube for the world to see.

He’s just young and dumb.

Don’t get it twisted, because I’m not talking about Bennett’s intelligence. He’s a smart guy who does dumb things. This isn’t the first one. Trust me, it won’t be the last.

Cowboys PR director Rich Dalrymple must walk into his office each morning wondering if Bennett has left some mess he’ll be forced to spend a chunk of the day answering questions about.

The Cowboys already fined Bennett once for releasing a profanity-filled rap video on YouTube, but the fine was later reduced.

But when you’re young and rich it’s easy to give folks the finger. When your superior athleticism has caused you to be coddled much of your life, it’s easy to make light of stereotypes.

Now, some of you will ask what’s the big deal with the video because you found it amusing. Or harmless.

You’ll talk about how Barack Obama being the first African-American president is an indication of how far our country has come, which is true but we have so much further to go.

You’ll say Bennett was just having a little fun. You’ll say I just need to get over it.

Whatever.

I’m sensitive to the issue because my parents grew up in Nashville, Tenn., during the height of the civil rights movement. I heard stories about water fountains marked “white” and “colored.” I heard stories about movie theaters with segregated sections.

To me, the civil rights movement is real ­ not something that happened 100 years ago, seen today only on black-and-white images inside a dusty picture frame on a fireplace mantle. To me, the civil rights movement is more than a PBS special or an HBO documentary.

To me, it’s about real people.

Perhaps Bennett doesn’t realize the civil rights movement was just a generation ago for many of us. Two generations at the most.

Maybe he doesn’t realize that forced busing and desegregation were combustible issues in Dallas in the early ’70s when the Cowboys were shedding their reputation as next year’s champions and winning their first Super Bowl.

He probably doesn’t know Hall of Fame cornerback Mel Renfro filed a civil suit against the city of Dallas in the late ’60s because he couldn’t buy a house in a certain part of town.

We’re still talking about a country where many African-American families are celebrating their first generation of college graduates. Is there more opportunity than ever for African-Americans to succeed? Of course, but let’s not act like discrimination doesn’t exist.

That’s just dumb – kind of like Bennett’s video about the Black Olympics.

 

 

AFRICOM, Peace and Obama

Pushing AFRICOM while preaching that war is a millstone around Africa’s neck, US Prez Barack Obama made a historic journey to Ghana this past friday. Among Obama’s controversial statements, he also said that Africa should stop blaming colonialism for her problems. Obama, black on the outside, imperialist on the inside, arrived in Africa like somewhat of a conquering hero handing down his edicts to the disheveled subjects of his realm.

Tho destabilized, Africa is a community more than a continent; our historic Motherland represents for us a nation, tho fragmented. It is the unfulfilled aspiration of African people to become internationally united and to break the unprincipled relationships that Imperialism has imposed upon us.

Jubilation seems to rise across the African continent as the first black president of the United States made a visit to Ghana. A bout of jealousy tempered this jubilation as Kenyans and Nigerians expressed their feelings of having been snubbed. At the same time, the broad masses of Africans remain emotionally detached from the Obama visit. However, they cannot remain politically detached, because Obama’s visit brings the worst kind of news for every day toiling people.

According to Patrick Morris, Chief Executive Officer of Gold Star Resources Corp. (TSX-V; GXX; OTC Bulletin Board: GXXFF; http://www.goldstarresources.com), “The U.S. Department of Energy has already confirmed that the United States will be importing over 770 million barrels of African oil annually by the year 2020. The U.S. National Intelligence Council is projecting that 25 percent of U.S. oil imports will come from West Africa by 2015 compared to 15% today. My own professional experience tells me that the political stability of Ghana’s government, a credible democratic political party system, and a positive investment environment all favor closer ties to Ghanaians by the Obama White House.”

Oil production has stagnated the economies of countries like the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and others. While those countries are cash rich, they have little infrastructure development and rely almost entirely upon imports for everything from low-tech to hi-tech to basic food stuff and even water. This is what is known as monoculture, the development of a single cash intensive resource as a sector burdened with sustaining an entire national economy.

With Africa now becoming the number one exporter of oil exports to the US, the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) becomes increasingly important for this country to stave off or monopolize competition from China, India and the EU.

Monoculture branded the slavery of Africa, from that of the colonial/slave system to the post-colonial era. Neo-colonialist micro-states provide nothing except raw material to the West, at the expense of IMF/World Bank debt and a massive brain drain. What Africans on both sides of the Atlantic fail to understand is that neo-colonialism in the greatest seat of power on earth is still Imperialism.

Bottom Line about the Economy

Now the latest hype about the global economic situation involves the debate about what has caused it rather than what is actually taking place. Working class people must exercise some critical thinking, because this ruse intends to keep them in the dark. Since black folks are linked into the global economy just like anybody else, we need to get our heads out of the soaps and churches and anywhere else that does not help us gain clarity and substance on this issue.

The economists are inventing red herrings like the “global savings glut”. This is nonsense. Who believes that money can be earned thru saving? In terms of working class folks, it makes little sense to save, since inflation eats up savings. The annual 3% inflation rate results in only a 1% yearly savings on your money, if banked. Outside of the industrialized countries, there is no return because inflation is much steeper. If you are a middle class person trying to save, your higher education is not paying off.

Not only that, but the Savings & Loans crisis of the Eighties and Nineties definitely scared the US public away from savings and stampeded them towards more sophisticated types of swindles, such as retirement plans based upon 401k and KEOGHs. Just because an activity is approved by Congress, and filled with volumes of small type that only a lawyer can understand, does not make it honest. No black worker has any business playing the stock market without knowing the dollar value of one point on the DJIA or having $250k to throw away in a money-manager fund. ‘Investment’ means only fools leverage all their assets on a gamble.

So if the economists were discussing stock-based retirement funds as a form of savings, consider that misinformation. The New York Review of Books and PEN World Voices presented a symposium on the world economic crisis at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 30. At that time, the idea was proposed that savings had driven down interests rates when, in fact, the Fed and the European Common Bank (ECB) themselves dictate interest rates. Not only that, North America and Europe in no way represent the globe.

It is important to repudiate any notion which dismisses the theory that the ruling class manipulated the financial system for their own benefit. The theory proposed by the symposium flies in the face of every scandal from Enron to Bernie Madoff. It contradicts the events which demanded welfare (bail outs?) for the banks.

Folks must not be duped by the highly esteemed panelists at that event, former senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells, and Jeff Madrick as moderator. Not one of them has an analysis which serves the interests of the millions of people who form the basis of the US domestic economy; not one of them even speaks the language of every day people.

When the banks pressed the Fed to raise interest rates, this became the primary trigger for the financial meltdown. While most folks think of the banks as finance institutions, the bank is a tool for making money. It is an instrument for concentrating money. Concentrated money becomes capital. Working class people lack capital. They sell their labor for a wage. Capitalists do not earn wages. They make money not thru labor or savings but by skimming value from what labor produces.

If ten laborers in a gold mine work together to extract one ton of gold daily which has a value of $900 per ounce, not one of them makes $900 per day, or even half of that. Even if their combined labor only extracts ten pounds of gold a day, who gets the money? The workers do not earn enuf to save. The value of the gold gets concentrated at the top of the chain, by people who trade paper with a value printed upon it, in exchange for the real value that has been extracted from the mine. This practice prevails thru out the bloodsucking capitalist system, where a few people live exorbitantly upon the backs of five billion working people worldwide.

This paper money has a value assigned to it. This value can be manipulated easier than anything else. After all, the paper has no real value! Today, one dollar may be as strong as yesterday’s ten dollar bill; tomorrow, that same one dollar note may be devalued so that it is only worth five cents. Entire societies remain at risk as a worker in this type of system.

So the monies the panelists claimed were tied up in savings actually were being poured into a volatile market, the stock market, another place ruled by paper tigers. Over the last thirty years, real wages failed to keep pace with inflation and the cost of living. Working people lacked the ability to save. However, amid the fears that Social Security would dry up before they could retire, they put a few hard earned extra dollars into stock-based retirement funds. Human relations managers and other company officials pulled their workers off assembly lines to sell them pyramid and ponzi schemes called a KEOGH or IRA or 401k Plan. These talks sounded something like the average MLM hustle, where the guy at the top of the chain makes all the money and the suckers who bought into it are left holding the bag. That is precisely what happened in instances such as MCI-Worldcom, Tyco, Enron, and others all the way thru the  Madoff scandal. These were all multi-billion dollar scams.

Now, this symposium happened in April. Do not forget, several weeks earlier, pretty much the same crew had called for the goverrnment to nationalize the banks. Their analysis continues shifting, while the causes for this period of voodoo economics involve financial manipulation, pure and simple. Prior to the curveball idea about interest rates being dictated by savings, the pundits said that the financial crunch happened because people were living on debt, another shattered theory.

People were indeed living on debt, yet that is not the reason for the crisis. People were forced to live on debt because wages did not keep pace with rising costs. Remember the old adage: “When creditors enforce collections, that results in market corrections.” So for folks living in debt, their very existence has become manipulated by those who control wages and prices. Stay tuned to the media, because within the next few weeks they will cook up a new rationale for the problems they continue heaping on the backs of poor and working people.

South Africa’s Reserve Bank Mandate

Reserve Bank mandate must be reviewed

26 May 2009

The Young Communist League of South Africa (uFasimba) fully supports NUMSA’s mass action to the Reserve Bank to demand the scrapping of the inflation targeting policy, cutting of interest’s rates and prioritisation of jobs creation, growth and sustainable development.

The YCLSA strongly believes that the strategic mandate and focus of Reserve Bank should be reviewed and be redefined to focus on job creation and to mitigate the impact of the global and capitalist meltdown crisis now being felt by ordinary South Africans. In South Africa, thousands of jobs are being lost and families are losing breadwinners, cars and houses are being repossessed by the Capitalist Banks as a result of capitalist financial crisis. The inflation targeting framework underpinned by capitalist principles and logic has failed to address the developmental needs of our country.

The Reserve Bank should be playing a key strategic role in job creation and meeting the demands of the working class and the poor within the overall political economy geared towards reversing the colonial and apartheid legacy. The growing inequalities and unemployment poses a major social and economic crisis not for new Jacob Zuma led administration, but also for the Reserve Bank.

As the YCLSA we demand that the Reserve Bank should not assume a posture or seek to be a ‘cartel’ to serve the interests of capital, but we need a Reserve Bank that focuses on quality job creation and poverty eradication. The policies of the Reserve Bank must be aligned to the objectives of the developmental State and agenda. This is totally in sync with the policies adopted at the watershed 52^nd National Congress of the ANC in 2007, the various Alliance summits and incorporated into the ANC led Alliance elections manifesto and now adopted by government led by President Zuma.

Issued by YCLSA

Contact:

Castro Ngobese

YCLSA National Spokesperson @ 082 567 3557

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Ubuntu: Clean Water for Africa

Tags

bloodsucking, Dranunculiasis, guinea worm, Jimmy Carter, parasite, scolex, Water

Water, Capitalism and Africans

Ubuntu is a Zulu word meaning “humanness.” In Pan Africanism we call this quality “humanism” but it is even more down-to-earth among the Bantu. You can find examples of what is called ubuntu thru out Africa, not just among the Zulu. Almost all Africans have some version of it. It is a quality which must be used to bring us together both as Africans and as human beings across this planet.

So I have begun my own quest for spreading it globally. On FaceBook, I joined Sherekea Clean Water Project to recruit everyone of my friends to join. Having clean water in the Motherland is important. I think it is a key component to bringing peace there and slowing the depredations of capitalism.

A few words about the most important substance in creation. Water cannot be found just lying around unless it is trapped. Gravity alone is not enuf to keep water in one place; it will evaporate or precipitate out of the sky. Water erodes the hardest stone and bursts the strongest container. Water moves; water is the substance of life and that is why it moves and that’s why it is the most precious substance on earth.

And movement is the inherent tendency of all living things. To defy the conditions of a life’s existence, to spread life as far and wide as possible, we kno that life just isn‘t possible without access to water. But aint enuf water on moon or Mars to sustain life as we kno it and love it. Whitey might be on the moon, but we can’t get clean, accessible water in Africa, the place where humanity and civilization began.

So after joining FaceBook, I started blitzing for folks to join Sherekea Clean Water Project. It’s quite an addiction of mine, and this blog has suffered for it. I apologize to my readers, who expect original stuff. Well, this is part of it.

Dranunculiasis or guinea worm is one disgusting parasite (see pic, below). It is a nematode which enters the human body thru microscopic crustaceans. There it usually matures and migrates to the foot, where it creates an ulcer from extending its head (scolex) whenever the foot enters water. However, the guinea worm can emerge from the eyes, lips, arms or any body part. It is extremely painful, potentially crippling. If it migrates to the brain, it remains dormant there in a cyst.

Well, that racist ex-prez Jimmy Carter suggests people use a rag to filter water to prevent guinea worm. This will never prevent disease and will doubtfully eradicate guinea worm. Why propose a rag when the US has companies like Calgon, Coca Cola and Budweiser which filter enuf H2O to provide clean water for Africa. Yeah, I sed it. Jimmy Carter is a racist who calls for a reactionary stop-gap measure! Capitalism is racist. It will not do anything unless a profit-motive exists. Jimmy Carter should call for clean water so women and children don’t have to walk miles. He should advocate clean water so that people no longer have to worry about river blindness, guinea worm, shistosomiasis, infantile diarrhea and countless other diseases! Jimmy Carter is not that stupid. He knows Americans aren’t that stupid. But as a liberal he is that racist, and so is America to stand for such a suggestion. I hate to call people names, no, that’s a lie… But anyhoo, let me break it down for you.

Unlike Jimmy Carter and other capitalist apologists, natural parasites have no choice but to behave the way they do. For eradication of guinea worm, the Carter Center has received $40 million at one time from just Bill and Melinda Gates building a $55 million total, yet not one water purification plant has been built from that money. Okay, there is the profit motive for Jimmy Carter. After all, how much loot does it take to supply everybody in Africa with a cheap, dirty rag? It is such a lousy idea, it just might work.

Schistosomiasis, also known as bilharzia or snail fever, comes from a nematode (actually a “trematode”) that lives in fresh water and penetrates the skin. It is estimated to infect 200 million people worldwide. The worms grow inside the body and lay eggs. Schistosomiasis causes fever, chills, muscle aches, anemia, malnutrition, and can damage the liver, intestines, lungs and bladder.

Dranunculiasis emerging from a foot.

River blindness is caused by another water-borne worm in Africa.

Infantile diarrhea is caused because of water which hasn’t been distilled, boiled or otherwise purified. It is a leading cause of infant mortality in Africa, where women daily walk miles to fetch water for cooking and drinking. So not only are people dying because of poor water, they also suffer because of lack of access to water. It is estimated that 70% of all hospital visits in East Africa are because of water-related illness.

Stop military aid to reactionaries like Yoweri Musaveni and Paul Kagame, and help people. Yeah, I sed it. Whenever you have a bottled drink, from a soda to a beer to any of the zillion of water-based drinking products on the market, just think how the facilities which bottled your favorite drink could contribute towards building water purification facilities in Africa. So that people could be liberated from water-borne disease. So that people can enjoy sanitation. So that women do not have to walk miles away from home just to provide drinking and cooking water for their families. Think about that for a moment. Then do something about it.

Remember Malcolm X.

Complimentary post: The Economics of Water

South Africa’s Changing Political Climate

Jacob Zuma and the African National Congress

A few things about ANC and Jacob Zuma. The recent presidential victory of Zuma seems to indicate that ANC has stepped away somewhat from the politics of compromise with Imperialism. The Young Communist League, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and other formations have gotten behind him in a big way. This represents a departure from the legacy of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, who were more behind building a substantial black middle class rather than working on behalf of the masses.

Because, in recent times, the African National Congress has not lived up to its words. As a student activist in the anti-apartheid struggle, the organizations that I participated in typically brought in Azanian Peoples Organization (AZAPO) comrades or those from Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC-A). This was because the ANC had strong liberal support from the NAACP and the white left, for example, and the other groups became marginalized. Also, AZAPO and PAC-A had vibrant Pan Africanist politics. They discussed how they not only attacked apartheid infrastructure, they also fought SADF troops and armed boers on the ground. The ANC had a policy of not hitting “soft” targets, despite the massacres white nationalists perpetrated against the African community. Now when the apartheid system released Nelson Mandela from 27 years imprisonment on Robbin Island, he scrapped the long-time demands that ANC had promised to the African masses.

Mandela’s freedom was bought for a price. Mandela veered away from the Freedom Charter; he served up the masses to a neo-colonial State which became entrenched in Imperialism. Winnie Nomzamo Mandela, his wife, walked him out of prison and Nelson walked her into prison because her politics diverged drastically from the sell out brand that he had cultivated over many years, as AZAPO comrade Mongezi Sifika-Nkomo has stated.

Prior to Mandela’s release, a wave of killings swept South Africa. This time, it was political violence masquerading at a political level. Remember the necklace, a weapon used against police agents and informers? Well, the ANC adopted it to terrorize AZAPO and PAC-A veterans. The Pan Africanist line held by these groups was that the land belonged — not to ‘all who live on it’, as the ANC Freedom Charter states — to the African masses. These freedom fighting groups had declared that the black workers and peasants own the mines and all the land. This declaration jeopardized the ANC position.

So ANC declared war on their political allies. Shortly afterward, the boers used Inkatha Freedom Party to wage a successful war of attrition on the ANC. This brought the ANC and Mandela to the table on white power’s terms. Afterwards, Mandela’s presidency opened up opportunities for rich white mining operations such as Anglo-American and Rand to expand into the rest of Africa. South Africa paved the way for “post-racialism” and the US is somewhat tailing that model.

During this period, huge “gold rushes” sparked intense wars over their mineral rich deposits of diamonds in Sierra Leone and casseterite/coltan in Eastern Congo. The profiteering done on a large scale during those wars has not contributed towards raising the living standards of African people despite the individuals who apparently live like leeches on the backs of the struggling masses. This is a direct by-product of South African “post-racialism.”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, constructed by Mandela in partnership with his apartheid bosses to allow racist butchers to escape extremely serious charges concerning their heinous abuse of humanitarian rights. The South African Defense Force had been implicated in genocidal crimes ranging from direct military support and assistance of Renamo and UNITA, two vicious counterrevolutionary formations, to atrocities carried out in the townships and refugee camps against noncombatants.

The documentation on these activities is extensive. SADF carried out assassinations on people like ANC leader Chris Hani. Their jamming equipment brought down the Soviet aircraft shuttling Mozambican President Samora Machel from peace talks in Nkomati, Tanzania, where Zimbabwean and Tanzanian leaders had proposed to Machel that they form a triple front to end the Renamo depredations in northern Mozambique. The South African government, not knowing the outcome of those talks, decided to kill Machel in a manner resembling an accident. These are some of the serious crimes that the SADF and its political leadership have escaped, even while the entire economic sector in South Africa continues to be dominated by international finance capital. Thabo Mbeki carried on the Mandela policy.

International finance used the SA Tarzan sector to push the family of economic apartheid’s long-time Malawian lackey, Hastings Banda, into top leadership positions in Zambia. The Bandas have helped set the stage for destabilizing Central and East Africa.

Now, today, tho, Jacob Zuma apparently represents a sincere break with the politics of collaboration. The ANC “subsystem”, as it has been called, is being dismantled for a more radicalized vision of what South Africa should be. And this is as it ought to be. While a number of black middle class forces sought to divide the ANC and form a breakaway formation, Zuma craftily held it together and expanded his base. He restored confidence in the ANC by strengthening its core values, and taking steps to move away from Imperialism. Various charges used to slander Zuma had been dismissed and discredited. This was a tactic to stop the trend towards collectivization, towards strengthening the unions, and towards building a revolutionary component inside South Africa.

Africans cannot be dispossessed on their own land; they cannot be forced to live on that 13% of land set aside from the period of colonial domination. The boers will have to sink or swim. Zuma seems to be bringing in a new day. Forward the Black Revolution in Southern Africa!

Scientists “Surprised”: AFRICAN CULTURE IS THE FUTURE

If you are an African, you should kno that we come from 200,000 generations of ancestors. Our history does not begin with slavery or colonialism. We did not gain our identity or culture when the Imperialists declared our existence and named us negroes, slaves, pygmies, bushmen or anything else. Those who think they have “good hair” and those who believe their thick lips and dark skin reflect some burnt ham curse, all races came out of us. They all descend from Africans but everybody is not an African. WE COME FROM AFRICA, other races merely come from the Africans. Our genetic diversity gave birth to them; our genetic diversity is at least three times greater than any other group.This study shows that the greatest genetic diversity on the planet is concentrated in Africa. There is no African race, we are a group of groups that is more diverse than all other groups combined. Which means AFRICAN CULTURE IS THE FUTURE!

From Science Daily

African Genetics Study Revealing Origins, Migration And ‘Startling Diversity’ Of African Peoples

A mother and daughter in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Credit: iStockphoto/Cliff Parnell)

— African, American, and European researchers working in collaboration over a 10-year period have released the largest-ever study of African genetic data—more than four million genotypes—providing a library of new information on the continent which is thought to be the source of the oldest settlements of modern humans.

The study demonstrates startling diversity on the continent, shared ancestry among geographically diverse groups and traces the origins of Africans and African Americans. It is published in the April 30 issue of the journal Science Express.

Researchers studied 121 African populations, four African American populations and 60 non-African populations for patterns of variation at 1327 DNA markers. The study traced the genetic structure of Africans to 14 ancestral population clusters that correlated with ethnicity and shared cultural and/or linguistic properties.

The research team demonstrated that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else on earth.

They also determined that the ancestral origin of humans was probably located in southern Africa, near the South Africa-Namibian border. Extrapolating the data, scientists were able to map ancient migrations of populations and determined that the exit point of modern humans out of Africa was near the middle of the Red Sea in East Africa. They also provide evidence for ancient common ancestry of geographically diverse hunter-gatherer populations in Africa, including Pygmies from central Africa and click-speaking populations from southern and eastern Africa, suggesting the possibility that the original pygmy language may have contained clicks. Overall, they demonstrate remarkable correspondence between cultural, linguistic, and genetic diversity in Africa.

“This is the largest study to date of African genetic diversity in the nuclear genome,” said Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist with joint appointments in the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “This long term collaboration, involving an international team of researchers and years of research expeditions to collect samples from populations living in remote regions of Africa, has resulted in novel insights about levels and patterns of genetic diversity in Africa, a region that has been underrepresented in human genetic studies. Our goal has been to do research that will benefit Africans, both by learning more about their population history and by setting the stage for future genetic studies, including studies of genetic and environmental risk factors for disease and drug response.”

Tishkoff says that there is no single African population that is representative of the diversity present on the continent. Therefore, many ethnically diverse African populations should be included in studies of human genetic variation, disease susceptibility, and drug response.

Anthropologists, historians and linguists now have at their disposal a completely new volume of research with which to test theories of human migration, cultural evolution and population history in Africa. Basic scientists, physicians and public health officials now have a foundation for illuminating the complex history of Africans and African-Americans, with implications for studies aimed at finding disease genes in these populations and learning which genetic differences make some individuals more susceptible to diseases like HIV, cancer or malaria.

This study also sheds light on African American ancestry, which they find originates predominantly from western African Niger-Kordofanian (~71 percent), European (~13 percent), and other African (~8 percent) populations, although admixture levels varied considerably among individuals. These results could have important implications for the design and interpretation of studies which aim to identify genetic and environmental risk factors for diseases common in the African American community, including prostate cancer, hypertension and diabetes.

The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education at Vanderbilt University, the L.S.B. Leakey and Wenner Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, David and Lucile Packard and a Burroughs Wellcome Foundation Career Award given to Tishkoff. Genotyping costs were supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute Mammalian Genotyping Service.

The study was conducted by Tishkoff, Alessia Ranciaro and Jibril B. Hirbo, formerly with the University of Maryland and now with the Departments of Genetics and Biology at Penn; Floyd A. Reed, also formerly with the University of Maryland and now with Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology; Françoise R. Friedlaender, an independent researcher; Christopher Ehret of the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles; Alain Froment of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris; Agnes. A. Awomoyi, formerly of the University of Maryland and currently with the Department of Internal Medicine at Ohio State University; Ogobara Doumbo and Mahamadou A. Thera of the Malaria Research and Training Center, University of Bamako, Mali; Muntaser Ibrahim and Abdalla T. Juma of the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Khartoum, Sudan; Maritha J. Kotze of the Department of Pathology at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa; Godfrey Lema and Thomas B. Nyambo of the Department of Biochemistry at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences, Tanzania; Jason H. Moore of the Departments of Genetics and Community and Family Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School; Holly Mortensen, formerly with the University of Maryland and now with the National Center for Computational Toxicology in the Office of Research and Development, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Sabah A. Omar of the Kenya Medical Research Institute; Kweli Powell of the University of Maryland; Gideon S Pretorius of the Division of Human Genetics, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa; Michael W. Smith of the . Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, National Cancer Institute; Charles Wambebe of International Biomedical Research in Africa, Nigeria; James L. Weber of the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, Wisc.; and Scott M. Williams of the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Center for Human Genetics Research, Vanderbilt University.

The researchers wish to acknowledge the indigenous populations who so graciously donated the DNA samples used in this study.

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Journal reference: 1. Tishkoff et al. The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans. Science, 2009; DOI: 10.1126/science.1172257