It’s such an evil system even denounced by the European Union, but France is not ready to move from that colonial system which puts about 500 billions dollars from Africa to its treasury year in year out.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France, that's pretty much equivalent to the budget of the French government. If that number were true, France finances ought to be in better shape.
$500 billion is roughly 25% of the entire GDP of all of sub-saharan Africa. It is more than the entire GDP of the countries mentioned here.
Of course it is bogus. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...
I must say I am quite surprised to see a poorly written propaganda hoax article make the frontpage of HN. It is linked to the general decline in quality of HN? Is it a voting ring? Or is it because the headline pulls all the right triggers in the minds of bay area tech people?
I see a lot of accounts created in the last couple hours posting in this thread, so it might well be a voting ring situation.
I looked at the data and it doesn't seem to be a voting ring, though it's hard to exclude that for certain. Also the new accounts posting in this thread seem to disagree with each other.
As far as I can tell, it is mostly that a lot of users thought the article was interesting. Presumably it wasn't obviously a hoax to them.
It's a year old, I tried searching a lot of the quotes it uses and they're bunk, even in French they're bunk, all linking back to this article and its reposts.
I mean the goddamn copyedit should have flagged everyone on this to begin with. Just looking at it I'm 90% sure I just bought a sham-wow. The article is linkbait copyediting 101.
It's definitely bogus. I can't dig up anything on this except reblogs of it.
The Chirac video is taken out of context, from a television interview where he says the current state of France as a first world country, and a G8 country comes directly from its former past as a colonial power.
In relation with that is the translation of declaration of Mr Chirac is
consciously shortened to serve the objectives of Mr. Koutonin. Chirac
said ""Some of the wealth we have in our coffers, I do not say all of
it, come from the exploitation of Africa. Therefore, it is only normal
that we give back that money. It is not only normal, it is more sensible
if we want to avoid the emergence of all kinds of social difficulties in
the continent" Indicating the context of this declaration was a must
that Mr Koutonin did not seem to appreciate
Not a single quote in the article is actually linked back to its source, just to wikipedia pages or websites and not even to a context in the article. His quote from Leopold Sedar Senghor comes up with 9 results in a google search, all linking back to this article. Even translated into French, the quote comes up with translations of this article.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is failing to even provide sub-par evidence.
Billions, nay near-trillions of dollars do not just magically float around the globe with no one noticing or accounting for them.
Sorry, but in a year none of this has been cited or sourced, just reposts. It's bullshit, it just got dredged up because everyone's been googling about France and Charlie Hebdo.
This article has nothing bogus.
if you are in search of truth, this article is real and I have been in West Africa long enough to confirm that, otherwise you can always find rented mouths that support colonialism even if they are Africans.
Half a trillion is not unrealistic. Take one of the numbers we know with a bit more certainty, Nguesso in the Republic of Congo (not the DRC!) takes only a little over 17% of the oil revenue locally - the rest is "exported" (this low price incidentally is how he has managed to remain in power for so long despite some pretty drastic attempts at changing that).
Africa's GDP is around USD 2.4 trillion so seeing a fifth of that "disappear" seems like a conservative lower bound, actually (admittedly countries like South Africa skew the measure).
OK, lets take something we do know with some more certainty. Combined GDP of all CFA Franc countries (both blocs): ~$170bn
Do you honestly think that France is taking 3x this per annum and hiding it in offshore accounts?
Certainly France (and the US) meddled with successions in Africa (and even when they didn't have France's blessing, most elite soldiers in the immediate post-colonial period had served in the French Foreign Legion....) but for all the coups, former French colonies can and did leave the CFA Franc, one rejoined a couple of decades later and a couple of countries that weren't ever French colonies also decided to join.
I'm not familiar with the administrative details behind the CFA Franc, but it sounds quite likely the author is inexpertly trying to describe a pretty standard set of central banking arrangements (governments required to borrow reserves at the base interest rate to fund deficit spending, fiscal rules for a currency area, foreign currency reserves held with ECB to support commitment to Euro parity etc). A bit like the French in the Euro really...
There are good arguments for the CFA Franc not being wholly beneficial for its member states, but this isn't one of them.
I didn't notice the amount was referring to the CFA Franc specifically. I'm referring to Francafrique generally, whose means of extractions go way beyond monetary policy. If he claimed half a trillion just from CFA countries, it is indeed a taller claim.
Interesting that this got 4 downvotes (6, since it had 2 upvotes before everything in the thread started going down - by far the most downvoted of all my posts!). This comment is a bit pointless since the thread has been flag-killed, anyway.
Clearstream (1, not 2) is the one case where we DO have evidence, thanks to lengthy and numerous lawsuits and plenty of publicly available documents, including some taken from the safes of the companies involved.
As a French citizen, I used to be somewhat adamant that there was no way my government was ever capable of doing Bad Things, a few hundred books later and exposure to the people in these groups (including working for an Elf-like company, and family in management in Total), I think differently.
Comments
That articles looks bogus. For instance:
It’s such an evil system even denounced by the European Union, but France is not ready to move from that colonial system which puts about 500 billions dollars from Africa to its treasury year in year out.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France, that's pretty much equivalent to the budget of the French government. If that number were true, France finances ought to be in better shape.
$500 billion is roughly 25% of the entire GDP of all of sub-saharan Africa. It is more than the entire GDP of the countries mentioned here.
Of course it is bogus. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...
I must say I am quite surprised to see a poorly written propaganda hoax article make the frontpage of HN. It is linked to the general decline in quality of HN? Is it a voting ring? Or is it because the headline pulls all the right triggers in the minds of bay area tech people?
I see a lot of accounts created in the last couple hours posting in this thread, so it might well be a voting ring situation.
I looked at the data and it doesn't seem to be a voting ring, though it's hard to exclude that for certain. Also the new accounts posting in this thread seem to disagree with each other.
As far as I can tell, it is mostly that a lot of users thought the article was interesting. Presumably it wasn't obviously a hoax to them.
In the end, flags defeated upvotes on this story.
It's a year old, I tried searching a lot of the quotes it uses and they're bunk, even in French they're bunk, all linking back to this article and its reposts.
I mean the goddamn copyedit should have flagged everyone on this to begin with. Just looking at it I'm 90% sure I just bought a sham-wow. The article is linkbait copyediting 101.
It's definitely bogus. I can't dig up anything on this except reblogs of it.
The Chirac video is taken out of context, from a television interview where he says the current state of France as a first world country, and a G8 country comes directly from its former past as a colonial power.
Hmm, looks like I can dig something up:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Afro...
Not a single quote in the article is actually linked back to its source, just to wikipedia pages or websites and not even to a context in the article. His quote from Leopold Sedar Senghor comes up with 9 results in a google search, all linking back to this article. Even translated into French, the quote comes up with translations of this article.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is failing to even provide sub-par evidence.
Billions, nay near-trillions of dollars do not just magically float around the globe with no one noticing or accounting for them.
Sorry, but in a year none of this has been cited or sourced, just reposts. It's bullshit, it just got dredged up because everyone's been googling about France and Charlie Hebdo.
This article has nothing bogus. if you are in search of truth, this article is real and I have been in West Africa long enough to confirm that, otherwise you can always find rented mouths that support colonialism even if they are Africans.
the 500 billions is the compounded amount over 50 or 60 years, as I understand
Half a trillion is not unrealistic. Take one of the numbers we know with a bit more certainty, Nguesso in the Republic of Congo (not the DRC!) takes only a little over 17% of the oil revenue locally - the rest is "exported" (this low price incidentally is how he has managed to remain in power for so long despite some pretty drastic attempts at changing that).
Africa's GDP is around USD 2.4 trillion so seeing a fifth of that "disappear" seems like a conservative lower bound, actually (admittedly countries like South Africa skew the measure).
OK, lets take something we do know with some more certainty. Combined GDP of all CFA Franc countries (both blocs): ~$170bn
Do you honestly think that France is taking 3x this per annum and hiding it in offshore accounts?
Certainly France (and the US) meddled with successions in Africa (and even when they didn't have France's blessing, most elite soldiers in the immediate post-colonial period had served in the French Foreign Legion....) but for all the coups, former French colonies can and did leave the CFA Franc, one rejoined a couple of decades later and a couple of countries that weren't ever French colonies also decided to join.
I'm not familiar with the administrative details behind the CFA Franc, but it sounds quite likely the author is inexpertly trying to describe a pretty standard set of central banking arrangements (governments required to borrow reserves at the base interest rate to fund deficit spending, fiscal rules for a currency area, foreign currency reserves held with ECB to support commitment to Euro parity etc). A bit like the French in the Euro really...
There are good arguments for the CFA Franc not being wholly beneficial for its member states, but this isn't one of them.
I didn't notice the amount was referring to the CFA Franc specifically. I'm referring to Francafrique generally, whose means of extractions go way beyond monetary policy. If he claimed half a trillion just from CFA countries, it is indeed a taller claim.
The money does not appear on official counts, it mostly sits in offshore accounts and structures. Cf the Clearstream affair.
Interesting that this got 4 downvotes (6, since it had 2 upvotes before everything in the thread started going down - by far the most downvoted of all my posts!). This comment is a bit pointless since the thread has been flag-killed, anyway.
Clearstream (1, not 2) is the one case where we DO have evidence, thanks to lengthy and numerous lawsuits and plenty of publicly available documents, including some taken from the safes of the companies involved.
As a French citizen, I used to be somewhat adamant that there was no way my government was ever capable of doing Bad Things, a few hundred books later and exposure to the people in these groups (including working for an Elf-like company, and family in management in Total), I think differently.
The same happened to all my replies on this post. it Seems like a french cyberteam crushed all debate with flagging, down voting and scripted attacks.
Where is the defense of freedom of speech beloved by #ImCharlie folks?