Hot lead.

The Times of London reports that “the boycott of a Chinese ship laden with weapons for Zimbabwe has cast new light on the connections between the African country’s president, Robert Mugabe, and a secretive Chinese arms-trading firm with a controvers…

Interesting that the Obama campaign hasn’t tried hitting Hillary harder over her China connections.

His campaign is busy playing dodge ball with the Rev. “Damn” Write team. They should be focused on stories related to the war in Los Angeles. It make me wonder how many shipments made it to the destination.

On April 29th, 2008 at 1:34 pm, see-dubya said:

Jim M. #1: I wondered about that too. The article said “agricultural products and raw materials”, which makes me wonder as well. Zimbabwe has a food shortage because they redistributed their farms, taking them away from the effective farmers. So what does that mean, exactly?

see-dubya,

“Redistribution of farms” is an understatement.

In the early 1980’s, Zimbabwe was known as the breadbasket of Africa. They were a net exporter of food and those exports contributed to their GNP. There were rougly 4000 to 5000 commercial farms in Zimbabwe producing this bounty.

The problem was that those commercial farms were owned and run by citizens of Zimbabwe who happened to be white. That did not sit well with Mugabe’s promise to “redistribute” lands to its black citizens. What began as redistribution quickly morphed into confiscation. White farmers were forced off their lands, some of whose families had been farming there for over 100 years. The land was given to Mugabe cronies, who let it go fallow.

Today, there are less than 400 white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, and that number drops daily. Mugabe has since moved on to other businesses in his zeal to drive whites out of black Africa, which has dried up any prospect of foreign investment. His price caps enacted to try to control inflation have caused businesses to close (they could not process or manufacture products at a cost even close to their expenses).

Zim has already had over 25% of its total population flee the country. It has an 80% unemployment rate and the lowest life expectancy in Africa, as well as one of the highest rates of HIV in the world.

The Chinese have a keen interest in Zim’s minerals and ore. Zim just happens to have the world’s largest deposits of chromium, platinum, lithium and and other elements that happen to be particularly useful and absolutely necessary in the manufacture of nuclear weapons (including the neutron bomb). The Chinese have perfected their nuclear program by leaps and bounds, thanks in large part to the Clinton Administration’s approval of the sale of Cray supercomputers (for weather research) and Sun supercomputers in the 1980’s. These supercomputers enable a user to conduct atomic “tests” without the necessity of actually detonating a bomb. Add the intelligence provided by Chinese spies like Wen Ho Lee into our nuclear weapons technology, and you get a thriving nuclear weapons program overnight. And a country like Zimbabwe with its mineral wealth is like a nuclear Wal Mart for the Chinese.

In 1996 Poly was named by prosecutors in connection with an attempt to smuggle 2,000 AK47s into the United States.

I thought I read a link on that linking Bill Clinton to the deal. Going to lunch and will search for it when I get back.