Cat:

Not in my lifetime.

Ah, but I was thinking long term. And, as Jérôme Keynes would tell you: "In the long term, we're all dead"...

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

that I'm not writing that nothing good could ever come of any policy coming out of America, just because it is coming out of America. I've been critical of policies, and politicians but I don't think I've ever written on dKos "whetever you do, it's bad" like you basically did about Europe in this thread.

So,non the comparison is not valid.

In any case, I'm not denying Europe's colonialist past, nor the continued exploitative beahavior of many of its companies in Africa today, but your blanket rejection that anything done with Africa is going to be exploitative by definition is just not acceptable.

Wind power

but there is no room for manoeuver in Cat's position.

It's a different thing to say "there is a significant risk, given the past and some still current European behavior in Africa, that a partnership would end up being unfair" and to say "any partnership will be exploitative because that's what Europeans are and do"

Wind power

I fear that it has more to do with self regard and aspiration than with analytic rigor. What Cat was saying comes from perspective highly critical of US and European civilization and its impact on the rest of the world. She cited Edward Said and, to the extent that I understand Said, seems to be mostly consistent with that approach.

While many of us in the US and Europe are critical of the nature of our societies and do not wish them to continue to have the impacts that they have had on much of the rest of the world we have been signally ineffective in bringing about such change -- to the extent that total system collapse is more likely than orderly internal change.

This is not to say that Jerome, Melanchthon and others are not sincere in their desires to bring about such change, but that has not made it so. I took Cat's comments as being directed at the fact and the likely probability of outcome concerning the relationship between the USA, Europe and Africa. On that I personally suspect she is right. "Not in my lifetime" -- unless via collapse. The poison in the soul of our shared cultures is deep and at the root of its organization. We all have to take responsibility for that, whether we are benificiaries, victims or both.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."