Eye on the Gold
Reach Publishers (Verlag)
978-0-620-87222-5 (ISBN)
- Titel nicht im Sortiment
- Artikel merken
South African gold funded the British Empires and its wars. The gold industry was the prime beneficiary of the apartheid system, and left legacies of social breakdown, impoverishment and environmental degradation. Production peaked in 1970 and is now in terminal decline; remaining ore reserves are too deep, too expensive and too dangerous to extract.
With the support of Archbishop-Emeritus Desmond Tutu, Terry launched the New York banking sanctions campaign against apartheid in 1985 as a last nonviolent attempt to avert a civil war. President Nelson Mandela subsequently acknowledged that the campaign was the single-most successful initiative to end apartheid. It became a major motivation behind South Africa’s relatively peaceful transition to constitutional democracy.
Terry represented the Anglican Church at the parliamentary defence review in 1996. His international banking experience had informed him about the arms industry as a globally and unethically and corrupt business. European governments pressurised South Africa to buy warships and warplanes the country could not afford and did not need. It was then not illegal in English law to bribe foreigners, and in Germany bribes were actually tax-deductible as a “useful business expense”. The arms deal unleashed a culture of corruption that now afflicts South Africa’s hard won and fragile constitutional democracy.
After more than twenty years of “following the money,” Terry was vindicated in August 2019 when the report of the Seriti Commission of Enquiry into the arms deal scandal was set aside in the landmark court judgment. Judge Seriti had been exposed as pursuing a “second agenda to silence the Terry Crawford-Brownes of this world.”
Since the collapse of the gold standard in 1971, Saudi Arabian oil (black gold) has funded the United States Empire, and its wars. Failed interventions to impose US military and financial hegemony around the globe have prompted increasing demands to replace the dollar as the basis of the international monetary system.
Are bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies the “new gold” of the future?
Terry was born in Ireland, but grew up in Libya until the age of 17 when he moved to America to attend the University of Minnesota. After graduating, he came to South Africa in 1967 intending to study the apartheid system at Wits, but to stay here only for two years before returning permanently to the US. Instead within four months he was married to Lavinia, and so got a job with a gold mining house and became a South African by marriage and choice. Because of the financial consequences of the Vietnam War, the international monetary system established at Bretton Woods and the fixed gold price at US$35 was fast collapsing. After a brief spell back in Minnesota and London as an international banker, he was recruited by Nedbank in 1974 and so returned to South Africa. After stints in Johannesburg and Durban, Lavinia finally got him home to Cape Town in 1981 when he was appointed Regional Treasury Manager for the Cape. Political turmoil after the 1976 Soweto uprising led to his refusal to allow his teenage son, Stuart to be conscripted into the apartheid army, and thus prompting a life-change from banker to peace activist and revolutionary.
| Erscheinungsdatum | 03.06.2021 |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | Wandsbeck |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 135 x 216 mm |
| Gewicht | 500 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte |
| Technik ► Bergbau | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-620-87222-5 / 0620872225 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-620-87222-5 / 9780620872225 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
aus dem Bereich
