NOTE: SF writer Charlie Stross inadvertently broke a fairly major story online, so the links to his original post may only work intermittently, and the comments feature at Autopope may not work at all, for a bit. He’s expressed some difficulties serving the anomalous amount of traffic.

But here’s the link to the relevant Hansard transcript.

Apparently, a shadowy organization is offering an undisclosed-but-fabulous sum of money to bail out Britain. No strings attached, of course…

The money quote?

Lord James of Blackheath:  For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X.

We can only hope that offer isn’t coming from the organisation’s secret lair beneath a remote volcano…

Anthropology professor Neil Norman from the College of William & Mary has recently excavated sites in Plateau, Alabama, searching to reconstruct the lives and deaths of those early inhabitants of AfricaTown, according to this article at al.com. Dr. Norman has been working to reconstruct the everyday lives and history of AfricaTown’s residents, and to locate and map the gravesites of many of those residents, as well.

Abaché and Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis

The project was funded and supported by local sources, including a grant from the Alabama Historical Commission, Mobile County, the City of Mobile, and the Museum of Mobile.

The United States passed legislation in 1808, prohibiting the importation of slaves.  Those laws against importing human beings to be sold were largely ignored until the beginnings of the Civil War, however. As late as 1860, the Clotilda—widely identified as the last slave ship—carried a human cargo in excess of 100 souls (and perhaps as many as 160, the actual number varies by report). Men, women, and children imported from West Africa to Alabama, where they were to be sold as slaves.

Some reports have it that Timothy Meaher, the owner of the Clotilda, bet $100,000 that he could import a shipload of African captives, without getting caught. Other reports simply name Meaher as the financier. To evade the authorities waiting in nearby Mobile, Alabama, the human cargo were transferred to a waiting riverboat, and Captain William Foster burned the Clotilda then sank her. The captives were transported by riverboat up the Spanish River, then hidden, eventually some of them were sold, but many more escaped.

More than thirty of those original captives made their way back downriver to the outskirts of Mobile, where they established AfricaTown. From the last link:

The most noted of the original 33 was Cudjoe Lewis, who Howze said was her great-uncle. Lewis joined Allen and others to build churches, homes and schools. They built a community during a time of racial strife that has now survived nearly 150 years.

Records are not clear whether Africatown was ever formally incorporated as a town. It is now part of Pritchard, Ala., a suburb of Mobile. Africatown has more than 12,000 residents.

Mr. Lewis lived out his life in AfricaTown, and related much of the history of AfricaTown and its founders before his death in 1935.

photo from http://www.southalabama.edu/archives/html/gallery/over/ob7.htm

The Encyclopedia of Alabama website informs us:

After their secret arrival—in 1820 the introduction of Africans was declared an act of piracy punishable by death—about 25 young people were sold upriver to slave brokers, but the majority remained in Mobile. Thirty-two became the property of Timothy Meaher, who had financed the expedition, and his brother James enslaved eight others, including Cudjo Lewis; twenty were sent to Burns Meaher’s plantation in Clarke County; between five and eight went to William Foster as payment for the trip; and others were bought by plantation owner Thomas Buford. The young Africans were employed as deckhands, field hands, and domestics.

After emancipation following the end of the Civil War in 1865, those formerly enslaved on Burns Meaher’s plantation joined the others in the area north of Mobile known as Plateau. They hoped to return to Africa and their families but were unable to do so for lack of money and thus decided to remain where they were, albeit on their own terms. In 1866, they established the settlement of African Town as the first town founded and continuously occupied and controlled by blacks in the United States.

For more information, consider the Sylvia Anna Diouf’s widely acclaimed book, Dreams of Africa in Alabama. Diouf painstakingly collects rare photographs, eyewitness accounts, interviews with former slaves, slavers, and other previously unpublished primary source material, to tell the stories of these remarkable settlers, and reconstruct the thread of narrative between their lives in Africa and their forced emigration to the United States.

How do we best save the earth? By heroically decimating humanity, of course. From The Onion, that last bastion of parodic commentary so true it hurts, perpetually raising the bar in fearless journalistic  pursuit of answers:

According to a press release from Philip Morris, the new environmentally friendly cigarettes work by employing powerful carcinogens that accumulate in the lungs of smokers, slowly breaking down their vital organs and eliminating the danger posed to the overpopulated planet by the human race.

I’m a longtime smoker, so I couldn’t agree more. Imagine if all the BP execs and government regulators responsible for the current environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico had only eradicated themselves decades ago; we’d have a cleaner, healthier planet, today.

Blatant examples of media agenda and spin as seen in the coverage regarding the GM Payback . . . Wow. Just wow.

MSNBC

Fallen giant General Motors Co. accelerated toward recovery Wednesday, announcing the repayment of $8.1 billion in U.S. and Canadian government loans five years ahead of schedule.

The Obama administration crowed about the “turnaround” at GM and fellow bailout recipient Chrysler LLC, saying the government’s unpopular rescue of Detroit’s automakers is paying off.

NPR

The American auto industry is showing signs of revival. The question is how that’s being played. Chrysler posted improved quarterly results this past week, and sales to auto fleets have surged. But some are saying that General Motors CEO Ed Whitaker went too far with television ads that have been playing constantly this week.

FOXNews

General Motors Co. has repaid the $8.1 billion in loans it got from the U.S. and Canadian governments, a move its CEO says is a sign automaker is on the road to recovery.

GM CEO Whitacre formally announced the loan paybacks Wednesday at the company’s Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas City, Kansas, where he also announced that GM is investing $257 million in that factory and the Detroit-Hamtramck plant, both of which will build the next generation of the midsize Chevrolet Malibu.

GM got a total of $52 billion from the U.S. government and $9.5 billion from the Canadian and Ontario governments as it went through bankruptcy protection last year. The U.S. considered as a loan $6.7 billion of the aid, while the Canadian governments held $1.4 billion in loans.

photo courtesy of chevrolet.com

But is the news really that simple, or anywhere near that positive? Rather a lot of people don’t seem to think so:

Newsvine:

So the taxpayer funded their bailout, and now we will repay the loan via stock purchases, GM never actually feeling the total bite of the 52 billion? That loan never coming out of their pockets, never facing the responsibility for their actions?

They cut nearly 70,000 Union jobs and reductions in the Pension, and moved more manufacturing over seas which had generated enough profits to pay this back. The truth is that GM is a taxpayer funded sinking ship, and not viable as it iscurrently structured. We are just funding the same behavior, the same failed business plans by being their crutch.

TTAC Bailout Watch

PDF of Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R, Iowa) letter to Secretary Geithner

NYT Op Ed Piece

Moreover, G.M. is not, in the strictest sense, paying back taxpayers at all. Rather, it is refunding $6.7 billion of an $18 billion escrow account that was given to it by the government when it emerged from bankruptcy. The rest of that account will be used to cover fourth-quarter losses (including $2.8 billion pledged for the rescue of G.M.’s major parts supplier, Delphi), repay loans from the Canadian government, and possibly prop up the automaker’s shaky European operations. That escrow account is due to expire in June, at which time G.M. will repay what remains of the $6.7 billion from this week’s pledge — and then pocket the estimated $5.6 billion remainder.

In fairness, G.M. was clear up front that it would not be able to make the taxpayers whole through cash payments alone. Rightly so: for all the talk of slimmed-down cost structures and booming sales in China, G.M. isn’t making any profit with which to repay its debts.

Ultimately, I find myself much less concerned about partisan politics these days, and much more concerned about this kind of ultra-rich and corporatist warfare on the working classes.

By the way, GM seems to be pinning their hopes of a return to profitability on the upcoming and much-hyped Chevy Volt, reportedly being built in GM’s Detroit/Hamtramck facility.