[UPDATE. President Ruto has just announced that the Finance Bill will be withdrawn. It looks like victory for the young protesters, though calls are still being made for him to resign]
Tumultuous events have been unfolding in Kenya this week.
Thousands upon thousands of young people have been taking to the streets across the east African country in protest at the Finance Bill being imposed by the government of President William Ruto.
It was passed by parliament on Tuesday June 25, with opponents warning that it “will raise the cost of living despite many people already struggling to put food on the table”.
Although a number of the unpopular proposals were withdrawn at the last minute, this was not enough to quell public anger.
In dramatic scenes, protesters stormed parliament buildings in Nairobi, starting a fire.
And the police opened fire on the crowds with live bullets.
A CNN reporter described how he “saw police shoot dead unarmed young men in front of Kenya’s parliament” and reports say at least five were killed in the capital.
By 5.45am on Wednesday June 26, 157 casualties were recorded at Kenyatta National Hospital alone.
In Githurai at least 22 people were said to have been shot dead by police.
If this brutal response seems reminiscent of the violence of past colonial repression, then that is because the same evil empire is behind it.
The day before parliament was stormed, US President Joe Biden officially designated Kenya a Major Non-NATO Ally, “a powerful symbol of the country’s strategic importance to the United States, offering Kenya a range of military and financial advantages”.
And the Finance Bill resulted from the fact that Kenya is currently submitted to “structural reforms” by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – in other words by the global criminocracy.
As ever, debt is the tool of domination, with the “need” to pay off the imperial usurers used as the excuse to “gut the middle class” and “drive more people into poverty”, as one recent article put it.
Kenyan people are being hit with a range of new taxes, which the government says are “to fund development programmes and cut public debt” – in other words to line the criminocrats’ pockets!
The murderous violence deployed by Ruto and his regime is hardly like to calm the situation.
At the time of writing, the “7 days of rage” proposed by the protest movement had not ended, with calls for main roads to be blocked and President Ruto’s State House to be occupied on Thursday June 27.
A new hashtag has been trending on social media – #tupatanethursday, a mix of Swahili and English meaning “see you on Thursday”.
And there are signs that other Africans could be inspired by the Kenyan revolt to rise up against the death grip of the global financial empire.
As one Nigerian observer commented: “The bravery of the people of Kenya is an inspiration to the rest of Africa”.
winter oak 
Why is it not considered theft when the very system of money subjugates, captures, controls, and directs the labor and resources of A People?
Here is the history: https://modernmoneynetwork.org/sites/default/files/biblio/RiPE%20Forstater.pdf
The world wide export of imperial colonial control over what shall be money and then demanding that taxes be paid in that money is the present operating system of the non-working class and is one of the critical means by which sovereignty and liberty are destroyed, along with community cooperation, and labor stolen.
From the abstract:
“In the European colonies, land expropriation and forced labor were used, but another important means of forcing indigenous populations to work as wage-laborers or produce cash crops was taxation and the requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency. This paper provides an overview of this method, and documents its historical importance, concentrating on Africa. Taxation also played an important role in the monetization and commoditization of African economies, and in the rise of a peripheral capitalism. As the paper demonstrates, Marx was not unaware of money taxes functioning in this manner, and the phenomenon was in no way limited to Africa.” – Matthew Forstater
From the above paper by Forstater: “…. The problem was that if the subsistence base was capable of supporting the population entirely, colonial subjects would not be compelled to offer their labor-power for sale. Colonial governments thus required alternative means for compelling the population to work for wages. The historical record is clear that one very important method for accomplishing this was to impose a tax and require that the tax obligation be settled in colonial currency.
This method had the benefit of not only forcing people to work for wages, but also of creating a value for the colonial currency and monetizing the colony. In addition, this method could be used to force the population to produce cash crops for sale. What the population had to do to obtain the currency was entirely at the discretion of the colonial government, since it was the sole source of the colonial currency. This method was widespread and important enough to be called “a secret of colonial capitalist primitive accumulation” (since it was not the only method, it must be called “a” secret). This practice is extremely well documented, yet it has hardly ever been mentioned as an important method of primitive accumulation.”
“……Several points concerning the role of direct taxation in colonial capitalist primitive accumulation need to be made. First, direct taxation means that the tax cannot be, e.g. an income tax. An income tax cannot assure that a population that possesses the means of production to produce their own subsistence will enter wage labor or grow cash crops. If they simply continue to engage in subsistence production, they can avoid the cash economy and thus escape the income tax and any need for colonial currency. The tax must therefore be a direct tax, such as the poll tax, hut tax, head tax, wife tax, and land tax. Second, although taxation was often imposed in the name of securing revenue for the colonial coffers, and the tax was justified in the name of Africans bearing some of the financial burden of running the colonial state, in fact the colonial government did not need the colonial currency held by Africans.”
“….The requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency rather than in-kind was
essential to producing the desired outcome,….”
But here we are today listening to colonized “experts” trying to tell us that the systems of colonial capture and control can somehow be turned into systems of liberation. They cannot.
The world is at a place where we must find the things we have gotten wrong and fix them.
The fullness of a society’s capacity will never be realized so long as the populace dedicates primary activity toward the acquisition of units of currency as though those units are necessary to have in order to conduct the rest of their activity. And everything of genuine value will be sacrificed to gain acquisition. Truly any commodity can/will be co-opted, even sand!! And then the populace will fight over that as opposed to focusing on its genuine full capacity!
When we decide that the fullness of our capacity is better served by simply looking to the abilities we already have to count and keep records about our activity we then shift our focus about what money is and is supposed to do for us.
It is time that the basics of Applied Math were highlighted by ALL Scholars and Leaders to get out from under the illiteracy of money and its subjugation of humanity.
What freedom, sovereignty, liberty has there ever been for any populace that must borrow the existence of and use of a unit of account? Whose agenda is served while ALL are using “the coin of the realm”?
Centuries more of this illiteracy will not make things better.
http://www.bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/300-you-have-been-served
http://www.bibocurrency.com/index.php/es/downloads-3/15-spanish-root/301-ha-sido-notificado
So, one can see that the foundation upon which the State then hands off the “money creation” process to banks is itself illegitimate. The means by which the State hands off this illegitimate and illiterate process is different in different places but the State has designated the “bank money” as legal tender; and this process alone shows that the State is claiming authority over and designating the bank note to be separate but equal to the coins and notes the State has illegitimately claimed the power to create in the first place and impose on The People. Graeber and Forstater and many others can date this practice back to Roman times or before.
And this most have Never Called Into Question. Maybe the Africans can do so today!!
LikeLike