COLLAPSED: Ayensu Starch Factory Is Belly Up

Ghanaian Former President, John Kufuor

By Ekow Mensah

The US $7million special presidential project, Ayensu starch factory is now lying belly up.

After producing 72 tonnes of starch derived from 420 tonnes of cassava the project has collapsed and its full cost to the national economy is yet to be evaluated.

The collapse of the project is attributed to technical reasons and the inability of farmers engaged to supply cassava to produce sufficient quantities.

Some officials claim that frequent power cuts caused substantial damage to machines which have not yet been replaced.

The factory was projected to work at 70 per cent of its installed capacity but could not go beyond 20 percent.

Farmers who were contracted to supply cassava to the factory could only produce 13,000 tonnes far below 10 per cent of what was required.

 Farmers who were interviewed by Mr Kweku Tsen of the Daily Graphic said the producer prices offered to them were just too low.

In a report published by the “Daily Graphic” of Thursday, May 9, 2013 farmers were quoted as saying that many of them made significant losses.

The factory which was under the supervision of the Ministry of Trade and Industry was expected to rake in substantial foreign exchange to boost the Ghanaian economy.

Another problem facing the factory is the claim by farmers that they are not paid on time for their supplies.

The question now is, can the factory be revamped? 

Mr. Sampson Abbey, Co-ordinator of the project believes that it can be revived.

He thinks that if the factory starts producing its own cassava, its dependence on local farmers will be greatly reduced and its viability will be enhanced.

Editorial

THE LEFT

The Ghanaian left has played very significant roles in the politics and history of Ghana and yet it remains the most marginalised group in the society.

It was the Ghanaian left which led the struggle for national independence and the struggles in the 1970’s and 80s against military dictatorship.

Indeed, personalities like J.S. P. Jantuah, Johnny F.S. Hansen, Zaya Yeebo, Explo  Nani Kofi, Yao Graham, Kofi Klu and many  others played key roles in toppling the Acheampong dictatorship.

In the struggle against the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), it was Kwame Nkrumah Revolutionary Guards (KNRG) the African Youth Command (AYC), the New Democratic Movement (NDM) and the United Revolutionary Front (URF) which provided the much needed leadership.

As a fact, Nkrumaist forces and individuals like Akoto Ampaw, John Ndebugre, Kwame Karikari and Azumah Besore dominated the Movement for Freedom and Justice (MFJ).

In spite of these facts the Ghanaian left has not been able to hold its own in the national political arena for  a number of reasons.

First left forces are dispersed in various political formations where they exist only as foot notes.

Indeed the left has failed to erect a credible platform for effective participation in national politics.

It has also failed to build bridges to organized labour and disaffected sections of the Ghanaian community.

The Insight believes that the time has come for Ghanaian left forces to rally together to build that credible platform for keen participation in the struggles of the people Ghana for democracy, social and economic justice .

Church questions Israel’s existence

General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland

The Church of Scotland says Israel has no right to the occupied Palestinian lands.

In a new report titled “The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the ‘Promised Land,’” the church said Israel’s claim to the occupied territories could be invalidated by its treatment of Palestinian people.

The report will be voted on by the 700 church members who attend the annual general assembly later this month.

If the paper is passed by a majority, it may become "the considered view of the Church,” a spokesperson said.

The report also calls for the church to consider backing “economic and political measures involving boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions against Israel focused on illegal settlements.”

Moreover, it calls on Christians to lobby the UK government to put pressure on the Tel Aviv regime to halt its illegal settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“Christians should not be supporting any claims by Jews, or any other people, to an exclusive or even privileged divine right to possess particular territory,” the report said.

Palestinians refer to the May 15, 1948 occupation of Palestine as the “Nakba Day,” which means the Day of the Catastrophe in Arabic, to mark the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland almost 65 years ago.

Israeli forces have wiped nearly 500 Palestinian villages and towns off the map, leaving an estimated total of 4.7 million Palestinian refugees hoping for an eventual return to their homeland more than six decades later. 

Letter to Fidel from FAO Director General

Commandante Fidel Castro

 DEAR Comandante:
I have the honor of addressing you from my position as Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), to sincerely congratulate you and the entire Cuban people for having fulfilled in advance the goal proposed by the World Food Summit, which took place in Rome 1996, and which proposed to reduce by half the number of malnourished persons in each country by 2015.

As you will surely recall, you honored us with your presence at that Summit and gave a brief but impressive speech, which still remains in the collective memory of our Organization. 

You concluded your speech by saying, "The bells tolling today for those who die of hunger today, will toll tomorrow for humanity in its entirety if humanity does not wish, or know how or is not wise enough to save itself." 

And it is said that you stated in the press conference following the aforementioned Summit that even if the goal were to be met, you would not know what to say to the other half of humanity not yet liberated from the scourge of hunger. 

These are concepts which preserve all their significance and value today.
Since then 17 years have transpired and I now have the great satisfaction of communicating to you that, in accordance with the decision of member countries and for the first time in its history, the FAO Conference, to take place this June in Rome, will adopt the total eradication of hunger as the number one goal of our Organization.

On this occasion, Cuba and the other 15 countries which have had the most success in reducing hunger will be honored. All of them will be presented with a certificate of recognition for having fulfilled in advance the Summit goal. The countries accompanying Cuba are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chile, Fiji, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Nicaragua, Peru, Samoa, São Tomë and Príncipe, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela and Vietnam.

Reiterating my congratulations for the important achievement reached by your country, I convey my best wishes for well-being and success to you and the entire Cuban people.
With my great esteem and appreciation
  

Comandante
Fidel Castro Ruz
Havana
Cuba

SOFT DRINKS ARE NOT SOFT AFTER ALL

A new study has revealed that daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages significantly increases the risk of developing type2 diabetes.

A team of researchers from Imperial College, London, found that those people who consumed a daily 12oz serving of a sugar-sweetened soft drink were 22 percent more at the risk of diabetes in later life.

The team studied more than 27,000 people from seven European countries the UK, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Sweden, France and the Netherlands, according to the paper published in the journal Diabetologia.

The study compared the drinking habits of those who had developed diabetes with those who had not.

Analyzed over 15 years of data, the research made clear that more than 40 percent developed type 2 diabetes, with those who said they drank at least one soda or some other sweet drink each day showing an 18 percent higher risk of developing the disease.

"The consumption of sugar sweetened soft drinks increases your risk of diabetes - so for every can of soft drinks that you drink per day, the risk is higher," said the study leader Dora Romaguera from Imperial College London.

Meanwhile, a diabetes charity recommends limiting sugary foods and drinks as they are calorific and can cause weight gain.

Potassium diet can combat stroke 

 British researchers have demonstrated that those people who consume higher potassium in their diets and cut down salt are in lower risk of stroke.

The study indicates that a lower salt intake and potassium rich diet can combat high blood pressure and consequently the risk of stroke, according to the paper published in the British Medical Journal.

Two separate studies showed that increased level of potassium intake and modest reduction in salt consumption reduced blood pressure in adults.

Increasing potassium in the diet to 3-4g a day can reduce blood pressure in adults while it is linked to a 24% lower risk of stroke in them, the recent study says.

A modest reduction in salt intake for four or more weeks caused significant falls in blood pressure in people (men and women) with both raised and normal blood pressure, according to the study led by researchers at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Queen Mary, University of London.

“Modest reduction in salt intake was equivalent to halving the amount of salt we consume each day,” said the study leader Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine at Queen Mary.

While the average potassium intake in many countries is below 70-80mmol per day, it is recommended that adults should consume around 4g of potassium a day (or at least 90-100mmol).

Potassium is found in most types of food, such as bananas, vegetables, pulses, nuts and seeds, milk, fish, chicken and bread. 

Material World: North Korea - Is the Crisis Real?

North Korean Leader Kim Jong-Un

By Stefan

It is hard to tell what is real in the ongoing Korean ‘crisis’ and what is contrived. Up to a point – after all, it is in no one’s interest to frighten the markets too badly – it suits both sides to foster a sense of crisis. 

For Kim Jong-un and his generals a crisis atmosphere is a way to exert pressure for full admission to the nuclear club. For the American rulers and their allies it is also a way to exert pressure – and push North Korea firmly out of the club.

Of course, a good external scare always comes in handy on the domestic front, especially at times when mass misery might otherwise fuel rebellion. It provides an excuse for deteriorating conditions of life, redirects discontent outward and rallies the populace around national leaders.

It seemed for a brief period that the crisis was a real one, but by mid-April the real crisis seemed to be over. Inside North Korea the mobilisation of reserves, air-raid drills and other war preparations were suspended. The focus of mass propaganda switched back to the usual choreographic displays and routine matters like the annual spring drive to collect manure.

Yet only a few days previously, US and South Korean officials were warning that medium-range missiles had been deployed along North Korea’s eastern coast, with ‘a very high probability’ of their imminent launch against US forces in Japan (or, just conceivably, Guam). A North Korean official announced that missiles had been placed on standby and target coordinates set for their warheads.

A torrent of threats?

The sense of crisis, however, is fuelled mainly by what Fox News called ‘a torrent of warlike threats’ from North Korean officials. True, the most alarming of these ‘threats’ are pure make-believe, given that North Korea has no delivery vehicle capable of reaching the US mainland. Moreover, media reports hardly ever reveal that the ‘threats’ are in fact warnings of what North Korea will do ‘in the event of US aggression.’ ‘Patriotic Americans’ are expected to regard the term ‘US aggression’ as a piece of gibberish and pooh-pooh the very idea that any country might genuinely fear an American assault. As if the peace-loving United States has ever attacked anyone!

Whatever ulterior motives the young emperor may have for inculcating fear in his subjects, it does not follow that he is not afraid or that his fear is unreasonable. Anxiety would be an understandable reaction to the movements of US air and sea forces near North Korean borders, especially the flights of nuclear-capable bombers and stealth jets. He and his advisers know how the US used the issue of nuclear non-proliferation to justify its invasion of Iraq and a contemplated invasion of Iran.

Use them or lose them

Even in purely military terms, North Korea is by far the weaker party in the confrontation. Despite a large army, its forces are no match for an opposing coalition made up of South Korea, the United States and Japan (it can no longer count on support from China). This in itself makes the deliberate initiation of large-scale hostilities by North Korea extremely unlikely. On the contrary, the vulnerability of its few strategic weapons exposes it to the danger of a successful counterforce first strike.

Here lies the real danger. Facing the perceived dilemma of ‘use them or lose them’, North Korea’s leaders switched to a strategy of pre-emption. This means that they resolved to launch their missiles as soon as they determined that the adversary had begun preparations for an attack. But such a determination might be mistaken, especially when made by people already keyed up in anticipation – because, for example, they suspect (as North Korean strategists say they do) that South Korea and the US will use the joint military exercises they conduct each spring as cover for a real attack.

Economic and political vulnerability

The sense of vulnerability that makes a North Korean pre-emptive strike possible has economic and political as well as military roots. 

In recent years the leaders have partly lost control of the economy and been forced to tolerate a vast expansion of formally illegal internal trade and the emergence of a new group of wealthy black-market operators who potentially pose a political challenge. It is now widely assumed that collapse of the regime and unification of Korea are only a matter of time.   

  

Another economic blow is the new sanctions imposed by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2094, designed to block ‘financial transactions and bulk cash transfers in support of illicit activities.’ This does not refer solely to trade in uranium and nuclear components. Other ‘illicit activities’, organised by a special bureau of the party Central Committee, include uranium sales, the counterfeiting of US dollars and the manufacture of methamphetamine and heroin for export (an estimated third of collective farm land is sown with poppies). Besides funding military programmes, the proceeds fill the personal bank accounts held by top officials abroad. 

           

However, the wealth of the North Korean leaders cannot be measured in money. They also enjoy enormous non-monetary privileges. The dynastic family possesses palatial villas in a series of scenic locations, staffed by numerous guards, servants and entertainers. At the same time, hundreds of thousands rot in the labour camps and millions struggle on the verge of starvation. And yet, to our great regret, this system -  marked by inequality perhaps even more extreme than that of the US - masquerades under the name of socialism! 

ITALY’S NEW BRANDRAND

White-washing capitalism?

Italian President Georgio Napolitano

The breakthrough achieved by a new political movement, the 5 Stars Movement (its official nameis Movimento 5 Stelle, abbreviated as M5S), was a key result of the election that took place on the 24/5 February in Italy. For the Chamber of Deputies the M5S got 25.55 percent of the votes. The figure for the Senate of Republic was similar. This resulted in 109 seats for M5S in the Chamber of Deputies and 54 seats in the Senate. For the old political establishment this outcome is quite drastic, but what does the M5S stand for, and will the Italian workers benefit from this electoral outcome?

Corrupt from the start

In order to understand Italian politics we need to go as far back as the artificial creation of Italy by the dominant European powers of that time (i.e., Great Britain, France and Prussia). Since its very foundation in 1861, Italian capitalism and its political establishment have been deeply linked to corruption and collusion with secret societies, such as Freemasonry and illegal organizations. Italian schoolbooks still teach that about 1,000 men led by Giuseppe Garibaldi conquered the southern part of the peninsula, dominated at that time by the House of Bourbon that could field an army of 150,000 men. Even with the addition of rebels and help from Savoy and Britain, Garibaldi’s army could not count on more than 15,000, ten times less than the Neapolitan army (as Marx pointed out in the New York Daily Tribune 23 August 1860). How did they do it? Corruption was the main weapon used by Garibaldi’s army.

The weapon of corruption worked very well and has dominated Italian politics since. ‘Unlike the rest of Western Europe, the disintegration of feudalism in southern Italy failed to produce an independent entrepreneurial middle class’ (Judith Chubb, Patronage, Power, and Poverty in Southern Italy, 1982). This was in large part due to the colonial politics of the northern Italian bourgeoisie (Antonio Gramsci, Ordine contadini, 1919-1920). The banks of the Nuovo, La Settimana politica, Operaie former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were being systematically robbed by the new elite. From 1863 to 1866 the Bank of Naples lost 37 million lire (Gigi Di Fiore, Controstoria dell’Unione d’Italia, 2007). The Bank of Sicily’s director, Emanuele Notarbartolo, who tried to save it from bankruptcy, was murdered on the orders of Raffaele Palizzolo, another Member of the Italian Parliament and member of the management board of the same bank. Palizzolo was also a known Sicilian mafia boss, who took advantage like many others of the unification of Italy to make dubious investments (trafficking) for his own personal profit. The same year, 1893, another scandal involved another bank, Banca Romana, which to extinguish its debts printed fake money. This scandal involved very important political leaders like Giovanni Giolitti and Francesco Crispi, founding fathers of Italy. These historical facts are just some early examples of how the Italian political system worked from the very beginning.

Things did not change during the Fascist dictatorship and after WWII the main party, the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC), refined this rotten system even further. Their political machinery was based on clientelism and patronage. Amintore Fanfani, leader of the DC in the 50s, while advocating against clienteles and personality politics set up a scheme to recruit DC members called tesseramento which took clientelism to its extreme. Judith Chubb describes how these tessere (party membership cards) were crucial to get power within the DC political party. ‘The tessera of the DC is like a blank check: it can be given out to anyone – to relatives, to the deceased, to persons chosen at random from the telephone book or from health-insurance list’ (Corriere della Sera 7 November 1973). The trick was quite easy: you provide me with tesserati and I provide you with jobs in provincial councils, local government offices, agencies of the public administration. Of course the public sector grew like crazy with no equivalent growth in the private sector.

Organised crime was another very convenient partner for the political establishment because it controlled a part of the private sector, in particular the construction business. This system soon extended to the rest of Italy, in particular when ‘at the beginning of the 70s, Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian mafia) itself began to become a company. A company because, by getting a more and more hefty share – which sometimes became almost a monopoly – of the drug market, Cosa Nostra began to manage an enormous amount of capital’ (last interview with Paolo Borsellino, 1992).

As we have seen with Palizzolo, the connection between political class and organised crime has always been there, but now in the 50s, 60s and 70s, it became obvious, with people like Giovanni Gioia, Fanfani’s political secretary, Salvo Lima, a collaborator of Gioia with important connections with Cosa Nostra who was murdered by Cosa Nostra itself in 1992, and Vito Ciancimino, DC politician, mayor of Palermo and mafia member. To confirm Borsellino’s statement, we could just consider that Silvio Berlusconi started his empire by getting a surety from the Bank Rasini of Milan that was involved in Cosa Nostra money laundering. The best buddy of Silvio Berlusconi, Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian ‘Socialist’ Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI), became clearly important when Cosa Nostra and the DC were having some ‘marital’ problems in the early 80s. It was known that this traditionally small party (9.6 percent of votes), which still carried the hammer and sickle logo until 1985, at once became ‘important’ and notoriously corrupted to the core.

To an extent, the Italian political class underwent a transition in the period from 1969 to 1977, which in Italy was characterised by intense social and political unrest connected with the first serious economic troubles since the end of WWII. At the conclusion of this phase, the national political class represented not only a relative obstacle to the healthy development of Italian capitalism, but started to act as an absolute brake: the public debt boomed and in 1985 reached the warning level of 80 percent of GDP (in 1970 it was only 40.5 percent).

If in the past Italian politicians were not so different from their counterparts in other European countries - maybe just slightly more naive and less concerned with an effective capitalist industrial policy - from the first ‘pentapartito’ (ie. five parties) government in 1981 they began to act as a simple parasite clique who prompted an artificial economic development making use of what Marcello De Cecco referred to as ‘criminal (or bastard) Keynesianism’: unbalanced and unproductive public expense, generalised political corruption at all levels, competitive devaluation of the currency, high taxation rates on salaries together with widespread tax evasion in the self-employment sector, and, finally, heavy reliance on the protected export of low-technology goods related to the existence of the European Common Market.

Enter Beppe Grillo

When in 1986 Beppe Grillo, a successful comedian from Genoa, made a joke about the PSI being corrupt he said what everybody knew already. Grillo was banned because of this joke from Italian television. This showed how little people were then allowed to say in the mainstream media and how bad the political situation was.

 Grillo’s activism against the political establishment became even more pronounced after that. At that time he was working in theatres, touching upon topics like corruption, pollution, consumer association matters, unemployment, bank scandals, etc. People who did not follow him in theatres could still see him on television on Tele+, where his live performances were broadcast every now and then. Grillo’s performances got mainstream media coverage when he talked about scandals like Parmalat’s, which broke before the media and justice system knew about it. The internet was the real breakthrough for Grillo. He could finally reach many more people, and his blog became the most popular in Italy.

Through Grillo’s blog, meet-ups were and are organised to allow ‘Grillo’s friends’ to meet face to face, discuss local problems and organise action groups, for instance against a local council that wants to build a new incinerator. In this way Grillo’s friends or followers started to become more and more proactive. In 2007 on the 8 September, a very symbolic date for Italy, a V-Day (Vaffanculo = Fuck off) was organised to gather as many followers as possible to protest against the political establishment. This was a great success, connecting 220 cities at the same time. On this occasion Grillo declared that he did not intend to create a political party but rather to eliminate them.

Grillo specified later that the M5S is in fact a movement and not a party. At the end of 2009 the M5S was founded. For some, Gianroberto Casaleggio is the real mind behind the M5S. It does not matter to us if behind Grillo there is Grillo or Casaleggio or Grillo and Casaleggio. What matters is what this political movement is about. They claim that they want to empower the citizens, getting rid of the old caste of politicians and their old systems based on clientelism and patronage. That’s reasonable and necessary in a country like Italy. We can sympathise with such a movement over this point, in the same way that Marx did with liberals like Garibaldi and Francesco Crispi in their battle against the Bourbon monarchy (Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1860), without this meaning that Marx was a liberal.

The Five Star Movement’s platform

So let’s have a brief look at the M5S political platform. M5S complains that the state is disjointed from the citizens, that the constitution (which represents bourgeois law) is not applied, and that the state’s cost far outweighs its efficiency. Here a cry for bourgeois

legality was expressed through the M5S.

Of course this message also appeals to workers, who have experienced years of abuse from the political class. M5S also proposes that the salary of the members of parliament be in line with the national average; this point has been seen as socialist, but in fact is just a sign that when a capitalist economy is in crisis politicians should get the blame too. Nothing socialist there! We think that the capitalist system itself should get the blame and not just its servant politicians.

An interesting proposal is to make debate available to all citizens with internet access via the live streaming of public meetings. This is not direct democracy, but the principle that workers could participate more closely in political debates is interesting. Following the same line, there is the proposal that new laws should be online three months before they are approved to get citizens’ comments. It is not clear if these comments will be enough to change the proposed laws or even stop them, but again the principle of participation is interesting.

M5S asks for referendums without a quorum condition and for the obligation on Parliament to discuss laws proposed by a people’s initiative. All these efforts to make Parliament more accessible to the workers are welcome, however very limited they are by the fact that economic power will be still in the hands of a few who will be influencing the political world anyhow. A more transparent way of doing politics in Italy is the main reason why the M5S got such a large vote. This expressed a feeling amongst many, even some of the upper class who rely on the bourgeois legality of the constitution, that the current political system was not representing them.

The M5S political platform includes several points about sustainability. Capitalism is not sustainable so to try to reconcile this with the health of the planet raises contradictions by Definition. In terms of economic policy the M5S wants to introduce class actions, abolish the dummy corporation system in the stock exchange, and abolish the so-called Biagi law in which workers with temporary contacts have no rights for holidays, sick leave or maternity leave, and have restrictions on their pension payments. Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute (Statuto dei Lavoratori, 1970) says that an employer ought to have a fair reason to fire an employee. Several governments have wanted to modify it, so allowing the employer to fire

their employees quite easily, to create what they call ‘flexibility’. Grillo in his blog proposed that this article should not be changed but that instead the taxes on enterprises should be lowered. The fact that the M5S is against Biagi’s law and does not want to change Article 18 was a crucial point to gain votes from the working class. In principle not changing this article is good. Unfortunately the real problem is that the worldwide free labour market has considerably reduced the working class’s bargaining power. Instead of hoping that lower taxes on enterprises would solve the problem, workers should get involved in international movements to fight against capital. Instead, M5S national reformism seems to be the preferred way.

Moreover the M5S tries to counter the anarchic nature of capitalism by proposing to forbid the closure of food  and manufacturing industries which gave  the internal market as their main market and to ban cross share-holdings between the bank system and the industrial system; also that financial advice institutes should share responsibility for losses; that a salary limit be established for the CEOs of corporations in which the State is the main shareholder; abolition of stock options; abolition of state monopolies such as TelecomItalia, Autostrade, ENI, ENEL, Mediaset, Ferrovie dello Stato. This is the part that seems to interest the Occupy Movement. M5S wants to reduce the public debt so as to reduce the  Italian State costs a lot, the money will also need to come from somewhere else. Benefits to unemployed people are also mentioned in M5S’s programme.

M5S reached political power rather quickly as an anti-establishment movement, because in Italy politics, corruption and crime are so interconnected, and public opinion, influenced by bourgeois ideology, can no longer stand it. In economic terms, the M5S response is a Keynesian mixed economy, with the old illusion that government intervention will be able to control or even cure the anarchic nature of capitalism. Unfortunately, the mixed economy already proved to be ineffective in taming capitalism. But can the M5S at least get rid of corruption and collusion? We shall see.

It may be interesting, from the social science point of view, to note that reformist movements are becoming more and more hybrid and decoupled from traditional left and right alignments. The internet has become a powerful medium for people organization, but still people need human contact and public speeches to be convinced. For many people representing the old establishment, this has been a real revolution. For the working class this is yet another reformist movement.

The Italian bourgeoisie is in such bad shape that this quite moderate movement, which aims at a capitalist system regulated by the government with no obvious links to organised crime, seems to be asking a lot. The need to apply bourgeois legality is so urgent that voters from all sides were attracted to the M5S. Workers voted for the M5S with the hope that cuts to state expenditure and the abolition of Biagi’s law could improve their condition.

Unfortunately, capitalism does not have a good face or a bad face, it follows profit. And although it is very appealing to kick the old politicians up the arse, the situation for workers is unlikely to be improved by M5S political reforms.

CESCO