VRA’s TROUBLE (1)

VRA CEO Kweku Botwe

By Ekow Mensah

One of the Volta River Authority’s (VRA) major problems is the fact that it has been compelled to supply electricity to the Volta Aluminum Company (VALCO) at below cost.

VALCO pays a special rate of 4.50 US cents per Kw/hr for electricity.

This rate is lower than what is paid by individuals and households and less than half of the export price paid by Togo and Benin.

It is only about one third of the tariff paid by the mining companies.

A report titled “Energizing Economic Growth in Ghana (2013) put out by the World Bank says that overall tariff subsidy to VALCO is US $150 million per annum.

In addition to this subsidy, the VRA loses substantial revenue by not selling the power supplied to VALCO at the highest price of 10 US cent for which there is a willing buyer.

This amounts to another subsidy for VALCO from the VRA at a time when the Authority is in dire need of resources to rehabilitate, expand and maintain infrastructure, in order to lower overall cost and improve services.

Government and VALCO officials have justified this strange subsidy policy on the basis of expected downstream benefits, including jobs and the development of an integrated aluminum industry.

Interestingly, the fuel cost alone of the electricity required for VALCO to produce one ton of aluminum is presently above $3,900 which is much higher than current international aluminum prices of about $2,100 per ton.

The justification is bizarre, having regard to the fact that all employees of VALCO could be retained on full pay at only a fraction of the cost of subsidy to the company.

A direct subsidy of $7million would also be sufficient to keep downstream producers in business and save the Government of Ghana more than $140 million.

Editorial

ENERGY SECTOR

The problems in the energy sector appears huge but The Insight believes that with just a little thinking Ghana can overcome them.

 The real problem is that some officials in the sector are busily resisting the temptation to think. They act as if thinking is just too much hassle and that the easy way of shifting blame and dancing tango around the problems is fine.

Why does the Government of Ghana spend US $3,900 on generating power for the production of one ton of aluminum which sells at US$2,100 on the international market?

It is difficult to understand why Government is subsidizing VALCO to the tune of US $150 million per annum when a direct6 subsidy of only US$7million will keep all the downstream aluminum industries in production.

Perhaps, it is time for some of the technocrats in the energy sector to put on their thinking caps.

It can help!

INSIGHT

Mr Tony Aidoo

Dr Tony Aidoo, a leading member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) will deliver a public lecture on “The Media And National Development” to mark the 20^th anniversary of The Insight.

 The event is scheduled to take place on Tuesday September 3, 2013 at the Freedom Centre in Accra.

Professor Agyemang Badu Akosah, a former Presidential Candidate of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) has been invited to chair the event.

Mr. Mahama Ayariga, the Minister of Information will also open an exhibition on the same day as part of the celebration.

The exhibition will feature mainly cuttings of the newspaper over the last 20 years.

Prominent personalities who have contributed significantly to the growth of the newspaper including Nana Kofi Koomson, of the Chronicle will be honoured at the event.

Death and Destruction of Agriculture

By Colin Todhunter

The widely held belief is that genetically modified ‘terminator seeds’ are not available on the commercial market anywhere. Since 2001, there has been a de facto worldwide moratorium on the use of terminator technology (UN Convention on Biological Diversity). By definition, such seeds are genetically engineered to make them sterile and unusable for replanting, resulting in farmers having to buy new seeds from a central supplier each year.

Under Article 28 of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights  (the TRIPS Agreement), “planting, harvesting, saving, re-planting, and exchanging seeds of patented plants, or of plants containing patented cells and genes, constitutes use,” and is prohibited by the intellectual property laws of signatory states.

Previously, farmers just replanted their own seeds and exchanged them among themselves. As with the forced enclosure of common land in England hundreds of years ago, ordinary farmers today are being denied access to their heritage too: the common exchanging, saving, evolving and breeding of seeds. By using various legal and political instruments, through seed monopolies and seed patenting, big agribusiness has taken over the cotton seed market, especially in India, where over 90 to 95 percent of all cotton is now genetically modified and controlled by big corporations.

It is frequently argued that the high debt incurred by Indian farmers and resultant farmer suicides (over 250,000 since 1997) have largely resulted from the need to purchase costly pesticides and expensive seeds each year because they contain a ‘terminator’ gene. Environmentalist Vandana Shiva has taken a good deal of flak from some quarters for implying that seeds with ‘non-renewable’ genetic traits are responsible for the mass farmer suicides in India. Her most strident critics say that this is a much-propagated myth or outright lie, given the global ban on the commercial use of ‘terminator’ seeds. So, who are we to believe?

Tiruvadi Jagadisan worked with Monsanto for nearly two decades, including eight years as the managing director of India operations.  The former Monsanto boss said government regulatory agencies with which the company used to deal with in the 1980s simply depended on data supplied by the company while giving approvals to herbicides.

As reported in India Today in 2009, he is on record as saying that India’s Central Insecticide Board simply accepted foreign data supplied by Monsanto and did not even have a test tube to validate the data and, at times, the data itself was faked. Jagadisan stated that Monsanto was getting into the seed business and that he had information that a ‘terminator gene’ was to be incorporated in the seeds being supplied by the firm.

It begs the question, who can we trust? Monsanto, a company with a more than dubious history of safety standards and scruples, and state regulatory bodies in India, a country where corruption throughout officialdom runs deep and is well documented, or people like Vandana Shiva and farmers on the ground who suspect terminator technology is already a reality?

Back in 2005, biologist Pushpa Bhargava alleged that there were reports that unapproved varieties of several genetically modified crops were being sold to farmers. He spoke of terminator seeds being sold to farmers and stated that one farmer came to him with some samples of sterile seeds and wanted him to test them to see whether they were terminator seeds. Dr Bhargava urged the central government to wake up to these happenings and take urgent steps.

The real experts, the farmers with generations of tradition and know-how to call upon, suspect something is amiss.

“We do not buy seeds from the market because we suspect they may be contaminated with genetically engineered or terminator seeds,” Pavamma, a Dalit woman, near the town of Zaheerabad, as quoted in ‘Women in India take on Monsanto’ by Arun Shrivastava, Global Research, 9  Oct, 2006.

The European Union has already suspected Indian Basmati rice could be contaminated with GMOs, despite, as with ‘terminator seeds’, GM food crops not having been ‘officially’ released onto the commercial market inIndia. How stringent are the checks on crops in India, whether in terms of ‘terminator’ technology or GMOs in general?

Either way, due to the corporate patenting and monopolization of GM seeds, farmers are compelled to regularly buy expensive seeds and use excessive amounts of chemicals on their crops. They thus incur massive debt due to spiraling input costs and weak returns as a result of US agribusiness manipulating global commodity prices courtesy of policies enacted on its behalf by the US government.

While the debate rages as to whether certain seeds contain a ‘terminator gene’ or more likely some other trait that at least diminishes seed virility, the outcome of global policies that have benefited big agribusiness, as well as seed patenting and seed monopoly (and the swallowing the seed companies’ pesticides!) has been the widespread termination of farmers’ lives in India. With reports of collapsed cotton yields throughout the state of Maharashtra in India , ‘cutting edge’ biotechnology is proving to be terminal on many levels.

Regardless of the absence or presence of any ‘terminator’ gene, biotech products are too often proving to be ‘terminator seeds’ in all but name.

US rulers fear American people

Edward Snowden

By Finian Cunningham

What the disclosures of former CIA contractor Edward Snowden show perhaps above all else is just how petrified the leaders of the United States have become - of ordinary citizens both in the US and around the world. When we say “leaders” we mean the ruling elite - the top one percent of the financial-corporate-military-industrial complex and its bought- and paid-for politicians.

The international manhunt by the US authorities for Snowden, which has accelerated with his flight to Moscow to evade extradition from Hong Kong, is indicative of the desperation in Washington’s elitist establishment to quash him and what he is revealing about their despotic rule.

Today, the US has evolved into a dystopia, not a democracy, where obscene wealth and privilege stand in the face of massive poverty and misery. One indicator of this abysmal inequality is the fact that the 400 richest Americans have more material wealth than 155 million of their fellow citizens combined. Another datum: some 50 million Americans - a sixth of the population - are surviving on food handouts. Unemployment, homelessness, suicide rates, prescription drug addiction, rampant gun crime all speak in different ways of social meltdown. 

American society is collapsing from the sheer weight of its decrepit capitalist economy. The social system is unsustainable. It is like a distended rotten sack that is coming apart at the seams from inexorable burgeoning pressure. This is not unique to the US. All around the world, people are rebelling against the inequity of crony capitalism - there is only one form of capitalism - from Europe to the Arab Middle East, from Turkey to Brazil. 

But the US is a phenomenal case in point of collapsing capitalist society. It’s hard to believe that not so long ago, within living memory; the US was regarded as the economic paradigm of the world. Now it more and more resembles a giant sprawling ghetto of unremitting poverty that is interspersed with a few gated rich communities, the latter populated by the top one percent of society.

This is the historical context for fully understanding the significance of gargantuan state surveillance by the elite against the citizenry, as revealed by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The American ruling class, as with their elite counterparts around the world, are figuratively sitting within their privileged niches and petrified by the mounting discontent “outside”. Through their criminal ransacking and rigging of wealth, the powers-that-be have through their own insatiable greed created a powerful potential enemy -virtually the entire population, both in the US and around the world.

In this highly unstable situation of elites and masses that bankrupt capitalism has furnished, “democracy” can no longer be tolerated by the rulers. That is why the rulers have embarked on massive information gathering, monitoring, spying and surveillance. It is all about maintaining “control” of a precarious and explosive disequilibrium.

One basic duty of any state is to protect its citizens from foreign enemies. Enemies are conventionally understood to be state militaries or non-state terrorist groups. But from Snowden’s revelations of US government surveillance of telecommunications, the vast bulk of America’s spying is on civilians. The phone calls, emails, cyber chats and photos of billions of people all around the world are vacuumed up and stored for analysis. Snowden disclosed in one instance how Chinese hospitals and universities - not military installations - were among the many international civilian targets for American government snooping.

US national security officials defend this global dragnet method as a necessary way to trawl for terrorists. Last week, the chief of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander told the American Senate that more than 50 terrorist plots against the US had been foiled by the NSA’s interception of civilian communications. The evidence for the alleged thwarted terrorist attacks cited by General Alexander was sketchy at best, so we are obliged to accept the NSA’s dubious word on its self-serving claims of success. 

Even if we accept this claim on face value, an alleged terror threat numbering 50, gleaned from billions of communication files, is a negligible ratio, akin to a needle in a haystack. That means two things. First, the statistical terror threat against US citizens is likewise negligible to the point of being virtually non-existent. As Snowden himself pointed out, the chances of Americans dying from slipping in their bathtub are far great than from terrorism. The second thing is that the official pretext for global, industrial-scale infringement of privacy - that is, national security of its citizens - is grotesquely disproportionate, and therefore unjustifiable.

In the aftermath of these revelations, US President Barack Obama and his security officials are claiming that the infringements of individual privacy are minor. “No-one is listening to your phone calls,” said Obama. He also added that there must be a trade-off between national security and what he called “minor breaches” of civil liberties.

These assurances from Obama and US National Intelligence Director James Clapper, among others, are rejected by Snowden and other NSA whistleblowers, as well as by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is litigating against the American government over the recent revelations. Official claims of limited surveillance and breaches are also repudiated by various digital privacy advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as by common knowledge of American constitutional rights.

Edward Snowden says that when he was working at the NSA, he had clearance to hack into anyone’s email “including the president’s”. That is far from “minor”.

Another former senior employee of the NSA, Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted under the US Espionage Act for similar whistleblowing in 2011, says that the American government and its secret agencies have systematically “subverted the constitution” by arrogating the power to tap into all and any communications that they desire. In a narrow sense, Obama may be right that “no-one is listening to your phone calls”. Not yet, at least, but the executive powers and technology are in place for this totalitarian system of eavesdropping to be switched on.

Drake writes, “The supposed oversight, combined with enabling legislation - the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court, the congressional committees - is all a kabuki dance, predicated on the national security claim that we need to find a threat. The reality is: they [the US government] just want it all, period.” He added: “They have this extraordinary system: in effect, a 24/7 panopticon on a vast scale that it is gazing at you with an all-seeing eye.”

It seems an incredible lack of judgment among some alternative commentators who have dismissed Snowden’s revelations as trivial. Worse still, some commentators have even insinuated that the former NSA analyst is a witting or unwitting player in an elaborate CIA hoax aimed at intimidating citizens from using mass communications.

Such views badly underestimate the extent of American government criminality towards its own sacrosanct constitution and the deeply corrupting implications that has for democracy.

Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story earlier this month, has said, “The people who have learned things they didn't already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or terrorists, but at them.”

Greenwald adds, “And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures. What has been ‘harmed’ is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability.”

Since the US Espionage Act was instituted nearly a century ago in 1917, there have been a total of 10 prosecutions against American government employees deemed to have broken the law and compromised national security through whistleblowing. One of those was former State Department staffer Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, revealing the spurious legal grounds for the American genocidal war on Vietnam.

Seven out of the total 10 prosecutions against whistleblowers - 70 percent - have occurred under the Obama administrations. That figure alone tells of a growing anxiety within the American ruling class. That anxiety is related to their increasingly criminal secret powers and the ongoing subversion of democracy. The American rulers are jealously guarding their criminal behaviour and that is why they are hunting down with a vengeance people like Snowden who are seen to be exposing this criminality. It is something of an irony that this week Snowden had to flee to Russia (the former “evil empire” in the words of late American President Ronald Reagan) in order to avoid extradition to the US where he is charged with felonies under the Espionage Act.

Former NSA employee Thomas Drake says that when he was working as an analyst during the Cold War he was assigned to monitor the espionage activities of Stalinist East Germany and its secret Stasi police. Drake says that the Stasi had an obsession to “knowing everything” about its citizens and kept a huge archive of paper files. However, this voluminous archiving is a fraction of what is stored and accessible by American secret services owing to the internet and digital technology. Drake describes the American NSA as “a Stasi on steroids”.

In the 1970s, US Senator Frank Church led a groundbreaking investigation into illicit American government covert operations. Church warned then that if the secret powers of the NSA were to ever become deployed against the American public - as opposed to “foreign enemies” - then that country’s democracy would be finished. That is precisely the present abysmal outcome of secret US state powers. 

There are two corollaries of the imploding capitalist system, for which the US still remains the lynchpin for historical reasons. The first is the increasing militarism of the US and its Western allies to compensate for this economic demise. This militarism has evolved over the past decade since the purported 9/11 terror attacks on the US in 2001 to become a condition of “permanent war”. The present US-led covert war in Syria and underway against Iran are part of a continuum of imperialist war-making that connects Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, as well as Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Mali. This state of permanent war is needed by the waning capitalist powers to try to assert control of natural resources, markets, finance and investment against perceived rivals, such as Russia and China.

The other corollary of the historic failure of capitalism, and in particular in the US, is the imperative to assert control over social meltdown and rebellion. That is why the growth in militarism abroad has gone hand-in-glove with the intensification of surveillance powers and repression against citizens at home. American, and Western, democracy is, for all intents and purposes, a dead corpse. Only criminal wars and repression of its citizens are keeping the moribund system on a life-support system.

As Thomas Drake noted, “Since the [US] government unchained itself from the constitution after 9/11, it has been eating our democracy alive from the inside out.”

The rulers of America are despotic elites who are living in fear and trepidation of their own people and of people power around the world rising in rebellion against the misrule of capitalism.