ACHIMOTA FOREST: Stop The Lies And Halt the Destruction

The Achimota Forest

The controversy over the intent to destroy the Achimota Forest is deepening with strange claims by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources.

The Ministry says that the forest is not for sale and that the plan is to turn it into an amusement centre.

The Amusement centre, will have a car park, restaurants, a shopping mall, prayer camp, a hotel and other facilities.

The question is, given the size of the forest how can all these facilities be built there without destroying the only forest belt in Accra.

Mr Inusah, Fusein, Minister for Lands and Natural Resources says that claims that the Forest is for sale are false.

However those opposed to the destruction of the Forest have not claimed that it is for sale.

All that they insist on is that the Forest should not be destroyed.

Dr Kwasi Nduom, former Minister in the Kufuor administration insists “the Achimota Forest must remain a forest”.

Nana Akomea, former Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) says the destruction of the forest will have adverse effects on the geography of Accra.

Part of Mr Fusein’s defence is that the Mahama administration is only continuing what the Kufuor Government started.

The preservation of the Achimota Forest has become a key object of The Insight.

Editorial

THESE CHIEFS!

Who told some of our chiefs that Ministers are appointed to represent tribal areas and that they have the power to dictate how ministers should behave?

The other day, it was a Chief from Gomoa who was lecturing the Minister with responsibility for gender and womens’ affairs about how to treat her deputy.

The chief believes that his subject has been treated badly by the Minister and therefore his traditional area has been affronted.

Only last week, another chief from the Brong Ahafo region jumped into the Victoria Hammah affair and urged the President to tamper justice with mercy.

 It is obvious that the chief too is acting in the wrong belief that Ms Hammah is from the Brong Ahafo region and is therefore representing the region in Government.

It is time to tell these chiefs that the Ministers are not their representatives in Government.

Bullet-proof Corruption

Stella Oduah, Nigeria Aviation Minister

By Ogaga Ifowodo

It was bound to come to this. The moment our “zero tolerance for corruption” president decided to fight tooth and nail against the public declaration of his assets, the moment he chose to declare instead “I don’t give a damn!” about any such nonsense as probity and leading by example, you knew the day was just around the corner when a minister could import bullet-proof luxury cars as personal gifts to herself. I say personal gifts as all the facts known so far about the “scandal de jour,” the current atrocity before another has us foaming at the corners of the mouth with unappeasable anger, point inescapably to that conclusion. Unless, of course, you believe that the said cars, which promptly disappeared from proper custody, were meant for visiting dignitaries. Yes, it was bound to come to the point where all that it would take to order, import, evade customs duties and take possession of bullet-proof luxury vehicles at prices so stupefyingly inflated you would think the whole thing was a prank is for a minister to say to her subordinate, “Do the needful.” That is all Minister of Aviation, Mrs Stella Oduah, says she did. And if she believes this pathetic attempt to save face — because she has a face to save, unlike the hundreds who have perished in several plane crashes under her watch — then how tragic is it that she is a minister?

I won’t bother with the shocking details of this latest act of daylight robbery, of the unending pillage and dispossession of the people. What would be the point? To establish that the armoured vehicles — BMWs, Germany’s vaunted “ultimate driving machines,” two Lexus limousines, and more, just in case you have been living in Mars for the past month or so — were bought without the “honourable” minister’s consent or knowledge? That transporting visiting dignitaries of international aviation regulation organisations from one point to another requires armoured vehicles, as if they would even come if Nigeria were at war, and if so to tour the war fronts? Or that it was all the fault of due process for failing to spot anything dubious about a transaction whose every line item screamed CORRUPTION! CORRUPTION! in red letters? Or that the number and price of the vehicles — N255 million or $1.6 million for two BMWs alone — can be justified even by a lunatic? No, the facts, such as we already have, are sufficient to hang a dog; no need to first give it a bad name. To my mind, the most worrisome thing about the seemingly untameable catastrophe of official corruption has to do with the abject failure of President Jonathan to lead anything close to a war against corruption, whatever his protestations to the contrary.

Recall, for instance, the president’s only action so far. On learning that his minister in charge of aviation, and, so, of air safety, had very likely been embezzling or misappropriating huge amounts of public funds while planes have been falling out of our sky like so many tattered paper kites flown by children, the latest being the Associated Airlines tragedy of 3 October 2013, what did he, enraged, do? Well, he set up a three-member panel to probe the minister. And then he proceeded on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem during which he took time from his personal devotions to perform some official business. (Sanctimonious officials are, of course, part of the problem of Nigeria. Their inability to separate the state from religion, their personal pieties from governance, will be the subject of my next column.) The only remarkable thing about that action which unmistakably expresses the president’s incandescent rage is that one of the persons to probe the minister, National Security Adviser Colonel Ibrahim Dasuki (rtd), travelled with Jonathan, while the minister to be probed had preceded the pilgrims-cum-public-servants to Jerusalem! It is quite possible Jonathan is embarrassed that bullet-proof luxury vehicles are now the poster-image of his war against corruption.  Perhaps the irony is plain to him, seeing that he has yet to fire a single bullet, even one filled with hot words, in this war. Rather, he has been far happier to be a nurse, binding the wounds of convicted corrupt politicians as shown by the state pardon to his mentor, D.S.P. Alamieyeseigha.

But why armoured cars? Security for her many important foreign visitors, says Mrs Oduah, though Nigeria is not at war, but how grateful she must be to Boko Haram! We know, however, that security was only a crude and clever ruse, and I hazard that this new trend among our politicians in high public office symbolises something else: armoured luxury vehicles as a triple-meaning metaphor for corruption: unabashed ostentation; a sign of their sense of invincibility, of absolute protection from prosecution; and protection from the people whom they so shamelessly dispossess and impoverish. Deep down, our politicians know that a thief lives in perpetual fear of being discovered by the owner, in this case the masses of the Nigerian people pauperised and dehumanised by official kleptomania. And our politicians know that the masses, unlike our president, give a bloody damn about corruption, and that a day of reckoning looms. But do our bullet-proof politicians know that no armour is proof against the rage of the people when they are finally roused to action?

omoliho@gmail.com

WikiLeaks releases Again

Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange

Details of a highly secretive, multi-national trade agreement long in works has been published by WikiLeaks, and critics say there will be major repercussions for much of the modern world if its approved in this incarnation.

The anti-secrecy group published on Wednesday a 95-page excerpt taken from a recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a NAFTA-like agreement that is expected to encompass nations representing more than 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product when it is finally approved: the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei. 

US President Barack Obama and counterparts from 11 other prospective member states have been hammering out the free trade agreement in utmost secrecy for years now, the result of which, according to the White House, would rekindle the economies of all of those involved, including many countries considered to still be emerging.

“The TPP will boost our economies, lowering barriers to trade and investment, increasing exports and creating more jobs for our people, which is my number-one priority,” Obama said during a Nov. 2011 address. The deal, he said, “has the potential to be a model not only for the Asia Pacific but for future trade agreements” by regulating markets and creating opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses in the growing global marketplace. 

Upon the publication of an excerpt obtained by WikiLeaks this week, however, opponents of the act are insisting that provisions dealing with creation, invention and innovation could serve a severe blow to everyone, particularly those the internet realm.

Although the TPP covers an array of topics — many of which have not been covered by past agreements, according to Obama — WikiLeaks has published a chapter from a draft dated August 30, 2013 that deals solely on Intellectual Property, or IP, rights. Previous reports about the rumored contents of the TPP with regards to IP law have raised concern among activists before, with the California-based Electronic Frontier Foundation going as far as to warn that earlier leaked draft text suggested the agreement “would have extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process and hinder peoples' abilities to innovate,” all of which is being agreed upon without any oversight or observation. Indeed, the thousands of words released by WikiLeaks this week has concreted those fears and has already caused the likes of the EFF and others to sound an alarm. 

The IP chapter, wrote WikiLeaks, “provides the public with the fullest opportunity so far to familiarize themselves with the details and implications of the TPP,” an agreement that has largely avoided scrutiny in the mainstream media during its development, no thanks, presumably, to the under-the-table arguments that have led prospective member states to the point they’re at today.

Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower site who has been confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for over a year now, had particularly harsh words for the TPP in a statement published alongside the draft release.

“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons,” Assange said. “If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”

Within the IP chapter, the partaking nations in one excerpt agree to “Enhance the role of intellectual property in promoting economic and social development,” but elsewhere suggest that the way in which such could be accomplished would involve serious policing of the World Wide Web. Later, the countries write they hope to “reduce impediments to trade and investment by promoting deeper economic integration through effective and adequate creation, utilization, protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights, taking into account the different levels of economic development and capacity as well as differences in national legal systems.” 

“Compared to existing multilateral agreements, the TPP IPR chapter proposes the granting of more patents, the creation of intellectual property rights on data, the extension of the terms of protection for patents and copyrights, expansions of right holder privileges and increases in the penalties for infringement,” James Love of Knowledge Ecology International explained after reading the leaked chapter. “The TPP text shrinks the space for exceptions in all types of intellectual property rights. Negotiated in secret, the proposed text is bad for access to knowledge, bad for access to medicine and profoundly bad for innovation.”

Opponents have argued in the past that stringent new rules under the TPP with regards to copyrighted material would cause the price of medication to go up: potentially catastrophic news for residents of member state who may have difficulties affording prescriptions. Public Citizen, a Washington-based consumer advocacy organization, has warned that US Trade Representatives privy to the TPP discussions have demanded provisions that “would strengthen, lengthen and broaden pharmaceutical monopolies on cancer, heart disease and HIV/AIDS drugs, among others, in the Asia-Pacific region.” Indeed, the leaked chapter suggests drug companies could easily extend and widen patents under the TPP, prohibiting other countries from producing life-saving pills and selling them for less. Outside of the world of medicine, though, the implications that could come with new copyright rules agreed upon my essentially half of the world’s economy are likely to affect everyone.

"One could see the TPP as a Christmas wish-list for major corporations, and the copyright parts of the text support such a view," Dr. Matthew Rimmer, an expert in intellectual property law, told the Sydney Morning Herald. "Hollywood, the music industry, big IT companies such as Microsoft and the pharmaceutical sector would all be very happy with this."

WikiLeaks wrote in response that the enforcement measures discussed have “far-reaching implications for individual rights, civil liberties, publishers, internet service providers and internet privacy, as well as for the creative, intellectual, biological and environmental commons.”

“Particular measures proposed include supranational litigation tribunals to which sovereign national courts are expected to defer, but which have no human rights safeguards,” warned WikiLeaks. “The TPP IP Chapter states that these courts can conduct hearings with secret evidence.”

According to the whistleblower site, the IP chapter also includes provisions that rehash some of the very surveillance and enforcement rules from the abandoned SOPA and ACTA treaties that were left to die after public outrage halted any agreement with regards to those legislation.

“The WikiLeaks text also features Hollywood and recording industry inspired proposals – think about the SOPA debacle – to limit internet freedom and access to educational materials, to force internet providers to act as copyright enforcers and to cut off people’s internet access,” Burcu Kilic, an intellectual property lawyer with Public Citizen, explained to the website TorrentFreak. 

SOPA, or the Stop Online Privacy Act, was abandoned last year after massive public campaign thwarted the US Congress’ attempt to censor access to certain internet sites where copyrighted content may be incidentally hosted. One of the bill’s biggest opponents, Kim Dotcom of file-sharing sites Megaupload and Mega, was quick to condone WikiLeaks for their release of the TPP draft and condemned those responsible for drafting a bill that he warned would have major consequences for all if approved, including residents of New Zealand such as himself.

“No wonder they kept it secret. What a malicious piece of US corporate lobbying. TPP is about world domination for US corporations. Nothing else. We will stop this madness in New Zealand,” he told RT’s Andrew Blake.

According to WikiLeaks, the Obama administration and senior heads of state from other potential TPP nations have expressed interest in ratifying the agreement before 2014. All of that could now be put in jeopardy.

Today's world would be unthinkable without Russian Revolution

Vladimir Lenin

By Oleg Artyukov

The Day of the October Revolution, November 7, is still a public holiday in Belarus. In Russia, it stopped being one after the collapse of the Soviet Union. More precisely, before 7 November 2004, the day was marked in calendars as a Day of Accord and Reconciliation. But the surrogate did not live long.

For many people - especially of the older generation - November 7 is still a great holiday. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation celebrates the holiday every year. Although, it is definitely a big question, whether the current Communist Party, or rather, its leadership, has more reasons to celebrate the October Revolution, than, for example, the Liberal Democratic Party, or "United Russia" have.

On the official level, politicians do not try to talk much about the events in October 1917 as a revolution. They refer to those events as a coup. The concept of a new textbook on history no longer distinguishes between February and October revolutions. Experts preferred to call the events of 1917 the Great Russian Revolution.

In fact, maybe it is fair. Eventually, there would be no October Revolution without the February one. But one can hardly deny the fact that the October Revolution had a huge impact not only on the whole world, but also on Russia. Do we have to try to downplay the significance of the events of October 1917, and even more so - do we need to be ashamed of them?

"Of course, in a purely technical sense, November 7, 1917 was a coup. But that coup was a part of the grand revolutionary process, which began in February and continued for a whole historical period, before the revolutionary impulse got exhausted," political analyst Boris Kagarlitsky said.

"It's comparable to what happened in France in the 18th century. The Russian Revolution shook not only to Russia, but radically changed the whole world. And the world we see around us today, would be unthinkable without it, just like the world of the 19th century would be unthinkable without the French Revolution. This is a fact of history of Germany, England or the United States, just like the fact of history of our country," he stressed.

  "What did it give us? It created the modern Russian nation, like the French revolution created the French nation in 1789. We would have been absolutely different people otherwise. We'd live in other places, have different composition of blood and speak a completely different language. The revolution made the Russian literary language the heritage of the entire nation and not only the Russian nation. The result was free education, health care, the widespread introduction of universal and equal election right, which did not exist in Russia and many countries of the West before 1917," the scientist of politics told Pravda.Ru.

"The Soviet Union could not build socialism in practice, although it was its proclamation ideologically. Capitalism radically changed under the impact of the Russian Revolution. Now, when we dismantle the structures generated by the revolutionary breakthrough, capitalism degrades as well. We say that there is  "wild capitalism" in Russia. But the fact is that it has been "running wild" in the whole world. This will continue, until someone gives a new impetus to social change," said Boris Kagarlitsky.

"According to polls, about 58 percent of people positively estimate the October revolution; about 25 percent are negative to it," said political analyst Sergei Chernyakhovsky.

In his view, the October Revolution was "the union of the people in opposing the dysfunctional government."

"All that was declared back then - was the ideals of public self-government, the ideals of accelerated development, the ideals of participation of each and everyone in the government," said Sergey Chernyakhovsky.

"Anyway, the whole prosperous Western world now enjoys the results of the path, which the October Revolution opened," the analyst told Pravda.Ru.

As for modern followers of the Bolsheviks, both Boris Kagarlitsky and Sergei Chernyakhovsky believe that there is no reason to regard them as such.

"When it comes to the Communist Party, this party is like a collection of people, who irresponsibly squander the legacy of their famous ancestors. They use the name, but do not even understand the meaning of the words spoken. Of course, there are different people at the Communist Party, but its administration is fully engaged in its own business only," said Boris Kagarlitsky.

"As for other communist groups, they need to learn to talk about something else, other than class struggle. They need to learn to work in the interests of working people - through free trade unions, social movements, etc. This is less romantic than making speeches about revolution, but that's what creates credibility among the masses," he stressed.

In the opinion of Sergey Chernyakhovsky, modern Russian communists represent a kind of residual branch that does not carry the temperament of the transformation of the world."

"The Bolsheviks always focused on the connection of their strategic objectives with what people lived. They wanted to move forward through the implementation of demands and expectations of people. And now, unfortunately, communists - those who call themselves communists today - talk about the things that are interesting only to themselves, rather than to people. They protect the world of their words and the world of their values, but they do not know how to connect it with expectations of the society," said the analyst.

Wealth of World’s Billionaires Doubles Since 2009

Queen Elizabeth, a billionaire

By Andre Damon

Even as workers in the US and other countries have seen their incomes plummet, the combined net worth of the world’s billionaires has doubled since 2009, according to a report published Tuesday by UBS and Wealth-X, a consultancy that tracks super-rich individuals.

The collective wealth of the world’s billionaires hit $6.5 trillion, a figure that is nearly as large as the gross domestic product of China, the world’s second-largest economy. The number of billionaires has grown to 2,170 in 2013, up from 1,360 in 2009, according to the report.

The vast enrichment of this social layer has been driven by surging stock markets, fueled by the “easy money” and money-printing operations of the US Federal Reserve and other central banks. This process is intensifying. Last week the European Central Bank, responding to a deterioration of economic conditions in Europe, cut its benchmark interest rate in half, from 0.5 to 0.25 percent, sending a new wave of cash into financial markets.

The day after Wealth-X released its report, Twitter, the social networking service, held its initial public offering, creating 1,600 paper millionaires in a single day, as its stock doubled within hours, according to the financial analysis firm PrivCo. The site’s co-founder, Evan Williams, increased his wealth by $1 billion in the process, to $2.5 billion. Fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey made $500 million, bringing his wealth to $2 billion.

The wealth report reflects the parasitic growth of the financial sector throughout the world economy. Seventeen percent of billionaires got their wealth from the finance, banking, and investment sectors, more than any other, while only eight percent are associated with manufacturing.

The vast expansion in the incomes of the super-rich comes even as social services are being slashed in the US, Europe and throughout the world. Earlier this month, food stamp benefits were reduced for the first time in US history, and extended unemployment benefits are scheduled to expire entirely at the end of the year.

The budget for the SNAP food stamp program is currently $74.6 billion a year, and funding the extended unemployment benefit extension, scheduled to expire in January, for one year would cost $25.2 billion. The combined net worth of the 515 billionaires in the US would pay for the food stamp and extended unemployment benefit program for an entire century.

In addition to analyzing the wealth of the world’s billionaires, the report documents the vast sums expended by the world’s billionaires on luxury items. The world’s billionaires hold about $126 billion in yachts, private jets, art, antiques, fashion, jewelry, and collectable cars. This figure is larger than the gross domestic product of Bangladesh, a country of 150 million people.

The world’s 2,170 billionaires own $48 billion in yachts, or an average of $22 million each. To put this figure in perspective, the United Nations has estimated that ending global hunger would take an investment of $30 billion per year.

The report estimated the real estate holdings of the world’s billionaires at $169 billion, averaging $78 million per individual. As the report noted, “The average billionaire owns four homes, with each one worth nearly US$20 million.”

The report added, “Time and space are rarely boundaries for the world’s billionaires, many of whom have a private jet or two, a super yacht and other comfortable and speedy modes of transport, not to mention several homes dotted around the globe.”

Despite their mobility, the world’s billionaires are congregated around major financial cities such as New York City, which has 96 billionaires, followed by Hong Kong with 75, Moscow with 74, and London with 67. If the wealth of New York City’s billionaires were divided up among the city’s 1.7 million poor residents, they would each get $170,000.

This social layer exists as an enormous drain on world society, producing nothing of value, but monopolizing vast resources. Not only are vast social resources devoted to their personal enrichment, but their domination over economic and political life acts as a block to any rational solution to the great problems confronting mankind. The super-rich control all aspects of political life throughout the world, with disastrous consequences.

This state of affairs is the inevitable outcome of the capitalist system, which treats the wealth of the world’s billionaires as sacrosanct, and the needs of the population, such as education, housing, healthcare, as expendable.