YAO GRAHAM TO SPEAK!

Dr Yao Graham, Chief Executive Officer, Third World Netwok

By Ekow Mensah

Dr Yao Graham, one of Ghana’s most distinguished left-wing intellectuals is to deliver a lecture on “ 24th February, Pan Africanism And Nkrumah Today”.

The Lecture forms part of activities being organized by the Socialist Forum of Ghana to mark the anniversary of the overthrow of Osagyefo Dr Kwamen Nkrumah, Founder of the Republic of Ghana.

The three-day lecture is being organized under the broad theme “Nkrumah Never Dies” and it will be held at the Freedom Centre in Accra form Monday, February 24 to Wednesday February 26, 2014.

Other speakers will include Dr Gamal Nasser Adam of the University of Ghana and Mr Lee Ocran, former Minister of Education.

Dr Nasser will speak on “ The Relevance of Nkrumah’s Economic Vision Today” and Mr Ocran will present a paper on “The History,  February 24th, Nkrumah And Ghana”

Organizers say they are inviting all progressives, Nkrumaists and the general public to participate in the event.

The Nkrumah government was overthrown on February 24, 1966 by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United states of America with the full collaboration of other Western intelligence agencies .

Since then, Ghana has suffered significant economic   decline as a direct result of the pursuit of neo-liberal policies.

 More than 400 industries established by the Nkrumah government have been vandalized and sold at knock- down prices.

Governments after Nkrumah have withdrawn subsidies on social services, limited access to education, massively devalued the cedi and embarked upon large scale retrenchment of labour in the public services.

Editorial

Ahmed  Kathrade, an anti apartheid campaigner who worked with such South African great as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliever Tambo has launched a campaign for the freedom of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

This is not surprising because of the similarities between apartheid and Zionism and the fact Israeli atrocities against Palestinians are so atrocious that right thinking people can no longer keep their silence.

The Insight fully supports this campaign and invites all progressives and democratically minded Ghanaians to join Campaign.

To start with, you can just go to the freedom Centre at Kokomlemle in Accra and append your signature to campaign.

The struggle to free Palestine from colonial occupation is about making the world a more decent place for all its inhabitants.

You cannot and must not remain neutral in this heroic struggle.

Please join the campaign to free Palestinian prisons including women and children from Israeli jails.

A statement issued by Young Democrats

 “Dollarisation”

The rapid depreciation of the cedi against its major trading currencies such as the dollar, the pound sterling and the euro in recent times is very disturbing as this has impose serious economic hardship on the country making life very unbearable. Clearly, this is one of the basic reasons people are experiencing untold hardships in various aspects of their lives.

Major undeniable factors can be ascribed as some of the causes to this major macroeconomic crunch.

To begin with, the price quotation of certain products and services on the Ghanaian market in foreign currency is very unfortunate and a callous attempt by some “unpatriotic citizens” to put the country in a state of unbearable destitution. An attempt by the Ministry of Tourism to stop people in the hotel industry from charging rates in foreign currencies is a step in the right direction. We therefore commend the ministry for taking this bold step and call on all responsible institutions do same. Their fight should not be mere lip service but come with concomitant achievements for all to see.

Secondly, the activities of the black market cause the cedi to depreciate with the speed of light since Bank of Ghana is unable to monitor and regulate their activities.

In addition, the deliberate acquisition of the dollar by some individuals with the intent of earning interest when these foreign currencies appreciate against the cedi is another cause.

Again, our appetite for foreign goods cannot be left out in this discussion since it is the major cause of the economic challenges we face. This causes high demand on our major trading currencies which further deepen the woes of the cedi.

Our investigation unveiled that some financial institutions and banks disregard the directives of Central Bank which is the regulatory body of all financial activities in the country not to sell foreign currencies beyond certain price limit set by  Bank of Ghana.

Apparently, Ghana has not yet become an industrial country. However, our quest for luxurious goods is very high. Therefore, a lot of business men and women engage in buying and selling of these goods which are produced outside the shores of Ghana and require the use of foreign currencies. As demand for these currencies increases, it leads to excess demand causing prices of these currencies (exchange rate) to escalate thereby causing the value of the cedi to depreciate because less cedi is demanded in such trade transactions.

We therefore call on government to quickly salvage the situation and arrest the downward trend of the cedi since its continual slope will only erode the confidence the people have in this Government.

One thing we believe government can do to salvage this situation is to first of all encourage export and secondly, initiate and implement strict measures to halt the activities of the black market.

We also call on the bank of Ghana to investigate and punish banks that flaunt the regulation of the central bank. In addition, we are also calling on the National Security to arrest and prosecute any individual engage in any illegal activity causing the whole country to suffer the consequences not forgetting institutions charging for products and services in foreign currencies.

US ambassador admits tapping Angela Merkel’s phone was 'stupid'

US Ambassador to Germany John Emerson

The US ambassador to Germany has admitted it was a “stupid” idea to tap the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel while discussing business, friendship and mutual trust at a trade association meeting.

“We have done a number of stupid things, Chancellor Markel’s phone being one of them,” Ambassador John Emerson told the VBKI trade association at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Berlin. 

He apologized for the stress and loss of trust the recent NSA wiretapping revelations might have caused the German government, according to reports by the Local. 

Emerson also praised Germany for being a “role model” for the rest of the world and admitted that, although there are grave threats like terrorism facing the world, tapping Merkel’s phone had little to do with preventing them. 

 “I understand the differences in the experiences of the German people and the recent experiences of Americans, as well as the impact that these different experiences have had on our respective attitudes to intelligence gathering,” the former banker told German business leaders during the half-hour speech. 

Emerson answered a variety of questions, including on cyber warfare and the Edward Snowden leaks, the latter of which were attacked by him after detailing how the US engaged in industrial espionage against German companies. 

“We don’t collect intelligence to provide a competitive advantage to US sectors… we don’t steal trade secrets,” he said. 

While covering a range of other issues, such as the proposed signing of the TTIP, the US-Europe trade agreement heralding the creation of the world’s largest free trade zone, Emerson also spoke of the common problems facing both countries, and stressed how important it was that they trust each other. 

Understanding that “fully rebuilding trust is going to take sincere effort and a long time,” Emerson revealed that “discussions continue to be ongoing between senior levels of our respective intelligence services.”

 

According to Der Spiegel’s reports, the German Chancellor’s mobile phone has been on an NSA target list since 2002 and was code-named “GE Chancellor Merkel.” And the monitoring operation was still in force even a few weeks before US President Barack Obama's visit to Berlin in June 2013 to speak about the warm and enduring bonds that exist between the two countries. 

Back then, Obama had promised that the US secret service would revise its methods of working in order to both provide the security of citizens and not to interfere with their privacy. The allegations have made a dent in US-EU relations. 

But only a short while after the US ambassador stressed how essential it is that “we rebuild the trust that has been shaken” and how “friends can disappoint one another” but must “work hard through it,” newer claims emerged of the United States also targeting Germany’s previous chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. 

Information that by 2002 Schroder was listed as number 388 on the NSA’s espionage targets list has been revealed by the Munich daily Suddeutsche Zeitung and the NDR news portal in reports on Tuesday. 

German media outlets quote unnamed US government officials and “NSA insiders” familiar with the Snowden documents, who allege that Schroder’s staunch opposition to America’s invasion of Iraq is what put him on that list.

The Global Elite is Insane

By Robert J. Burrowes

In a recent report titled 'Working for the Few: Political capture and economic inequality' Oxfam informs us that 'Almost half of the world's wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population'. Their report goes on to recommend that the World Economic Forum, an elite gathering held annually in Davos, Switzerland, take economic and political measures to ensure a more equitable distribution of wealth.

And in his explanation of why he attended the recent Forum in Davos, Kumi Naidoo, the Executive Director of Greenpeace International tells us 'If we manage to shift the consciousness of one CEO or senior political leader, who may do the same with a couple of his peers, then I think it is worth it. It is also worth being there, listening and observing, understanding some of the forces that shape our world and importantly feeding that information back to the rest of Greenpeace and other civil society allies.'

As anyone who pays even the slightest realistic attention to the global elite already knows, the elite's efforts to maximise its political and economic clout, and hence its wealth, at the expense of everyone else and the Earth itself, are carefully crafted. And this is not going to change on our recommendation or because we talk to them, or even because we listen to them. Moreover, the reason is simple.

The global elite is insane. And it is incredibly violent.

I would like to illustrate this insanity and violence briefly, explain what I mean by 'insane' and then outline a strategy to resist it.

In a video statement in 2012, the world's richest woman, Gina Rinehart, called for Australian workers to be paid $A2 per day - see here  and here - in a national economy where the current legal minimum wage is $A124 per day for a full-time adult worker. But Rinehart is not alone in advocating or, indeed, implementing such policies. Slave 'wages' are a common occurrence all over the world as most factory workers, particularly those employed by the world's largest corporations in Africa, Asia and Central/South America, can readily testify.

We also know that 50,000 people (85% of them children) die in Africa, Asia and Central/South America each and every day essentially because they do not have enough to eat: http://starvation.net/ This is a death rate that results in a cumulative death total that dwarfs both the death rate and the total number of deaths in all war throughout human history. Incredibly, even the number of deaths on 6 and 9 August 1945, when nuclear weapons were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulted in less than 50,000 individual deaths for each of these two days (and each of those subsequent). Apart from this, we know that about one billion people around the world go to bed in a semi-starved condition each night. Moreover, we know that the global elite takes deliberate measures to maintain and exacerbate this cruel state of affairs by planning and working to implement such atrociously unjust economic arrangements as those outlined in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) on top of the already highly damaging economic structures and relationships of capitalism.

How do you feel when you read these facts? If you are like me, you are horrified at the thought that you might starve yourself, you empathise deeply with those who suffer this fate and you make some effort to ameliorate it or change it (ranging from giving a donation, preferably to an organisation with more political savvy than Oxfam and Greenpeace, to campaigning to resist implementation of the TPP and TAFTA). You do this because you feel empathy, sympathy and compassion. You do this because you perceive the injustice and you want to take some action, at least, to change it. You identify with your fellow human beings who are suffering.

Insanity is widely understood to refer to a state of mind that prevents normal perception, behaviour or social interaction; it describes someone who is considered to be seriously mentally ill.

Do you believe that individual members of the global elite share your perception (which is shaped by your empathy, sympathy and compassion)? Who is normal: you or them? Are individual members of the global elite behaving and interacting as you would? Do they share your conception of what a desirable human community - with its basis in such values as love, solidarity, equity, justice and sustainability - might look like?

It is clear to me that, as a result of the violence they each suffered as a child, we can readily conclude that each individual within the global elite falls within the definition of 'insane': someone who is incapable of 'normal perception, behaviour and social interaction', someone who is incapable of love, compassion, empathy and sympathy. And this is why they do not join efforts to restructure the global economy to ensure distributive justice for all and disburse their personal wealth to those most in need as a measure of their commitment to the creation of a humane world based on equity, justice and sustainability.

So how did this insanity occur? In essence, these individuals suffered an extraordinary level of terror and violence during childhood leaving them particularly badly emotionally damaged. See 'Why Violence?' http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence Specifically, for example, two central psychological characteristics of these individuals are that they are terrified and self-hating but, because they unconsciously suppress their awareness of this terror and self-hatred (because it is too painful to feel), they project it as fear of and hatred for 'legitimised' victim groups, including working people and 'poor' people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America. Because of the violence they suffered as children, these individuals never developed a conscience, they never developed the capacity to love, and they never developed the emotional responses of compassion, empathy and sympathy. And this is why they do not care.

It takes persistent violence inflicted throughout childhood to destroy an individual's innate capacity to develop love, compassion, empathy and sympathy. Tragically, any member of the global elite, as well as any of their paid agents in the professional class (the political lackeys who generate the delinquent legislative frameworks that facilitate the exploitation of ordinary people, the business executives who undertake the daily management of this exploitation, the academics who justify it, the judges and lawyers who defend it and repress its opponents, and the media personnel who obscure the truth about it), has suffered this degree of violence, or very close to it, throughout their childhood.

And this is why these individuals are incapable of understanding that hoarded money and resources cannot provide them with security, particularly in the world that is coming. They are incapable of understanding that true security is the result of cooperative human relationships and a cooperative relationship between humans and the natural world.

Resisting Elite Violence Strategically

So how do we strategically resist the insanity and violence of the global elite? How do we replace elite-controlled structures with ones that meet the needs of all human beings as well as the planet and other species? And how do we do all of this within a timeframe in which the Earth's ecological limits are not fundamentally breached?

To do all of these things, we need an integrated strategy that tackles the fundamental cause of violence while tackling all of its symptoms simultaneously. This strategy has four primary elements.

First, and most importantly, we must review our child-raising practices to exclude all types of violence (including those I have labelled 'invisible' and 'utterly invisible') so that we no longer create insane individuals and perpetrators of violence. See 'Why Violence?'

http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence and 'Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice'  Let us create people of conscience, people of courage, people who care.

Second, we must noncooperate, in a strategic manner, with elite-controlled structures and processes while simultaneously creating alternative, local structures that allow us to self-reliantly meet our own needs in an ecologically sustainable manner. Anita McKone and I have mapped out a fifteen-year strategy for doing this in 'The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth' http://tinyurl.com/flametree

Third, we must keep planning and implementing sophisticated campaigns of nonviolent resistance to prevent/halt wars, end economic exploitation and save threatened ecosystems, as well as strategies of nonviolent defense to liberate Palestinians, Tibetans and other oppressed populations in those circumstances in which elite violence must be directly confronted (see Robert J. Burrowes The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996 and Gene Sharp The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).

And fourth, we must courageously pay the price of violent elite repression when we resist nonviolently, knowing that many of us are going to be imprisoned (sometimes as 'psychiatric' patients), some of us will be tortured and a great many of us will be killed.

In summary, if we are to effectively resist the elite's violence in our lives and take concrete steps to create our nonviolent world community, then we must recognise that individual members of the global elite are insane and cannot take responsibility for ending their violence. Instead, we must take responsibility for ending their violence while creating a world in which damaged individuals are unlikely to be created and, if they are created, they cannot wreak havoc on the rest of us.

If you would like to consider publicly committing yourself to helping to make this nonviolent world a reality, you can read (and, if you wish, sign online) 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World'

Cowards Lynch The Poor & The Hungry  

US President Hussein Obama is bleeding the poor profusely

By Farouk Martins Aresa

If you are so daring and angry enough to take human life of the poor and hungry, why don’t you confront those that bleed you left, right and center: cowards? When, out of ranging anger you administer punishment that is totally disproportionate to the crime, especially to the point of death, it is cruel and inhuman. Most of us are angry no doubt, at the selfish politicians that loot everything in sight. We can only take so much, but not the poor lynching the poor and hungry.  

Misplaced fury of stealing what is not yours is twisted anger without appropriate target. There is no way coward brutes can explain projection of cruel and unusual sodomy of ladies and little girls for stealing pepper or justify tire necklace. The fear is that this misplaced outrage will soon be forgotten until a worse one rear its ugly head again. We went through these many times.

There is no justification for the poor to be lynching the poor and hungry. It is misplaced anger that does not fit the crime. When people steal in the market, make them work, like sweeping the market or if they eat without paying, make them wash the dishes where many can see them. If they refuse, hand them over to police. Facing angry crowd, most of them would comply. It takes more out of our human dignity to kill the poor and hungry for little crime than the rich.

Out of the abominable sight of inhuman treatment of petty thieves comes a realization that we may not have lost our sense of morality but we have lost our sense of justice. Fairness and honesty are so ingrained in humans that even dogs know the difference between a kick and being tripped over.  Children know when we are not right. As they get older, we corrupt some of them with - do what I say, not what I do.

This was how we turn desperate youths into kidnappers of grannies and children while political fanatics turn youths into religious fanatics. The sad part is that when negotiations break down between home grown kidnappers or religious fanatics and the political godfathers that sponsor them, innocent people are sacrificed to death to demonstrate their brutality. The poor cannot keep on killing the hungry. It is hard enough being poor, it is even worse being poor and hungry.

Well-protected looters cannot escape the anger of those daring enough to kill. We always muse about everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. That is, nobody wants to bare the cat except those willing to die. Those daring enough to take the lives of the poor and hungry must be willing to direct their anger to where it belongs at the risk of death to justified the fury.  

So many times, our politicians have come out and tell us they steal because we let them and we aggrandize them and sing their praises. Another governor told us how easy it is to rig elections by “accommodating” the chief electoral officer. We have at least one head of state that cannot understand how our Country still stands after stealing so much and another one expecting Arab Spring. Ruthlessness on the poor and hungry petty thieves in the markets can’t cure the looters.

In fairness to our young people, we had our Nzeogwu, Rawlings, Ribadu, Steve Biko etc. But we have taken many more strides backwards and our young people are either contented with the status quo or given up. Moreover, those brave young folks have not enjoyed bandwagon effect of what they dreamed of, because they were betrayed. Some later became politicians, joining them if they couldn’t beat them. Tinubu and Bode George now use Ribadu to clear their names.

Some people claimed during Abacha regime, nobody dared steal except him. After Abacha, we promised to fix the loopholes that made it easy to steal directly from the Central Bank. Nigeria still remembers Buhari/Idiagbon era. It was stressful because that was a military government but necessary because harsh discipline could not have been done democratically. Then came Obasanjo era when all the military politicians were retired and EFCC developed some teeth.

Humans tend not to take the law into their hands when they know most crooks will be caught and punished. But if they get the feeling that nothing would be done unless they administer jungle justice themselves, we bred anarchy, Oyenusi, Aninih and copycats. Unfortunately, the poor and the hungry are at the receiving end while the looters and armed robbers go free if they steal enough to buy the lawyers and the judges.

There are many Nigerians willing to speak out and even risk their lives in exposing corruption at the leadership level. What they lack is the support of the people to see them through reprisals. The last one, Dino Malaye regardless of his personal affairs, lost his seat after he took on his colleagues in the House. Before him were others that could not garner support since 2000.

Dr. Haruna Yerima, exposed chairmen of the House committees that demanded and received bribes from government ministries and parastatals; Adams Jagaba exposed N4 million offered as bribe to impeach speaker, Alhaji Umar Ghali Na'Abba; Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, named Senator Mantu that demanded N54m bribe for his appointment; Sen. Wabara demanded bribe from Education minister Dr. Osuji; and Sen. Uche Chukwumerije exposed N500,000 bribe to declare state of emergency in Anambra State. Today those are petty cash in Abuja. See Bribery.

This is the root of our anger on the street, but it must not demonize us into a beast taking it out on the poor and hungry because they cannot fight back. Ask why we misplace so much of our anger, instead of reserving it for the deserving rich stealing with impunity. Even when they are not securely protected by body guards and hustlers at parties, we sing their praises.

Do you believe justice is in heaven? Increasing number of us want it on earth before we get to heaven. Please let the poor and hungry breath before we eliminate one another for the rich.