 |
| Kofi Buah, Minister of Energy and Power |
By
Ekow Mensah
The
Centre for Public Interest Law (CEPIL) says that the process of awarding
licenses for the prospecting and exploitation of Ghana’s oil is not open and
could be abused.
CEPIL
claims that the licensing regime “does not provide for an open and competitive
bidding process, the disclosure of beneficiary ownership information, and
mandatory contract disclosure.”
“Thus,
the process lends itself to potential abuse, which could defeat the objective
of ensuring good governance in the management of Ghana’s oil wealth” it said in
a brief for journalists.
It
also claimed that legal and institutional inadequacies continue to pose great
challenge as to whether oil production will be carried out in a manner that
will preserve the environment and livelihood of fisher folks.
These
inadequacies, CEPIL maintains are manifested in inadequate laws to ensure the
protection of community livelihoods, marine biodiversity and the coastal
environment, weak and under resourced regulatory institutions, inadequate grass
root participation in environmental protection, loopholes and pitfalls in our legal and fiscal regimes.
Interestingly,
CEPIL also claims that “since the discovery of oil and gas in the Jubilee
fields in 2007, significant efforts have been made to establish a strong
culture of governance in the management of oil and gas resources”.
CEPIL says “these efforts have seen the
development of various legislations with mechanisms for enhancing good
governance including transparency and accountability”.
It
insists that it is relevant for citizens to embark upon advocacy to influence
the contents of the bills before they are passed into laws by Parliament.
CEPIL is organizing an Editor’s Forum to
discuss these issues on Wednesday, November 19, 2014.
Mr Augustine Niber, Executive Director of
CEPIL signed the invitation to the Editors which had the briefing note as an
attachment.
Editorial
The Lies In The Media
Yes,
a woman who passed through Ghana has been arrested in London for carrying US$
5million worth of cocaine.
This
is bad enough because it shows the level of vigilance at Ghanaian ports and its
is a clear indication of the fact that the drugs trade may still be thriving in
Ghana.
Unfortunately,
this bad story has been sexed up for political advantage by some unscrupulous
elements and in the end a story of incompetence and inefficiency has been
turned into a fable of lies and slander.
Why
would anybody claim that the woman who was arrested with the cocaine was carrying
a Ghanaian diplomatic passport when in truth she was travelling on an Austrian
passport?
Why
would anybody attempt to link her to the family of the President of Ghana when
in truth there is no such connection?
Why
would an innocent woman’s photograph be substituted for the picture of the
suspect?
This
mischief has certainly backfired and destroyed an otherwise good story of
incompetence and inefficiency.
Imperialist powers, bourgeois
“opposition” reach out to military junta in Burkina Faso
 |
| Leuf. Col Isaac Zida |
By
Antoine Lerougetel
Burkina
Faso’s pro-imperialist “opposition,” local African regimes, and the major
imperialist powers are stepping in to provide a civilian, democratic façade to
last week’s coup, following mass protests that led to the ouster of French-backed
dictator President Blaise Compaoré.
The
US, Canada and the African Union have all threatened sanctions if the military
does not hand over power to a civilian government in two weeks. They fear, as
the French daily Le Monde wrote on
November 4, that “Popular insurrection could re-start at any time,” and are
anxious to prop up discredited pro-imperialist regimes throughout West Africa.
The army intervened to head off mass protests that erupted on October 28
against Compaoré’s attempt to prolong his 27 years in office, deposing Compaoré
on October 31.
On
November 5, a delegation from the Economic Community of West African States
(ECOWAS)—consisting of the presidents of Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria—rushed to
the capital, Ouagadougou.
They
issued a statement the next day affirming that they had “secured an agreement
with stakeholders in Burkina Faso for the immediate lifting of the suspension
of the constitution and the holding of presidential and legislative elections
within 12 months to resolve the crisis created by last week’s resignation of
former president Blaise Compaoré and the dissolution of his government.”
Issued
after talks with the “opposition” and the junta led by Lt. Colonel Isaac Zida,
who took power on November 1, the ECOWAS statement called for the “urgent
designation by consensus of a suitably eminent civilian to lead the
transition.”
Making
clear its support for Compaoré’s services to imperialism during his 27 years in
power, it added: “The leaders recalled the important contributions by Burkina
Faso to the promotion of global peace and security as well as political
stability within the region and the continent at large, particularly its active
participation in peacekeeping and mediation processes.”
Burkina
Faso’s army is a key element of France’s military intervention in the Sahel,
above all the war in Mali. Forty French firms are present in most sectors of
Burkina Faso’s economy, and Paris is the main provider of finance for its
former colony. The French ambassador Gilles Thibault has been playing “a great
role”, according to French President François Hollande’s entourage.
The
protests against Compaoré were called by the “Leadership of the Opposition”
coalition of bourgeois parties on October 21, when Compaore’s proposed
constitutional changes became known. By Tuesday, October 28, to the
consternation of the “opposition,” protests drew in hundreds of thousands of
mainly young people in the capital and other major cities across the country.
French
imperialism, backed by its international allies, moved quickly to install a new
and pliant regime. Compaoré fled Ougadougou last Friday, escaping angry
protesters only thanks to a French army helicopter and then a plane taking him
to Ivory Coast—where Compaoré had helped Paris install the current Ivorian
President Alassane Ouattara in a French military intervention in 2011.
On
October 30, the army, backed by the “opposition’s” appeals to it to prevent
chaos, moved to strangle the revolt and solidify the control of Zida, an officer
of Compaoré’s presidential guard. In a November 2 communiqué, Zida warned rival
General Kwamé Lougué that any attempt to oppose him was “an attack on the
ongoing transitional process ... Any act that might challenge the transitional
process will be repressed with vigour and firmness.”
The
“opposition” is publicly led by spokesman Zéphirin Diabré, who under Compaoré
combined a mining finance consultancy with the post of minister of trade and
mines. He heads a UN development agency and until 2011 was CEO of the Africa
branch of French mining and nuclear energy conglomerate Areva.
His
organization called a demonstration on Sunday afternoon at Nation Square to
demand a civilian government. However, according to Jeune Afrique, “The protest on Nation Square ...
nevertheless was a failure, with only 1,000 people present. Opposition leader
Zéphirin Diabré did not come as he was meeting with representatives of the army
at the time, according to his aides.”
Diabré
has stated that the opposition would not be opposed the participation of the
army in the transition to a civilian government. He and the “opposition” have
been in talks with the UN, ECOWAS and the African Union.
In
a Le Monde interview on Tuesday, he
declared: “The army itself recognized that what took place was a popular
insurrection ... Because there was a power vacuum, the army stepped up to its
responsibilities and held on to the machinery of state. We met on Sunday with
Lt. Col. Zida, who was designated by the army to lead the transition.”
The
comments of demonstrators who did turn up on Nation Square highlight the class
gulf between the workers and oppressed masses of Burkina Faso and the
pro-imperialist opposition.
Protester
Amadou Yamiro told BBC, “This morning we came out, because up until now the situation
is not clear. We still don’t have a leader for our country. We don’t want the
army to be in power, especially the special presidential regiment...We went to
the national TV to try to understand what is going to happen, and while a
colonel was reassuring us, some troops arrived and started to shoot. We are
told it was the presidential regiment again, the same ones that shot people
[during unrest] on the 30th [October], the ones that killed many people ...The
presidential guard with Zida will put this country into chaos.”
General
Kuame Lougué, who at times poses as a radical descendant of the petty-bourgeois
nationalist Burkinabé president Thomas Sankara but was Compaoré’s defence
minister, has played a dubious role during the protests and the military coup. Médiapart, a French news site
linked to the pseudo-left New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), has promoted him,
declaring he was “propelled to the head of the protests,” and there were
reports of protesters chanting his name in the streets.
He
recently made a statement to RFI radio, pledging his support for the army. RFI
noted that Lougué “is still on active duty, as general of the second section,
and that while he is no longer in the army command, he remains at the disposal
of the general staff. He stresses that he supports his comrades in arms ... he
will support decisions of the general staff.”`
Credit:
www.wsws.org
 |
| Karl Marx |
War Making and Class
Conflict
By Joseph T. Salerno
By Joseph T. Salerno
All
governments past and present, regardless of their formal organization, involve
the rule of the many by the few. In other words, all governments are
fundamentally oligarchic. The reasons are twofold. First, governments are
nonproductive organizations and can only subsist by extracting goods and
services from the productive class in their territorial domain. Thus the ruling
class must remain a minority of the population if they are to continually
extract resources from their subjects or citizens. Genuine "majority
rule" on a permanent basis is impossible because it would result in an
economic collapse as the tribute or taxes expropriated by the more numerous
rulers deprived the minority engaged in peaceful productive activities of the
resources needed to sustain and reproduce itself. Majority rule would therefore
eventually bring about a violent conflict between factions of the previous
ruling class, which would terminate with one group establishing oligarchic rule
and economically exploiting its former confederates.
The second factor that renders oligarchic rule practically inevitable is related to the law of comparative advantage. The tendency toward division of labor and specialization based on the unequal endowment of skills pervades all sectors of human endeavor. Just as a small segment of the population is adept at playing professional football or dispensing financial advice, so a tiny fraction of the population tends to excel at wielding coercive power. As one writer summed up this Iron Law of Oligarchy: "[In] all human groups at all times there are the few who rule and the many who are ruled."
The inherently nonproductive and oligarchic nature of government thus ensures that all nations under political rule are divided into two classes: a productive class and a parasitic class or, in the apt terminology of the American political theorist John C. Calhoun, "taxpayers" and "tax-consumers."
The king and his court, elected politicians and their bureaucratic and special-interest allies, the dictator and his party apparatchiks — these are historically the tax-consumers and, not coincidentally, the war makers. War has a number of advantages for the ruling class. First and foremost, war against a foreign enemy obscures the class conflict that is going on domestically in which the minority ruling class coercively siphons off the resources and lowers the living standards of the majority of the population, who produce and pay taxes. Convinced that their lives and property are being secured against a foreign threat, the exploited taxpayers develop a "false consciousness" of political and economic solidarity with their domestic rulers. An imperialist war against a weak foreign state, e.g., Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, etc., is especially enticing to the ruling class of a powerful nation such as the United States because it minimizes the cost of losing the war and being displaced by domestic revolution or by the rulers of the victorious foreign state.
A second advantage of war is that it provides the ruling class with an extraordinary opportunity to intensify its economic exploitation of the domestic producers through emergency war taxes, monetary inflation, conscripted labor, and the like. The productive class generally succumbs to these increased depredations on its income and wealth with some grumbling but little real resistance because it is persuaded that its interests are one with the war makers. Also, in the short run at least, modern war appears to bring prosperity to much of the civilian population because it is financed in large part by money creation.
We thus arrive at a universal, praxeological truth about war. War is the outcome of class conflict inherent in the political relationship — the relationship between ruler and ruled, parasite and producer, tax-consumer and taxpayer. The parasitic class makes war with purpose and deliberation in order to conceal and ratchet up their exploitation of the much larger productive class. It may also resort to war making to suppress growing dissension among members of the productive class (libertarians, anarchists, etc.) who have become aware of the fundamentally exploitative nature of the political relationship and become a greater threat to propagate this insight to the masses as the means of communication become cheaper and more accessible, e.g., desktop publishing, AM radio, cable television, the Internet, etc. Furthermore, the conflict between ruler and ruled is a permanent condition. This truth is reflected — perhaps half consciously — in the old saying that equates death and taxes as the two unavoidable features of the human condition.
Thus, a permanent state of war or preparedness for war is optimal from the point of view of the ruling elite, especially one that controls a large and powerful state. Take the current US government as an example. It rules over a relatively populous, wealthy, and progressive economy from which it can extract ever larger boodles of loot without destroying the productive class. Nevertheless, it is subject to the real and abiding fear that sooner or later productive Americans will come to recognize the continually increasing burden of taxation, inflation, and regulation for what it really is — naked exploitation. So the US government, the most powerful mega-state in history, is driven by the very logic of the political relationship to pursue a policy of permanent war.
From "The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy" to "The War to End All Wars" to "The Cold War" and on to the current "War on Terror," the wars fought by US rulers in the twentieth century have progressed from episodic wars restricted to well-defined theaters and enemies to a war without spatial or temporal bounds against an incorporeal enemy named "Terror." A more appropriate name for this neoconservative-contrived war would involve a simple change in the preposition to a "War of Terror" — because the American state is terrified of productive, work-a-day Americans, who may someday awaken and put an end to its massive predations on their lives and property and maybe to the American ruling class itself.
In the meantime, the War on Terror is an open-ended imperialist war the likes of which were undreamt of by infamous war makers of yore from the Roman patricians to German National Socialists. The economist Joseph Schumpeter was one of the few non-Marxists to grasp that the primary stimulus for imperialist war is the inescapable clash of interests between rulers and ruled. Taking an early mega-state, Imperial Rome, as his example, Schumpeter wrote:
Here is the classic example ... of that policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest — why, then it was national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall upon the Roman people. [No] attempt [can] be made to comprehend these wars of conquest from the point of view of concrete objectives. ... Thus there is but one way to an understanding: scrutiny of domestic class interests, the question of who stood to gain. ... Owing to its peculiar position as the democratic puppet of ambitious politicians and as the mouthpiece of a popular will inspired by the rulers [the Roman proletariat] did indeed get the benefit of the [war] booty. So long as there was good reason to maintain the fiction that the population of Rome constituted the Roman people and could decide the destinies of the empire, much did depend on its good temper. ... But again, the very existence, in such large numbers, of this proletariat, as well as its political importance, was the consequence of a social process that also explains the policy of conquest. For this was the causal connection: The occupation of public land and the robbery of peasant land formed the basis of a system of large estates, operating extensively and with slave labor. At the same time the displaced peasants streamed into the city and the soldiers remained landless — hence the war policy.
This lengthy quotation from Schumpeter vividly describes how the expropriation of peasants by the ruling aristocracy created a permanent and irreparable class division in Roman society that led to a policy of unrestrained imperialism and perpetual war. This policy was designed to submerge beneath a tide of national glory and war booty the deep-seated conflict of interests between expropriated proletarians and landed aristocracy.
The second factor that renders oligarchic rule practically inevitable is related to the law of comparative advantage. The tendency toward division of labor and specialization based on the unequal endowment of skills pervades all sectors of human endeavor. Just as a small segment of the population is adept at playing professional football or dispensing financial advice, so a tiny fraction of the population tends to excel at wielding coercive power. As one writer summed up this Iron Law of Oligarchy: "[In] all human groups at all times there are the few who rule and the many who are ruled."
The inherently nonproductive and oligarchic nature of government thus ensures that all nations under political rule are divided into two classes: a productive class and a parasitic class or, in the apt terminology of the American political theorist John C. Calhoun, "taxpayers" and "tax-consumers."
The king and his court, elected politicians and their bureaucratic and special-interest allies, the dictator and his party apparatchiks — these are historically the tax-consumers and, not coincidentally, the war makers. War has a number of advantages for the ruling class. First and foremost, war against a foreign enemy obscures the class conflict that is going on domestically in which the minority ruling class coercively siphons off the resources and lowers the living standards of the majority of the population, who produce and pay taxes. Convinced that their lives and property are being secured against a foreign threat, the exploited taxpayers develop a "false consciousness" of political and economic solidarity with their domestic rulers. An imperialist war against a weak foreign state, e.g., Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, etc., is especially enticing to the ruling class of a powerful nation such as the United States because it minimizes the cost of losing the war and being displaced by domestic revolution or by the rulers of the victorious foreign state.
A second advantage of war is that it provides the ruling class with an extraordinary opportunity to intensify its economic exploitation of the domestic producers through emergency war taxes, monetary inflation, conscripted labor, and the like. The productive class generally succumbs to these increased depredations on its income and wealth with some grumbling but little real resistance because it is persuaded that its interests are one with the war makers. Also, in the short run at least, modern war appears to bring prosperity to much of the civilian population because it is financed in large part by money creation.
We thus arrive at a universal, praxeological truth about war. War is the outcome of class conflict inherent in the political relationship — the relationship between ruler and ruled, parasite and producer, tax-consumer and taxpayer. The parasitic class makes war with purpose and deliberation in order to conceal and ratchet up their exploitation of the much larger productive class. It may also resort to war making to suppress growing dissension among members of the productive class (libertarians, anarchists, etc.) who have become aware of the fundamentally exploitative nature of the political relationship and become a greater threat to propagate this insight to the masses as the means of communication become cheaper and more accessible, e.g., desktop publishing, AM radio, cable television, the Internet, etc. Furthermore, the conflict between ruler and ruled is a permanent condition. This truth is reflected — perhaps half consciously — in the old saying that equates death and taxes as the two unavoidable features of the human condition.
Thus, a permanent state of war or preparedness for war is optimal from the point of view of the ruling elite, especially one that controls a large and powerful state. Take the current US government as an example. It rules over a relatively populous, wealthy, and progressive economy from which it can extract ever larger boodles of loot without destroying the productive class. Nevertheless, it is subject to the real and abiding fear that sooner or later productive Americans will come to recognize the continually increasing burden of taxation, inflation, and regulation for what it really is — naked exploitation. So the US government, the most powerful mega-state in history, is driven by the very logic of the political relationship to pursue a policy of permanent war.
From "The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy" to "The War to End All Wars" to "The Cold War" and on to the current "War on Terror," the wars fought by US rulers in the twentieth century have progressed from episodic wars restricted to well-defined theaters and enemies to a war without spatial or temporal bounds against an incorporeal enemy named "Terror." A more appropriate name for this neoconservative-contrived war would involve a simple change in the preposition to a "War of Terror" — because the American state is terrified of productive, work-a-day Americans, who may someday awaken and put an end to its massive predations on their lives and property and maybe to the American ruling class itself.
In the meantime, the War on Terror is an open-ended imperialist war the likes of which were undreamt of by infamous war makers of yore from the Roman patricians to German National Socialists. The economist Joseph Schumpeter was one of the few non-Marxists to grasp that the primary stimulus for imperialist war is the inescapable clash of interests between rulers and ruled. Taking an early mega-state, Imperial Rome, as his example, Schumpeter wrote:
Here is the classic example ... of that policy which pretends to aspire to peace but unerringly generates war, the policy of continual preparation for war, the policy of meddlesome interventionism. There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest — why, then it was national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall upon the Roman people. [No] attempt [can] be made to comprehend these wars of conquest from the point of view of concrete objectives. ... Thus there is but one way to an understanding: scrutiny of domestic class interests, the question of who stood to gain. ... Owing to its peculiar position as the democratic puppet of ambitious politicians and as the mouthpiece of a popular will inspired by the rulers [the Roman proletariat] did indeed get the benefit of the [war] booty. So long as there was good reason to maintain the fiction that the population of Rome constituted the Roman people and could decide the destinies of the empire, much did depend on its good temper. ... But again, the very existence, in such large numbers, of this proletariat, as well as its political importance, was the consequence of a social process that also explains the policy of conquest. For this was the causal connection: The occupation of public land and the robbery of peasant land formed the basis of a system of large estates, operating extensively and with slave labor. At the same time the displaced peasants streamed into the city and the soldiers remained landless — hence the war policy.
This lengthy quotation from Schumpeter vividly describes how the expropriation of peasants by the ruling aristocracy created a permanent and irreparable class division in Roman society that led to a policy of unrestrained imperialism and perpetual war. This policy was designed to submerge beneath a tide of national glory and war booty the deep-seated conflict of interests between expropriated proletarians and landed aristocracy.
Democracy and Imperialist War Making
Schumpeter's analysis explains the particularly strong propensity of democratic states to engage in imperialist war making and why the Age of Democracy has coincided with the Age of Imperialism. The term "democratic" is here being used in the broad sense that includes "totalitarian democracies" controlled by "parties" such as the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party in Germany and the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. These political parties, as opposed to purely ideological movements, came into being during the age of nationalist mass democracy that dawned in the late nineteenth century.
Because the masses in a democratic polity are deeply imbued with the ideology of egalitarianism and the myth of majority rule, the ruling elites who control and benefit from the state recognize the utmost importance of concealing its oligarchic and exploitative nature from the masses. Continual war making against foreign enemies is a perfect way to disguise the naked clash of interests between the taxpaying and tax-consuming classes.
Schumpeter's analysis explains the particularly strong propensity of democratic states to engage in imperialist war making and why the Age of Democracy has coincided with the Age of Imperialism. The term "democratic" is here being used in the broad sense that includes "totalitarian democracies" controlled by "parties" such as the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party in Germany and the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. These political parties, as opposed to purely ideological movements, came into being during the age of nationalist mass democracy that dawned in the late nineteenth century.
Because the masses in a democratic polity are deeply imbued with the ideology of egalitarianism and the myth of majority rule, the ruling elites who control and benefit from the state recognize the utmost importance of concealing its oligarchic and exploitative nature from the masses. Continual war making against foreign enemies is a perfect way to disguise the naked clash of interests between the taxpaying and tax-consuming classes.
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