FORMER MINISTER CRIES OUT: Over Terrible contracts with Mining Companies

Mike Hammer, Fmr Minister of Lands and Natural Resources

By Ekow Mensah

Mr. Mike Hammah, former Minister of Lands and Natural Resources says the agreement under which some mining companies can retain up to 100 per cent of their earning abroad is unacceptable.

In a posting on his facebook wall, Mr Hammah insisted that such agreements need to be reviewed.

According to him the late Professor John Evans Atta Mills, before his untimely demise used to be deeply worried about the impact of the Mining Stability Agreement.

According to the minister, “as an estate tax expert, Professor Mills concluded that the agreement signed in 2003 between the government of Ghana and those foreign mining companies would not inure to the benefit of Ghana, thus, Ghana was only short  changed.

“President Mills therefore accordingly tasked the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources and the Ministry of Finance to look into the matter.

 Mr Hammah indicated that Multi Agency  Revenue Task Force, an in-house committee was formed by the then Minister of Lands and National Resources, Alhaji Collins Dauda, to  worked closely with the Minister of Finance to identify gaps in the existing stability agreement.

 He claims that “President Mills later summoned and reassigned him to the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources.  Among other things he tasked him to continue from where his predecessor had left off.

Mr Hammah said he and Dr Kwabena Dufour, the then Minister of Finance set up a seven-member team headed by Professor Akilagpa Sawyer, to review and re-negotiate the stability agreement entered into with some mining companies to ensure that the country derived maximum benefits from its resources.

The Akilagpa Sawyer Committee began work in September, 2011 and is yet to complete its task.

The retention of as much as 100 per cent of the foreign exchange earned by mining means that true companies rely on credit from local banks to finance their operations.

Ghana earns only five per cent of the total value of gold exported from the country.

Mining companies also enjoy a 5-year tax holiday.

Editorial

HANDS OFF SHIPYARD

 The Insight is part of the continuing struggle to keep the Tema Shipyard and Dry Dock in the hands of the State.

The struggle was started by the workers of the Shipyard who saw at first hand the inefficiency and outright thievery which came along the privatisation of the enterprise.

Indeed, the developments at the shipyard demonstrated very clearly that privatisation is not the solution to the many problems confronting state enterprises.

The Tema shipyard and Dry Dock is a strategic national assets because of its relevance to the exploration for and exploitation of Ghana’s oil and gas resources.

If the shipyard is revamped it will offer services to ships and other vessels which would come to Ghana to do business with the oil companies as well as employment for the true unemployed.

The Insight insists that a strategic national asset like the shipyard ought not be privatised again after the Government of Ghana took full control of it.

The people of Ghana are willing and able to manage the shipyard and dry dock which they set up with state resources.

We salute the workers of the Tema Shipyard and Dry Dock for their steadfastness in resisting the attempt to privatise the establishment.

The Insight asks the Mahama administration not to undo what Professor John Evans Atta Mills did at the Tema Shipyard and Dry Dock.

Drastic Growth in Extreme Poverty in US

US President Barack Obama

By Debra Watson

A report this summer from the National Poverty Center (NPC) reveals that the number of people in the US living on less than $2 a day per person, termed extreme poverty, increased by 160 percent from 1996 to mid-2011, rising from 636,000 households to some 1.65 million households. The findings throw light on the terrible plight of children in America. Concentrating on non-elderly households with children, the report found that 4.3 percent of these households were in extreme poverty, with 3.55 million children living in them.

The number of households in extreme poverty in the US began to climb irreversibly after the Clinton administration ended cash welfare for vulnerable families in 1996. Over a dozen years, between 1996 and late 2008, the number and extent of extreme poverty roughly doubled, rising by more than 600,000 households. The increase continued after the recession of 2008, but the pace was now accelerated. Over roughly three years following the financial meltdown, 450,000 more families joined the ranks of the utterly destitute, with a sharp increase in numbers in the first six months of 2011.

The report, published in Social Service Review, was authored by H. Luke Shaefer, University of Michigan, School of Social Work, and Kathryn Edin, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government. Measuring extreme poverty uncovers a further income stratification among those below the official poverty level. The sharply rising income inequality in the US has created in its wake a new phenomenon: massive numbers of US families that live in daily conditions once relegated the poorest of the poor in the economically underdeveloped world.

It throws light on particular aspects of the growth in inequality in the US that have not been examined in reports from the Census Bureau and other sources that compare income for different quintiles of the population. Some recent research has developed a category called deep poverty or a yearly income below half the official poverty line. Both these methods of research have revealed drastically rising inequality and the growth of deep poverty in recent years.

The researchers used the figure of $2 a day per person, the United Nations measure of poverty in developing countries. The official poverty line for a family of three would equate to roughly $17 per person per day averaged over a year. Deep poverty, below half the poverty line, would equate to an average of approximately $8.50 per person per day.

At $2 per person per day, the extreme poverty category examined in this report finds a family with virtually nothing to live on, or roughly 13 percent of what is considered official poverty. Social science researchers have estimated that it requires an income twice the Census Bureau’s official poverty level to actually support a family.

Counting food stamp benefits, now called SNAP, as cash only reduces the number of extremely poor households with children by half. The current food assistance benefit for a family of three tops out at $526. Since it only is available to families with income below 130 percent of the official poverty level, receiving the benefit does not bring any family to a livable income. If counted as the equivalent of cash income, the assistance actually would barely move a family in extreme poverty to deep poverty.

In addition, the SNAP benefit itself is facing serious cuts and even outright elimination for many poor families. In November, a family of three will lose $29 a month when the SNAP per person benefit allotment is cut as the federal government eliminates stimulus measures instituted in the immediate aftermath of recession. Five million people will be entirely cut off from SNAP benefits if limits in eligibility are imposed under plans to cut the program that emerged during discussion of the new Farm Bill this summer.

The number of SNAP households has nearly doubled since 1996, according to the report, indicating the huge rise in need. In 1996, there were an average of 25.5 million recipients per month, and by the end of 2012, this had gone up to 47.5 million. Earlier this year, a new Census Bureau Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) counted a record 49 million people considered poor in America. Still, 1.7 million children are left behind in extreme poverty because they do not get these benefits.

While SNAP-assisted households were doubling, cash welfare was plummeting. The researchers note: Subsequently, cash assistance caseloads have fallen from 12.3 million recipients per month in 1996 to 4.5 million in December 2011, and only 1.1 million of these beneficiaries are adults. Even during the current period of continued high unemployment, the cash assistance rolls have increased only slightly. Welfare, in the form of cash assistance, is a shell of its former self.

In Clinton’s infamous acceptance speech for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1992, he laid out the plan to end the New Deal-era Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which for the previous five-plus decades provided monetary assistance to families with little or no income.

Under the continuing economic crisis, states are accelerating the pace at which families in need are being driven off the welfare rolls. For example, in March 2013, there were 47,460 households in Michigan that received welfare payments, according to the latest Economic Security Bulletin from the Michigan League for Public Policy. They note: This is the first time since the Family Independence Program was implemented in 1996 that the caseload dropped below 50,000.

By June 2013, the caseload in Michigan dropped to 43,400 welfare cases, nearly half the number counted in late 2011 when new state measures eliminated exceptions to strict federal and state time limits for welfare. A 60 months lifetime limit for welfare was imposed under the Clinton administration in 1996 and was cut to 48 months in Michigan by Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm in 2007.

In fall 2011, the Republican Michigan state legislature eliminated exceptions, such as those that kept people living in high unemployment areas in the state from losing their benefits. There are still more than 400,000 unemployed in Michigan today.

The report also explores long-term unemployment and the increase in extreme poverty. There were 4.8 million workers in the US in 2012 unemployed for more than six months. That year, half the unemployed in Michigan were in this category.

The report’s authors note: While the Great Recession era has ushered in a prolonged period of high unemployment, its real legacy may prove to be the unprecedented duration of unemployment spells: the average spell was 38.1 weeks as of December 2012. This has increased the number of people in the US in extreme poverty, struggling to survive on practically nothing.

The researchers also point to the trend to shift already drastically inadequate government-funded income support from the unemployed to those working low-wage, part-time and temporary jobs most of the new jobs being created in the US. The minimum wage is a poverty wage, still $7.40 an hour, about half what has been computed as a living wage.

A spy who tried to scale Kremlin wall

Prince Bandar Bin Sultan

By M K Bhadrakumar
When the Central Intelligence Agency's "favorite Saudi prince" - which was how the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz last week described the chief of Saudi intelligence, Prince Bandar bin Sultan - landed in Moscow in his private jet on Wednesday and drove straight to Novo-Ogarevo in the city suburbs to meet President Vladimir Putin at his residence, it didn't turn out to be the "hush-hush" visit that the spy chief is usually accustomed to and would have expected. 

The Russian news agency Itar-Tass scrambled to carry a crisp report, quoting the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying that the Saudi prince and Putin discussed a "broad range of issues in bilateral relations, the situation in the Middle East and North Africa". 

Evidently, the Russians didn't want to trigger rumors and speculation at a time when there is a new criticality about the Syrian situation - and Bandar's mystique thrives on rumors. In fact, the same day that Bandar's jet landed in Moscow, Syrian government forces "liberated" the strategic city of Homs, which the opposition fancifully used to call their "revolutionary capital". 

With this, the government regained control over the country's central provinces, which are traversed by the two strategic highways linking Damascus respectively with the northern city of Aleppo and the Mediterranean port city of Tartus, where Russian navy maintains a Soviet-era base. 

Our man in Riyadh
Bandar is Saudi Arabia's key point person for Syria. Only last weekend King Abdullah named him director-general of the Saudi Intelligence Agency on top of his post as secretary-general of the National Security Council. The appointment has been widely seen as signifying a new phase in the Saudi push for "regime change" in Syria. 

By now it is clear that the Obama administration proposes to be involved through the CIA rather than the Pentagon in the Syrian civil war. Obama opted for CIA operations in preference to any direct US military operations as such after being warned by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey that outright intervention in Syria would require "hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers", and would cost "in the billions". 

The Americans hold Bandar in high regard as a "can-do person" - almost like one of them and as Ha'aretz put it, "Bandar is considered the CIA's man in Riyadh." 

Bandar served as the Saudi ambassador in Washington for 22 years at a stretch and proved invaluable as interlocutor for successive American presidents so much so that he received the protection of the US Secret Service as America's national security asset, something strange in diplomatic history. 

To be sure, last weekend's appointment of Bandar as the spy chief signifies that Abdullah has put him on the driving seat to steer the Saudi-US juggernaut that hopes to roll down the road to Damascus, the present road blocks notwithstanding. 

After all, Bandar could do an exceptional job in Afghanistan in the 1980s to ensure that the Mujahideen were kept supplied with a steady flow of funds or weapons to bleed the Soviet Red Army, while his brother-in-law, Prince Turkei, who held charge of Saudi intelligence, liaised with the dangerous folks who later morphed into the al-Qaeda. 

Bandar leads the pack of hardliners within the Saudi regime who shall not settle for anything short of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad stepping down. What brought him to Moscow on Wednesday was obviously Syria. 

An eerie similarity
Put plainly, he thought of leaving his name card. Bandar's visit implies a tacit Saudi acknowledgement that Putin's robust Syrian policy is meeting with success. 

But then, Bandar has a genuine aversion toward revolutions (in the Arab lands) and he views the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat no less than Iran's rise. He heard somewhere that there could be scope to develop commonality of interests with Moscow, which never quite disguised its own distaste toward the Brothers. 

The overarching Saudi agenda is to create whatever misunderstanding possible in the Russian-Iranian equations by creating a misperception that Moscow may be tempted to follow a "dual track" policy on Syria. But, of course, Bandar's timing was appalling. 

The Russians knew Bandar recently held coordination meetings in Washington and Tel Aviv to devise new ways of stepping up the military pressure on the Syrian government forces by arming the rebels - including groups affiliated with al-Qaeda in northern Syria - and to weaken the Hezbollah, whose fighters are helping the Syrian army. 

Arguably, Obama's policy has an eerie similarity with the cunning strategy that Jimmy Carter and Zbignew Brzezinski crafted following the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan - bleed the Red Army in a covert war bankrolled by the petrodollar sheikhs. 

Whereas the Russian focus will be on paving the way for a political track leading to a level playing field in the presidential election due in Syria in 2014, the US-Saudi-Israeli problem with that is, Assad's prospects of winning in that election and ruling Syria with greater legitimacy than ever before are excellent as things stand today. 

The fact remains that for a very substantial section of the Syrian people, Assad stands between them and the deluge that is enveloping the Muslim Middle East. 

Enter Bandar. The forte of the Saudi prince lies in finessing Salafist fighters as instruments of regional policy, something that fits in with the broader US's geo-strategies as well in the so-called Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan and Central Asia). 

The Saudi-backed coup in Egypt reinforces the US-Saudi axis in Syria. The interim government in Cairo has reverted to the full-throttle collaboration with the Israeli security establishment characteristic of the Hosni Mubarak era, which is something that pleases Washington. Most important, Riyadh and Cairo have given a big hand to kick-starting the stalled Middle East peace talks, which is a significant contribution to the US's desperate need to be seen as a benevolent mediator. 

Over and above, the sidelining of Qatar has removed a maverick while the puncturing of Turkey's pretensions as the leader of the Arab people ensures that the US-Saudi axis has a better control over the conduct of the covert war in Syria. 

A slap in the face
Most certainly, Bandar's intention was to fathom the mood in Moscow at a juncture when US-Russia ties are poised to take a tumble over the case of the ex-CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden. 

Simply put, there is a high probability of the Syrian conflict taking a new geopolitical dimension by locking in big power rivalry. The influential US senator John McCain said Thursday that Moscow's decision on Snowden is "a slap in the face of all Americans". He said in a statement,

Now is the time to fundamentally rethink our relationship with Putin's Russia. We need to deal with the Russia that is, not the Russia we might wish for. We cannot allow today's action [on Snowden] by Putin to stand without serious repercussions. Today's action by Putin's Russia should finally strip away the illusions that many Americans have had about Russia in the past few years. We have long needed to take a more realistic approach to our relations with Russia, and I hope today we finally start.

Meanwhile, Russian media reported intercepts of message addressed to "jihadists" from North Caucasus to look to join the holy war in Russia rather than proceed to Syria, and to "prepare for the so-called Olympics Games in Sochi [February 2014]." 

The Kremlin would know from the "Afghan jihad" that Bandar is a dangerous customer. The Itar-Tass did a fine work of photo journalism with the picture of the portly figure of Bandar seated on a gilded chair lost in thoughts, presumably in an ante-room at Novo-Ogarevo - left to himself. 

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India's ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

Dangers of powers

By Chris Benderev

Neuroscientists have found evidence to suggest feeling powerful dampens a part of our brain that helps with empathy.

Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You've probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they're a little less friendly to the people beneath them.So here's a question that may seem too simple: Why?

If you ask a psychologist, he or she may tell you that the powerful are simply too busy. They don't have the time to fully attend to their less powerful counterparts.

But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates.

Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a showing evidence to support that claim.

Obhi and his fellow researchers randomly put participants in the mindset of feeling either powerful or powerless. They asked the powerless group to write a diary entry about a time they depended on others for help. The powerful group wrote entries about times they were calling the shots.

Then, everybody watched a simple video. In it, an anonymous hand squeezes a rubber ball a handful of times sort of monotonously. While the video ran, Obhi's team tracked the participants' brains, looking at a special region called the mirror system.

Where Empathy Begins

The mirror system is important because it contains neurons that become active both when you squeeze a rubber ball and when you watch someone else squeeze a rubber ball. It is the same thing with picking up a cup of coffee, hitting a baseball, or flying a kite. Whether you do it or someone else does, your mirror system activates. In this small way, the mirror system places you inside a stranger's head.

Furthermore, because our actions are linked to deeper thoughts like beliefs and intentions you may also begin to empathize with what motivates another person's actions.

"When I watch somebody picking up a cup of coffee, the mirror system activates the representations in my brain that would be active if I was picking up a cup of coffee," Obhi explains. "And because those representations are connected in my brain to the intentions that would normally activate them, you can get activation of the intention. So you can figure out, 'Hey, this person wants to drink coffee.' "

Obhi's team wanted to see if bestowing a person with a feeling of power or powerlessness would change how the mirror system responds to someone else performing a simple action.

Feeling Power Over Others

It turns out, feeling powerless boosted the mirror system people empathized highly. But, Obhi says, "when people were feeling powerful, the signal wasn't very high at all."

So when people felt power, they really did have more trouble getting inside another person's head.

"What we're finding is power diminishes all varieties of empathy," says Dacher Keltner, a social psychologist at University of California, Berkeley, not involved in the new study. He says these results fit a trend within psychological research.

"Whether you're with a team at work [or] your family dinner, all of that hinges on how we adapt our behaviors to the behaviors of other people," he says. "And power takes a bite out of that ability, which is too bad."

The good news, Keltner says, is an emerging field of research that suggests powerful people who begin to forget their subordinates can be back coached to their compassionate selves.

US ‘aid’ ruins Egypt’s economy, democracy

 

US President Hussein Obama

By Dr. Kevin Barrett

American President Obama says he deplores the Egyptian junta’s decision to massacre peaceful protesters and declare martial law.

If he deplores it so much, why is he paying for it? 

It is no secret that Egyptian strongman el-Sisi and the soldiers he is sending to slaughter protesters are on the US payroll. 

According to official estimates, US taxpayers give the Egyptian military 1.3 billion dollars per year in direct military aid. When various forms of indirect aid are taken into account, including money from US puppet states in the Persian Gulf, the real annual total is in the billions. 

This lavish US funding has allowed Egypt’s military to balloon into a monster that controls between one-quarter and one-third of the Egyptian economy. That is why Egypt is economically moribund. 

Military spending kills economies, as shown by Dr. Robert Reuschlein of RealEconomy.com. Money wasted on militaries, which are non-productive organizations, is stolen from the productive sector. In societies with large militaries, the best scientists, engineers, and other experts stop producing valuable goods and services, and spend their lives figuring out how to destroy things and kill people. And poorer people, instead of becoming productive citizens, are trained to mindlessly obey orders and kill on command. Many of them suffer severe psychological damage that renders them non-productive. 

In Egypt, the military’s economic hegemony creates even more problems. 

Egypt has inherited a millennia-old authoritarian bureaucratic tradition. Pharaohs, emirs, presidents-for-life, and generals serve as dictators, and their bureaucratic lackeys have the high-status, high-paying jobs. Productive people are considered mere peasants and tradesmen, inferior in status to the bureaucrats. 

British colonialism, which imposed a new layer of foreign bureaucracy, worsened the problem. Bright young Egyptians were trained to believe they were owed government jobs when they graduated from college. Widespread belief that “the government owes me a high-paying non-productive job” persists in Egypt. And the military officers and their cronies are the biggest and most bloated parasites. 

In today’s global economy, nations led by a strong productive sector win out in the long run. Countries like Egypt, where bureaucrats (especially military bureaucrats) have grabbed the money and power, are doomed to poverty.

And the US, which “aids” Egypt by lavishing money on its corrupt military bureaucrats, is the main force behind the impoverishment of Egypt. 

US military aid has not only crippled Egypt’s economy, but has also killed Egyptian democracy. 

US aid has created a parasitical “deep state” consisting of military officers and their friends. These people run Egypt from behind the scenes. Mubarak was their figurehead. When Mubarak was overthrown and the Egyptian people elected Islamic activists to parliament and the presidency, the deep state and its foreign backers felt threatened. So they sabotaged Egypt’s economy, saturated the public with anti-Morsi propaganda, and engineered the coup d’état. 

If Obama simply called the coup what it is - a coup - US law would automatically trigger a suspension of military aid. Why has Obama decided to lie and pretend that a coup is not a coup? Why does he insist on maintaining US funding for Egypt’s brutal dictatorship? 

The answer, in one word, is “Israel.”

Zionists dominate the American media, financial, and political sectors. They insist on funding Egypt’s military dictatorship because they want to keep Egypt weak and subservient to the US and its Israeli masters. 

The Zionists know that if real democracy is established in Egypt, the Egyptian people will vote to revoke the Camp David “surrender treaty” and support the Palestinian resistance. And they know that if Egypt’s economy succeeds, Israel will never achieve its long term objective: Stealing all of the land between the Nile and the Euphrates.

So the Israelis have seized control of US Mideast policy and forced the US to lavish money not only on Israel, but on Egypt’s military dictatorship as well. Funded by the Zionist-dominated US, the Egyptian junta has helped Israel blockade and starve Gaza. The junta even cooperates with Israeli drone strikes in the Sinai! Morsi, a friend of Hamas, opposed the Gaza blockade (and Israel). That's why Netanyahu applauded the anti-Morsi coup, calling Morsi a “radical” and crowing about “the weakness of political Islamic movements.” Netanyahu’s puppets - the Egyptian military - can now go back to ruling Egypt on behalf of Israel, without interference from the likes of Morsi. 

Netanyahu’s American thugs, the neoconservatives, agree. According to Stephen Sniegoski’s article “Neocons, Selective Democracy, and the Egyptian Military Coup,” American neoconservatives - the authors of the 9/11 coup d’état - have shelved their “let's invade the Mideast for democracy” rhetoric and come out in full support of the murderous Egyptian junta and its slaughter of thousands of peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators.

The neocons have a good reason to hate Morsi: The Egyptian President has repeatedly scoffed at the official myth of 9/11 and called for a new investigation. Such an investigation would quickly destroy neoconservatism, and cause such top neocon leaders as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Dov Zakheim, Douglas Feith, Marc Grossman, Michael Ledeen, and many others to be hanged for treason. Officially establishing the truth about 9/11 would also put an end to Israel as an apartheid Zionist state. 

Real democracy in the Middle East would quickly lead to the empowerment of anti-Zionists and pro-9/11-truthers. (The vast majority of the people of the Middle East oppose Zionism, and roughly three out of four do not believe the official myth of 9/11.) 

So the Zionist-dominated USA will continue to offer lip service to democracy - while paying the Egyptian junta, and other puppet regimes, to destroy it.