GhanaWatch

The bankers’ budget

2011-08-12T13:43:00.000Z

The bankers’ budget

The stock market panic and the call for strong government

2011-08-12T09:50:00.000Z

The stock market panic and the call for strong government

Knowlegde to the Highest Bidder

2011-01-28T23:19:00.000Z

The new harsh Realities of Education in Ghana

this is an up and coming article on educationan in Ghana.

Middle East and North African Crisis and The US Reponse

2011-01-28T23:16:00.000Z

TRUE DEMOCRACY OR NATIONAL INTEREST?
The current upheavals in the Maghreb and the Middle east clearly shows the quandary in which many of the western capitals have dug themselves in over the years.After proping up unrepresentative repressive regimes over the years all in the name of promoting their national interst and ensuring stability in a volatile region while preaching openness freedom and democracy to all bu those regimes- their friends in the region- the chickens seem to have finally come home to roost.

One of their chummy tyrannical allies has fallen and fled to Saudi Arabia even though all indications points to the fact that they still have a sympathetic cabal in place in Tunisia. Even though the ordinary people who brought down the western backed leader have not given up the revolution. Many western capitals were absolutely shocked at what happened a couple of weeks ago in Tunisia. Now what faces the western nations is even a bigger problem; their closest and strongest ally Egypt is in the middle of an unprecedented revolution.

No matter what happens the country will never be the same again and certainly the relationship with the west especially the US will not be as it was before the revolution. These protests are as much against the ruling class in Egypt as it is against the major western powers especially the US. At the moment there is as much apprehension in Washington and Jerusalem as there is in Cairo.There is more at stake than the leadership and politics of one country.What is at stake is the future of American influence in the region and more importantly the future of Israel.

After propping up the repressive government that has ruled the country under emergency rule for over two decades , most of people outside the ruling class are alienated and even feels hostile to the western nations. These abuses were tolerated primarily because the Egyptian Government claimed any reforms that leads to democracy will inevitably lead to the transfer of power to more radical groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

What is refreshing is that there very little involvement of any religious organization much less an extremist religious group in the Egypt protests. It was the case in tunisia and up till now there is no indication that there will be any religious element.

Now ,it is decision time in many western capitals. many of the leaders are afraid of what will come next if Mubarak falls however they are savvy enough not to appear to be on the wrong side when the history of this revolution is written in years to come. Their hypocrisy has caught up with them and any bad move will cost them dearly in a region that occupies a great importance in their foreign policy.

FINNALY SOMEONE STOOD UP TO THE NLC

2010-10-08T17:04:00.000Z

If there was one institution created by the Kuffour administration that was abhorent to the people of Ghana then it was the National Labour Commission (NLC). Since the draconian Labour Act of 2003 Act 653 was passed and established the NLC, this institution has made it impossible for workers in this country to express themselves in any way. The Act has virtually ostracized industrial action in this country.Since it was established, the NLC has at every opportunity dealt with labour unions unfairly while bootlickers masquerading as Labour consultants justified the NLC's unfair actions. even though the NLC was suppose to be an independent arbiter between workers and employers, they have always been biased in favour of employers. According to the Act they are supposed to enforce resolutions and binding agreements as well as resolve labour issues.However the NLC never enforced a single ruling against employers but always took harsh actions against Workers eve to the extent of pursuing expensive legal actions against workers. Now the NLC has met its match in the UTAG who are seriously challenging their authority and pushing to the middle where they should be.

CENTENARY OF VISION

2010-05-24T10:36:00.003Z

To some , the message will be hard to swallow but m,any are those who buy into the vision of the Great Founder of Ghana and the Liberator of Africa. The current Government with obvious Nkrumahist Coloration,has done a lot to showcase the achievement of Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah. Tomorrow, the 25th May is Africa unity day and it is fitting that a massive and well publicized event will be organized to celebrate this Great patriot and Pan Africanist.

A STRATEGY DOOMED FOR FAILURE

2010-01-30T19:22:00.004Z

The New Public transport Strategy we cannot rely on Over the past couple of weeks i frequently keep hearing advertisements admonishing and elicititing my support for the impending Urban Rapid Transport Programme. Under this program it is envisaged that rapid public transport routes will be created on our already congested road for the sole purpose of transporting the public.

WEB MOBILE IS HERE

2010-01-18T14:43:00.004Z

GREAT POTENTIAL FOR GHANA Last week Google unveiled Nexus One after several years of rumors and speculations amid the greatest fanfare only Google could conjure up in these times. The nexus One is a Mobile phone that the geeks at Google call a "super phone" . The nexus one is a 3.7Inch Touchscreen with a 1GHz Snapdragon Processor,a 5 megapixel camera with an LED flash and comes with accompanying GPS and and Compass.It runs the ANDROID mobile Operating System as expected. it is the first time the online giant has ventured into the hardware market. its intended to rival the I-phone and the badly trailing Blackberry. But more importantly this is to make sure the worlds biggest Internet company keeps itself at the top of the pile. Google has known for a long time that the web is going "mobile" and the biggest pie of the online market will thrive on mobile platforms so the Nexus one is to give Google direct control of at least a section of the mobile market and lock in advertisers and other customers. Tjhis is not the first time

EAGLE EYE GHANAIANS?

2009-10-26T12:09:00.006Z

We must as a nation congratulate ourselves for creating a perception among at least some politicians that we will not tolerate sleaze among those who keep our purse. According to the former Chief of Staff and the Head of the Planning Committee of the defunct Ghana@50 he advised the former Chief Executive of the same org to be cautious with some aspects of the work because Ghanaians will be suspicious of any unusual actions of people in Power. Mr. Mpaini was giving evidence on the mismanagement of funds allocated to the celebration of the Ghana @50.According to Mr. Mpaini he warned Dr. Wereko Brobby to be very careful when the latter decided to loan the Ghana@50 Commission with 200,000 Ghana Cedis towards the celebration when the funds were not forthcoming from Government If this is the case and they do fear such finger pointing then that should mean more Government officials should be scrupulous in their dealings.And if most Ghanaians demand accountability from their officials then this should lead to more accountability. Mr. Mpainin in a negative tone berated Ghanaians for being too suspicious of Public officers and "have a pull-him-down attitude". If this was the case and yet they still managed to steel the staggering amount of money we occasionally hear about. MORE POWER TO GHANAIANS IF THAT IS WHAT THEY WILL DO TO SAFEGUARD OUR SMALL KITTY.

DISSAPOINTMENT THUS FAR !!

2009-07-09T13:51:00.003Z

Most of us are disillusioned about direction of the the new government anyway but it looks like we have to brace ourselves for yet more heartbreak.This is especially difficult for those of us wish they do well for Ghanaians to be rewarded for giving them a chance to show that that governance can be conducted in a way that does not ignore the needs of ordinary people. as was seen in the Kuffour days. In the beginning of the NDCs rule the some of our pleaded for some of the impatience to be toned down and the new administration to be given some time to settle. lack of strong leadership and the lack of bold thinking in those early days was tolerated by some of us only because we thought it was only a matter of time that the Good professor came into his own. Instead of the Government getting to grips with the country's situation, it looks like Mill himself is baffled and confounded and lacks the sharpness of reaction to deal most issues especially when it comes to communicating actions and plans. I do not for one moment doubt the competence and the capabilities of Mills and majority of his team in dealing with some of the issues we have on our burning hands in the country today. But there is some amount of inertia and where there is some movement there is a fair amount of hesitation. There no point in touting the capabilities wend potential of anyone or any institution if those attributes are not translated into tangible deliverable. It is distressing to see the government falters in simple areas wand make the erstwhile mediocre administration seem like a group of hardworking rocket scientists.

GOT SERVED!

2009-06-22T13:44:00.002Z

The rains we prayed for came and it washed us away from our flimsy structures and caused us so much pain and anguish. A lot of times we humans wish for thins we really cannot handle when we gt our wishes. Ghanaian also are noted, far more than any other group of people, for causing self inflicting pain and what happened on Friday and Saturday was a classic case of illustration. firs we are at fault for praying for rain when we were in the least prepared for it no matter how absurd that may sound. we simply should have left god alone to his own devices but no, not Ghanaian we fasted , "allnighted" and "compelled" the Almighty to open the heavens-open he did on Friday evening( and what a time too for God to choose ;ruining the perennial weekend revelers). The majority of people who pray happens to live in Accra which incidentally is the most ill-prepared and least in need of rain

IF HE IS NOT AWERE LET HIM KNOW

2009-05-29T12:39:00.003Z

WE WILL NOT FORGIVE MILLS IF HE FAILS Many of us really wish the president well and hope he succeeds not least because of his humility and measured approach.he is totally different in approach from the Kuffour team that inflicted humiliation on us and expected us to thank them for it. However after six months of mills it is very difficult to say we are on the right track however magnanimous i try to be. There is lack of strong personality and direction at the center and i struggle to see any boldness in action or thought from the president and his team. Also it seems the president especially is overwhelmed by the problems of this country ad is struggling to decide where to begin. We all know the NPP left this country on a broken limb but we Ghanaians are not prepared to wait .We want solutions now. The president is too touchy feely and does not want to step on toes but that is what governance is about.

LETS CELEBRATE AU

2009-05-26T15:15:00.006Z

Its is not Perfect but it is a great and wonderful dream Sure i would never hold a Federal United States of Africa passport in my lifetime and i may not be able to travel effortlessly between African countries as of it was one nation, but the dream of African unity is un-undying passion that makes my heart glows every time i think about it.This wonderful yet almost illusive dream fashioned by our illustrious fore bearers is both uplifting and disappointing depending on which side you happen to be standing at what time . It is one of the few things that all Africans aspire to but deep inside we hope it is not only a vision. every year on the 25 of may people across the content are reminded of this dream of our fore fathers to make the African continent one nation. The celebration that goes wit this day always so much emotions and debates as to whether the project of Africa Unity is even a desirable vision not to mention whether it will ever be attained. Then there is the perennial cynical view that since the early 50s African leaders only shuttle between capitals for unproductive talk shops that does not yield any benefits for the ordinary African or fails to move the continent any closer to unity. some say the reborn AU is no different from the erstwhile OAU which many have consigned into the dustbin of history as one of the failed multinational organizations with lofty intentions but lacking pragmatic actions. we live on a continent where we have been programmed by both internal and external factors to always see the negative and ignore the successes and the positive. the bad news has drowned out the good news so much so that good news and successes are rare. This condition has been applied in assessing performance of the OAU What many fail to recognize is that that the AU has been through an evolution and a deep analysis will show that it really did more than average in fulfilling its missions and goals. One of the prime goals of the OAU in its formative years was to liberate the continent from colonial domination.This goal was achieved in record time which brought some of the very best in Africans and showed that together we can collectively achieve.Within less than a decade this was actualized leading to the liberation of over a dozen colonies.By the 25th year of the existence of the OAU only a handful of African colonies were under colonial control and in those places strong efforts were underway to liberate to areas.

BRETTON WOODS IS BACK TO GET US!

2009-05-26T11:03:00.004Z

ARE OUR LEADERS READY TO SAVE US FROM THEM? Last week we all listened in horror as the IMF staff mission leader Peter Allum delivered his report to his bosses in Washington. his report was as usual laden with bitter pills for us to swallow. One of the main concerns of the IMF was the government's partial subsidization of energy and utility tariffs to low consumers. According to Mr. Allum this is one major concern of the Fund and they see it as one of the main problem areas of our economy. So predictably the IMF is urging the Government to cut this all important lifeline to the poor (one of the few things citizens get to enjoy from the government). After the G-20 in April summit the G-7 countries realizing that they have lost some clout economically , south to entrench their domination by giving the IMF more powers and resources. The newly re-launched IMF is determined to continued from where they lefty off prior to the Global Financial Crisis. Forcing small developing counties to go through painful reforms that do not yield any benefit but causes a lot of misery to the poorest in the society. The change in government from fairly right-wing NPP to the 'social democratic' NDC is expected to lead to a resistance of the cutthroat policies from Washington. we are keenly watching , especially at a time of great economic upheaval whether the good prof. and his NDC will be worthy of our confidence and trust in the management of our economy away from all the dependency traits that has contributed in holding us back.This is time for assertive leadership that can intelligently jungle asking for money from the fund (because we desperately need it)while at the same safeguarding some our very sensitive sections of the population from cutthroat and painful reforms that hurts. The Bretton woods system is clearly set up against our interest so if our leaders will disregard good and sensible counsel and go ahead to do the biding of the fund , then we are truly doomed.Forced reforms always end in disaster and countries that have benefited from good reforms always do so on their own accord and not under duress. We all saw how powerless the Breton woods were when some of thier acclaimed "star pupils" in eastern and northern Europe who have followed liberalization policies to the letter came close to economic implosion. The IMF had no answers to the collapse of the Global financial system which they had shaped and influenced over the last two decades. Our leaders must be wise and not let us down. the fact that full cost recovery is working in other countries does not make it the optimal policy choice for us too.

A LITTLE MORE OF THE SAME

2009-05-18T10:11:00.005Z

.... Real change is elusive in terms of posture and orientation Those of us who rooted for Atta mills to ascend to the presidency because we thought he was going to be our answer to the real change that was needed are left scratching our heads and left wondering if he can provide at least some hope to the change agenda Only a week ago the media space was completely dominated by abject discussions and debates about the true number of people and functionaries included in the presidents entourage and the true cost of the trip to the UK. The president's media czar defended the number and the expenses on a host of media outlets , claiming that Ghanaian must rather consider what came out of the trip rather than the cost. for a moment , i thought it was Kwabena Adjepong or Andrew Awuni or or better still defending Kuffour over his numerous travels. Mahama ayariga ,when quizzed , insisted that the travel to the UK was to secure funds to balance our budget and to fund some critical projects.and that millions of pounds have been pledged by the UK government towards such.In a way that argument answers the critics (especially those from the opposition NPP) who have been mocking the president for being locked up in the castle and unable to travel outside the country to look for funds to run the country. That is the aspect that saddens me the most ;that our measure of the success of leadership is the leader's ability to beg for more funds from western nations This is the level we have reduced ourselves to. and sadly our president has bought into it. This mediocre leadership style that is low on cerebral work but heavy on little things that appears grand but hollow inside is what we rooted for the Prof to change but it looks like so early in the day our hopes will be dashed. What is even more annoying is that our new president is also trapped in the neo-colonial mind that dictates that we must maintain a "special" relationship with our colonial oppressors. even the act of the president first visiting the UK in his first official trip outside of Africa at the expense of missing the swearing -in of the new president of South Africa! In the new geopolitical reality we find ourselves in our leaders must be nimble footed and forward thinking. The world is totally different in geopolitical terms and diplomatically from the one they knew when growing up. If they are impervious to the reality , they better have a second look at the events at the G-20 convened in London on the 1st of April to discuss ways out of the global Economic crisis.Only a few years back that summit would have been dominated by only a few western countries while big powers like China , India, Russia,Brazil and South Africa wouldn't even get a look-in. the worlds power centers have not only shifted by it is spreading , creating many centers of powers. The world is becoming 'Flat' and the traditional political ,economic and diplomatic superpowers are having to cede some of their powers to other countries because they have no other choice. The newly emerging powers are propping up the western economies through all forms of investments and trade. Our leaders must recognize the new reality and take actions that will enhance our development. The unreasonable attachment to our colonial ties must be shed away and embrace the new era that has dawned on us. The president must know that the change agenda also includes foreign policy; we must revolutionize our foreign policy outlook to benefit from the new age and form powerful partnership with the emerging powers who will pull us towards the expanding center. Also the "beg mentality"of our leadership must be shed away and a more cerebral , creative and and dignifying attitude to adopted. If the job of the presidency is simply going around western countries begging for money , then most of us "simpletons can be better president than those we have had.

NOW WE CAN STOP COMPLAINING

2009-04-20T13:26:00.004Z

....MILLS THROW THE GAUNTLET TO THE YOUTH I have enormous respect for the president and this has been strengthened by the decision of the professor to appoint many young people into ministerial and governance positions across the board.And when i speak of young people , i dont mean fourty- somethings who have been around forever, but relatively inexperienced and fresh people. This is something most of us have been agitating for....give us a chance to prove ourselves.It seems it was something the president has given a lot of thought and deliberately gave these young men and women a chance to show what they can do.Never in the history of our country has so many young people have been given a chance to prove themselves in positions of authority.The likes of Okudzeto Ablaquah, and James Agyenim Boaten would not have stood any chance of getting an appointment getting such high profile appointment in anyone's government except for that of prof Mills. Even at the risk of incurring the displeasure of hard core party members mills has bravely given the chance to some very young people. The other day i watch a group of angry NDC members berating the president for appointing a 26 year old man as a DCE.i thought that was brilliant decision b the president. Now these young must become ambassadors or the youth of Ghana and dispel the wrong notions crafted about young people. Their elevation to these positions is an opportunity in three generations and their performance will determine whether the youth get another chance to prove the young people are indeed better at some things that we are given credit for. Not only young people have benefited from the Mills revolution but women have also been given the opportunity to influence decision making at the highest level.

100 OF TENTATIVE CRAWLING

2009-04-20T12:42:00.004Z

Most people really wish president Mills very well in his bid to prosecute his change agenda. Mills is a likable character and has the outlook of an underdog... a humble underdog at that. Most people are inclined to have a soft spot for underdogs and mills has an excellent underdog profile in the Ghanaian context. but inexplicably Mills did not get the honeymoon and goodwill that new governments get in the beginning of their reign. perhaps a reflection of the impatience of LONG SUFFERING citizens who are simply tired of the ebb and flow of hope and frustration with each change in government . After 100 days, the jury is still out on the real achievement of the mills govrnement but whta most of us keen observers hav sen is that this goernemnt will adopt a delibrately brooding style of dong things. Mills seems not to be in any hurry to take any decisions or actions . This irks both critics and supporters alike. The supporters are angered especially by the unwillingness of the president to wrestle control of the state and its machinery from the operatives of the previous government. Another worrisome feature of the mills government is his choice to remain silent and lock himself up in the castle . Over the last 3 months Mills has been president his profile goes up and he appears to be control and command confidence whenever he speaks to the media, but this rarely happens. The president is extremely media shy and makes me remember one of his statement during the 2008 electioneering campaign , when he declared in an angry tone that "we talk too much". But seriously that is the first and foremost function of a government-to communicate its actions and intention to the populace. However it is clear that Prof. Mills is a honest and thoughtful person and with the right personnel and council he can achieve one thing that has eluded this nation in a long time ,that an honest and clean leadership. for now most can forgive the president , but that will certainly not be the case in a years time.A little bit of tentativeness could be tolerated for now but our legendary collective patience is not infinite.

RESPECT!

2009-03-20T11:15:00.003Z

Many people around the world have enormous expectations on president Obama , they expect him to create a new global order dominated by fairness, equity, sincerity and above all respect for other countries especially those who are not considered as traditional close friends of the US.This expectation is against the background of 8 years of confrontational, threatening and disrespectful attitude of the Bush administration towards countries he and his Neo-con advisers considered as adversaries on the international arena. On Thursday 19 march , President Obama addressed the Iranian leadership and its peoples on the eve of their new year. The tone and content of the address was very different from what we are traditionally used to when it comes to dealing with Iran. the president gave strong indications that he will be willing to negotiate with the Iranian leadership in a fair way while respecting its rights to its sovereignty and independence.the speech was devoid of any threats of use of force which is significant in that it calms the environment and prepares the ground for more meaningful engagement.The Obama administration has clearly signaled it is in a mood to engage diplomatically. Another significant aspect of the speech was that it addressed both the people of Iran and their leaders in the same breath: a significant departure from the divide-and-rule tactics employed by previous US administrations that tries to depict the leadership as a monstrous machine that does not have the welfare of its people at haert

LORDS, MASTERS AND MISTRESSES

2009-03-19T09:30:00.005Z

>>>>>THE CALLOUS RULING ELITE

LORDS, MASTERS AND MISTRESSES

2009-03-19T09:30:00.004Z

>>>>>THE CALLOUS RULING ELITE

Talking-shop-on-Thames

2009-03-19T09:17:00.004Z

BIG ECONOMIC POWERS DECIDE THE FATE OF POOR “LIKE King Charles II, the Economic Conference is taking an unconscionable time to die,” lamented The Economist in 1933, halfway through an epic—and ultimately fruitless—gathering of world powers in London to prevent the spread of protectionism in the depths of the Depression. That conference lasted more than a month, with the dollar sinking and tempers rising the longer it dragged on. At least there is no danger of interminable drift when leaders of the Group of 20 gather in London next month to address the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. They have set themselves just one day, April 2nd, to do what their predecessors failed to accomplish in weeks: tackle the crisis and consider ways to remake the rules of finance. This weekend G20 finance ministers and central bank governors attending a preparatory meeting in London may well attempt to limit expectations. More pressingly, they will have to heal an awkward sense of transatlantic disunity that has emerged in the run-up to the meeting. The tensions were exposed at an assembly of European finance ministers on March 9th and 10th. The ministers responded sharply to a call by Lawrence Summers, the White House economic adviser, for everyone in the G20 to focus on boosting global demand. Such calls were “not to our liking,” sniped Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister and the chairman of the meeting. The cause of harmony may not have been helped when Britain’s most senior civil servant was quoted as saying the shortage of staff in Barack Obama’s two-month-old Treasury was making preparations for the summit “unbelievably difficult”. (Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, disputes that.) In reality, the tensions appeared more symptomatic of the opening of bargaining than of a disastrous rift. The G20’s agenda focuses on three broad areas: sorting out the crisis through fiscal and monetary means and by encouraging banks to lend; medium-term regulatory reforms; and strengthening multilateral bodies such as the IMF so that they can give more help to crisis-hit developing countries. Everyone has different priorities. America feels its counterparts are not doing enough to boost demand. It would like them to pledge a fiscal stimulus equal to 2% of global GDP this year and next, and for the IMF to monitor compliance. Some countries would also like the European Central Bank to make better use of its monetary arsenal, as the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have. America has indeed done a lot to stimulate growth (see table). The IMF, however, notes that taking into account automatic stabilisers, such as welfare payments to the unemployed, Germany’s fiscal response is not as far behind America’s as it appears. Not only does Germany feel its spending package is big enough, it is pressing for a quick return to balanced budgets when the crisis is over. Although transatlantic differences have emerged over fiscal policy, they are narrowing over regulation. Germany and France have long battled to persuade America and Britain to regulate hedge funds, which are clustered in the financial centres of New York and London. America is now prepared to countenance regulation of systemically important ones. Since the G20 leaders first met in November, their deputies have laboured on reforms to the stricken global financial system, in particular through the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), a Basel-based group that met in London this week. These include reforms that would affect bank regulators, supervisors and accounting standard-setters, and cover bankers’ pay, derivatives trading and rating agencies. America, chastened by its own regulatory failures, is now more supportive of tougher, co-ordinated global regulatory standards but only to a degree: it is unenthusiastic about uniform standards for executive pay pushed by Britain. In addition, the FSF is expected to propose to the G20 ways to make bank regulation less pro-cyclical, by making forward-looking provisions against bad loans rather than the “incurred-loss” method now in use—though not so that banks can use the provisions to massage earnings (see article). It will suggest incorporating a leverage ratio into bank-capital requirements, to supplement the existing risk-weighting of assets. It is also helping set up cross-border supervisory colleges to share information about 30 global banks. Illustration by S. Kambayashi There is general support for doubling the IMF’s resources to $500 billion, but America would like it to have even more. It is not clear how the increase would be funded. Reserve-rich countries like China could contribute more, as Japan did with a $100 billion pledge in February. But some fear that strings might be attached to such money, such as less criticism of China’s exchange-rate policy. Mr Geithner has proposed the IMF’s credit line with 26 rich member countries be dramatically raised to $500 billion from $50 billion. Some of the trade-offs will be driven by political considerations. French and German voters, for example, lay part of the blame for the crisis on hedge funds and tax havens, even though both played minor roles compared with the highly regulated banking system. Likewise, Mr Geithner is pressing for higher global capital standards for non-bank financial firms (such as American International Group, a big insurer), in part to reassure taxpayers that this sort of crisis and the accompanying bail-outs will not be repeated. Given the importance of the summit to the reputations of Gordon Brown, its British host, and Mr Obama, on his first overseas trip since taking office, every effort will be made to trumpet such progress. Few expect a 1933-style fiasco, though participants believe that given the tensions exhibited this week, a narrowing of differences is more likely than any “grand bargain” to put the world to rights. The best that might emerge from the summit is proof that leaders of the world’s biggest economies continue to talk to each other. Given the urgency of the situation, and the immense capital that Mr Obama still holds abroad, the world might have hoped for more. Talk, like so much else in this financial crisis, is cheap.

Talking-shop-on-Thames

2009-03-19T09:17:00.003Z

BIG ECONOMIC POWERS DECIDE THE FATE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY “LIKE King Charles II, the Economic Conference is taking an unconscionable time to die,” lamented The Economist in 1933, halfway through an epic—and ultimately fruitless—gathering of world powers in London to prevent the spread of protectionism in the depths of the Depression. That conference lasted more than a month, with the dollar sinking and tempers rising the longer it dragged on. At least there is no danger of interminable drift when leaders of the Group of 20 gather in London next month to address the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. They have set themselves just one day, April 2nd, to do what their predecessors failed to accomplish in weeks: tackle the crisis and consider ways to remake the rules of finance. This weekend G20 finance ministers and central bank governors attending a preparatory meeting in London may well attempt to limit expectations. More pressingly, they will have to heal an awkward sense of transatlantic disunity that has emerged in the run-up to the meeting. The tensions were exposed at an assembly of European finance ministers on March 9th and 10th. The ministers responded sharply to a call by Lawrence Summers, the White House economic adviser, for everyone in the G20 to focus on boosting global demand. Such calls were “not to our liking,” sniped Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister and the chairman of the meeting. The cause of harmony may not have been helped when Britain’s most senior civil servant was quoted as saying the shortage of staff in Barack Obama’s two-month-old Treasury was making preparations for the summit “unbelievably difficult”. (Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, disputes that.) In reality, the tensions appeared more symptomatic of the opening of bargaining than of a disastrous rift. The G20’s agenda focuses on three broad areas: sorting out the crisis through fiscal and monetary means and by encouraging banks to lend; medium-term regulatory reforms; and strengthening multilateral bodies such as the IMF so that they can give more help to crisis-hit developing countries. Everyone has different priorities. America feels its counterparts are not doing enough to boost demand. It would like them to pledge a fiscal stimulus equal to 2% of global GDP this year and next, and for the IMF to monitor compliance. Some countries would also like the European Central Bank to make better use of its monetary arsenal, as the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have. America has indeed done a lot to stimulate growth (see table). The IMF, however, notes that taking into account automatic stabilisers, such as welfare payments to the unemployed, Germany’s fiscal response is not as far behind America’s as it appears. Not only does Germany feel its spending package is big enough, it is pressing for a quick return to balanced budgets when the crisis is over. Although transatlantic differences have emerged over fiscal policy, they are narrowing over regulation. Germany and France have long battled to persuade America and Britain to regulate hedge funds, which are clustered in the financial centres of New York and London. America is now prepared to countenance regulation of systemically important ones. Since the G20 leaders first met in November, their deputies have laboured on reforms to the stricken global financial system, in particular through the Financial Stability Forum (FSF), a Basel-based group that met in London this week. These include reforms that would affect bank regulators, supervisors and accounting standard-setters, and cover bankers’ pay, derivatives trading and rating agencies. America, chastened by its own regulatory failures, is now more supportive of tougher, co-ordinated global regulatory standards but only to a degree: it is unenthusiastic about uniform standards for executive pay pushed by Britain. In addition, the FSF is expected to propose to the G20 ways to make bank regulation less pro-cyclical, by making forward-looking provisions against bad loans rather than the “incurred-loss” method now in use—though not so that banks can use the provisions to massage earnings (see article). It will suggest incorporating a leverage ratio into bank-capital requirements, to supplement the existing risk-weighting of assets. It is also helping set up cross-border supervisory colleges to share information about 30 global banks. Illustration by S. Kambayashi There is general support for doubling the IMF’s resources to $500 billion, but America would like it to have even more. It is not clear how the increase would be funded. Reserve-rich countries like China could contribute more, as Japan did with a $100 billion pledge in February. But some fear that strings might be attached to such money, such as less criticism of China’s exchange-rate policy. Mr Geithner has proposed the IMF’s credit line with 26 rich member countries be dramatically raised to $500 billion from $50 billion. Some of the trade-offs will be driven by political considerations. French and German voters, for example, lay part of the blame for the crisis on hedge funds and tax havens, even though both played minor roles compared with the highly regulated banking system. Likewise, Mr Geithner is pressing for higher global capital standards for non-bank financial firms (such as American International Group, a big insurer), in part to reassure taxpayers that this sort of crisis and the accompanying bail-outs will not be repeated. Given the importance of the summit to the reputations of Gordon Brown, its British host, and Mr Obama, on his first overseas trip since taking office, every effort will be made to trumpet such progress. Few expect a 1933-style fiasco, though participants believe that given the tensions exhibited this week, a narrowing of differences is more likely than any “grand bargain” to put the world to rights. The best that might emerge from the summit is proof that leaders of the world’s biggest economies continue to talk to each other. Given the urgency of the situation, and the immense capital that Mr Obama still holds abroad, the world might have hoped for more. Talk, like so much else in this financial crisis, is cheap.

OUT OF TOUCH ZEALOTS AND POWER SEEKING RELIGIONISTSEEKING CONTROL OVER POPULATION

2009-03-18T17:41:00.004Z

>>>>>>OVER POPULATION AND REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH POLICIES There are aver 100m Catholics in Africa , most of whom live in different cultural and economic conditions though most of them have one thing in common: a deep respect for for the Pope, the head of the catholic church(who considers himself as God's representative of earth ). his views are sacrosanct to majority of Catholics and most of them hung to it like dear life. This makes the pontiff's crusade against contraception very dangerous in one of the most affected regions of the world in terms of HIV/AID and populations planning. the dogma of the catholic church over the use of condoms as a preventative tool against HIV is without basis and his adamant posture defies any reasonable logic. the Pope insist that condom use was not the answer to fighting AIDS on the continent "On the contrary, it increases the problem," the Pope told reporters a day earlier aboard his plane on his way to Africa. There are over 40million sufferers of HIV/AIDS on the African continent some of whom are devout Catholics and may have been saved from the disease in the first place if they had had the benefit of sexual and contraceptive information. Over the years the catholic church even under the leadership of the moderate john Paul took a strong stance against the use of contraception and any other form of family planning. even back then a certain bishop Ratzenger was one of the driving forces behind this uncompromising stance. now this bishop Ratzenger happens to be Pope Benedict who has hardened his stance and made so many attacks against almost all the features of our modern society. he has hardened his stance against gay rights,stem cell research, abortion , the ordination of females, celibacy in addition to his pet opposition. He was the key inspiration behind the roll back of some of the positive scientific and family planning policies in the US during the evangelical right-wing inspired presidency of Bush. During Bush's years all US funding for any health facility that provided family planning and abortion services.this resulted in fatal consequences in many countries including Ghana where maternal mortality increased twofold with two thirds of all fatalities happening as a result of unsafe abortions. There are horrific tales of young women inserting dangerous objects and chemicals such as broken bottles and detergents into their wombs to abort unwanted pregnancies because it was illegal to perform abortion or because there was no availability of education/information and facilities where they could go. This man (the pope) is either completely out of touch with the world or deliberately following dogma informed by primitive ignorance that is costing a lot of lives.he is a leader of a billion strong followers and has enormous powers , even though he is not accountable to anyone of his followers. he gos around the world wielding a lot of influence on world leaders .asking them to implement policies to the detriment of majority of the population As far as HIV infections occur, the reality is, yes, there is a failure rate associated with condom use. However, the failure rate of any abstinence policy is considerably higher. figures from Uganda where money for condomisation was cut and used for an extensive abstinence campaign returned a negative result ,culminating in an increase in the infections and prevalence rate in a country that had succeeded to a certain extent in controlling the AIDS scourge The pope would willfully destroy the world in order to satisfy ancient ritualistic dogma.

MORE LIKE IT MR.PRESIDENT

2009-03-18T10:52:00.002Z

Many people have been jolted my the effusive and unannounced outburst of the President. speaking to a group of journalist who called on him at his Castle office, the president in an animated tone give a clear warning that he will not tolerate any unjustified harassment from anyone ,especially the opposition NPP whose posture since losing power has been very questionable. among his audience were a good number of media personnel who have made it their lives mission to destroy the ruling party and their associates including the president.They have attacked, mocked and humiliated the president right from his days in opposition till now.The president has suffered a lot at the hands of this section of the media and he feels he is really really fed up with them. Since the president was sworn in the NPP has been taunting the president and the ruling party and have refused to co-operate with the transition team. And whenever the new government takes any action to demand accountability the out gone government uses the media to accuse them of harassment. The NPP as was shown last Sunday have failed to realize that they are out of power and strut around behaving as if they have a divine right to rule this country. "I respect civility and politeness and I believe that people have taken my respect for peaceful co-existence as weakness, timidity and inability to act "

A BETTER GHANA BUDGET

2009-03-11T14:17:00.004Z

It probably is the most unanticipated budget in almost a decade and sure it was an unheralded affair. Right after the hurried transition there was a huge issue about the true state of the economy . whilst the out going NPP insisted they left a far better economic legacy than they met , the incoming government and the world Bank were shouting from the the rooftops about the worsening economic conditions. The ensuing debate led us to one conclusion : the economy was in dire straits and Ghanaian must brace themselves for the coming storm that was going to be very rough. Many Ghanaians get the message, the economy is in a mess and that they should expect very little from the government. The overarching theme of the budget was Fiscal discipline and austerity at all levels of governance with the most coming from the executive.There are so many initiatives and ,measures geared towards cutting out waste and monitoring how monies are spent in all the MDAs. It is dense of good governance initiative and waste -cutting. If all these initiatives will be implemented then it will mark the beginning of a new era of accountability and openness in governance. What the budget is short on is bold visions and initiatives that will give a clear direction to the nation.

2009-02-27T13:34:00.001Z

Unions have a substantial impact on the compensation and work lives of both unionized and non-unionized workers. This report presents current data on unions' effect on wages, fringe benefits, total compensation, pay inequality, and workplace protections. Some of the conclusions are: • Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20% and raise compensation, including both wages and benefits, by about 28%. • Unions reduce wage inequality because they raise wages more for low- and middle-wage workers than for higher-wage workers, more for blue-collar than for white-collar workers, and more for workers who do not have a college degree. • Strong unions set a pay standard that nonunion employers follow. For example, a high school graduate whose workplace is not unionized but whose industry is 25% unionized is paid 5% more than similar workers in less unionized industries. • The impact of unions on total nonunion wages is almost as large as the impact on total union wages. • The most sweeping advantage for unionized workers is in fringe benefits. Unionized workers are more likely than their nonunionized counterparts to receive paid leave, are approximately 18% to 28% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and are 23% to 54% more likely to be in employer-provided pension plans. • Unionized workers receive more generous health benefits than nonunionized workers. They also pay 18% lower health care deductibles and a smaller share of the costs for family coverage. In retirement, unionized workers are 24% more likely to be covered by health insurance paid for by their employer. • Unionized workers receive better pension plans. Not only are they more likely to have a guaranteed benefit in retirement, their employers contribute 28% more toward pensions. • Unionized workers receive 26% more vacation time and 14% more total paid leave (vacations and holidays). Unions play a pivotal role both in securing legislated labor protections and rights such as safety and health, overtime, and family/medical leave and in enforcing those rights on the job. Because unionized workers are more informed, they are more likely to benefit from social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance and workers compensation. Unions are thus an intermediary institution that provides a necessary complement to legislated benefits and protections. The union wage premium It should come as no surprise that unions raise wages, since this has always been one of the main goals of unions and a major reason that workers seek collective bargaining. How much unions raise wages, for whom, and the consequences of unionization for workers, firms, and the economy have been studied by economists and other researchers for over a century (for example, the work of Alfred Marshall). This section presents evidence from the 1990s that unions raise the wages of unionized workers by roughly 20% and raise total compensation by about 28%. The research literature generally finds that unionized workers' earnings exceed those of comparable nonunion workers by about 15%, a phenomenon known as the "union wage premium." H. Gregg Lewis found the union wage premium to be 10% to 20% in his two well-known assessments, the first in the early 1960s (Lewis 1963) and the second more than 20 years later (Lewis 1986). Freeman and Medoff (1984) in their classic analysis, What Do Unions Do?, arrived at a similar conclusion. Historically, unions have raised the wages to a greater degree for "low-skilled" than for "high-skilled" workers. Consequently, unions lessen wage inequality. Hirsch and Schumacher (1998) consider the conclusion that unions boost wages more for low- and middle-wage workers, a "universal finding" of the extensive literature on unions, wages, and worker skills. As they state: The standard explanation for this result is that unions standardize wages by decreasing differentials across and within job positions (Freeman 1980) so that low-skilled workers receive a larger premium relative to their alternative nonunion wage. The larger union wage premium for those with low wages, in lower-paid occupations and with less education is shown in Table 2. For instance, the union wage premium for blue-collar workers in 1997, 23.3%, was far larger than the 2.2% union wage premium for white-collar workers. Likewise, the 1997 union wage premium for high school graduates, 20.8%, was much higher than the 5.1% premium for college graduates. Gundersen (2003) estimated the union wage premium for those with a high school degree or less at 35.5%, significantly greater than the 24.5% premium for all workers. Unemployment insurance Unemployment insurance (UI) is a joint federal and state program that was created in the Social Security Act of 1935 to provide some income replacement to workers who lose their job through no fault of their own. Budd and McCall (1997) offer a cost-benefit decision-making analysis to explain the costs facing the unemployed worker in filing a UI claim. In a system with complex eligibility rules and benefit calculations and a lack of uniformity among states regarding these rules, the difficulty, or "cost," of obtaining information is formidable. In fact, the main reason that many unemployed workers never file a claim is because they thought they were not eligible (Wandner and Stettner 2000). The threat of an employer retaliating by not rehiring a laid-off worker might be another cost weighing on the decision to file a claim. Unions can help offset the costs of workers who are laid off. Primarily, unions provide information to workers about benefit expectations, rules, and procedures, and dispel stigmas that might be attached to receiving a social benefit. Unions also can negotiate in their contracts layoff recall procedures based on seniority and protection against firing for other than a just cause, as well as help workers build files in the case of a disputed claim (Budd and McHall 1997). Additionally, the union-wage differential reduces the likelihood that unemployed workers will be ineligible for benefits because their pay is too low (Wenger 1999). Budd and McHall (1997) have estimated that union representation increases the likelihood of an unemployed worker in a blue-collar occupation receiving UI benefits by approximately 23%. At the peak of UI coverage in 1975, one in every two unemployed workers received UI benefits. By the mid-1980s, the ratio of claims to unemployed workers (the recipiency rate) had fallen to almost 30%. Blank and Card (1991) found that the decline in unionization explained one-third of the decline in UI recipiency over this period. These findings underscore the difference unions make in ensuring that the unemployment insurance system works. Considering that UI acts as a stabilizer for the economy during times of recession, the role of unions in this program is pivotal (Wandner and Stettner 2000). Worker's compensation Laws governing workers' compensation are primarily made at the state level (with the exception of federal longshoremen), but they generally form an insurance system in cases where a worker is injured or becomes ill at the workplace. The employer is liable in the system, regardless of fault, and in return they are protected from lawsuits and further liability. Once again, lack of information about eligibility and the necessary procedures for filing a claim forms the greatest obstacle to receipt of benefits. Fear of employer-imposed penalties and employer disinformation are important other factors weighed by workers deciding whether to act. As with unemployment insurance, unions provide information to workers through their representatives, and they often negotiate procedures to handle indemnity claims. Through grievance procedures and negotiated contracts, unions protect workers from employer retaliation and, furthermore, act to dispel the notion among workers that employer retaliation is commonplace (Hirsch et al. 1997). Hirsch et al. (1997) found that, after controlling for a number of demographic and occupational factors, union members are 60% more likely to file an indemnity claim than nonunion workers. Employers and the private insurance companies that sell worker's compensation insurance policies have mutual interests in denying claims to limit costs (Biddle 2001). According to Biddle, higher denial rates lead to lower claim rates. The robust finding of Hirsch et al. demonstrates that unions provide a needed counterbalance to this interest. Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) The Occupation Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSHA) provided the foundation for the Occupation Safety and Health Administration, which enforces safety and health standards at places of work. The administration's purpose is to limit work-related injury, illness, and death due to known unsafe working conditions. They currently have only 2,100 inspectors to monitor over seven million establishments. Enforcement of OSHA regulations presents an obvious challenge; OSHA implementation requires worker action to initiate complaints. In two studies of OSHA and unions in the manufacturing and construction industries (1991a and 1991b), Weil found unions greatly improve OSHA enforcement. In the manufacturing industry, for example, the probability that OSHA inspections would be initiated by worker complaints was as much as 45% higher in unionized workplaces than in nonunion ones. Unionized establishments were also as much as 15% more likely to be the focus of programmed or targeted inspections in the manufacturing industry. In addition, Weil found that in unionized settings workers were much more likely to exercise their "walkaround" rights (accompanying an OSHA inspector to point out potential violations), inspections lasted longer, and penalties for noncompliance were greater. In the construction industry, Weil estimated that unions raise the probability of OSHA inspections by 10%. In addition to the findings above, Weil notes that the union differential could be even larger if OSHA's resources were not so limited. He claims, "Implementation of OSHA seems highly dependent upon the presence of a union at the workplace" (Weil 1991a). Following the trend of declining unionization, OSHA claims have dropped from their peak in 1985 of over 71,500 and are currently at close to 37,500 (Siskind 2002; OSHA 2003). Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Passed in 1993, the FMLA grants workers 12 weeks of unpaid leave in a 12-month period to care for newborn or newly adopted children, or in case of a personal or family member's health condition. The leave taker is guaranteed the same or equivalent position upon return. One of the most striking characteristics of the act is that less than an estimated 60% of employees covered by the FMLA are not even aware that it exists. There is also widespread misunderstanding on the part of the employer about whom the act covers and when it applies. There is evidence that this leads employers to reject legally entitled leaves (Budd and Brey 2000). According to Budd and Brey (2000), union members were about 10% more likely to have heard of the FMLA and understand whether or not they were eligible. Union members were found to have significantly less anxiety about losing their job or suffering other employer-imposed penalties for taking leave. And although the authors did not find union membership significantly increases the likelihood that a worker would take leave, they did find that union members were far more likely to receive full pay for leave taken. The biggest obstacle to workers exercising their rights under the FMLA—besides the fact that the leave is unpaid rather than paid—is information, since only a very slim majority has even heard of the act. With the exception of a $100 fine for failing to post a notice, employers have little incentive to inform employees of their rights. Unions are one of the few institutions to create awareness about FMLA's existence and regulations. Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) This act, passed in 1938, had two main features: first, it established a federal minimum wage. Second, it established the 40-hour work week for hourly wage earners, with an overtime provision of time and a half the hourly wage for work done beyond 40 hours. Trejo (1991) examined the union effect on compliance of the latter part of the FLSA, finding that employer compliance with the overtime pay regulation rose sharply with the presence of a union. He hypothesizes that this result reflects the policing function of unions because unions often report violations to enforcement agencies. Summary: union impact on workplace protections The research evidence clearly shows that the labor protections enjoyed by the entire U.S. workforce can be attributed in large part to unions. The workplace laws and regulations, which unions helped to pass, constitute the majority of the labor and industrial relations policies of the United States. However, these laws in and of themselves are insufficient to change employer behavior and/or to regulate labor practices and policies. Research has shown convincingly that unions have played a significant role in enforcing these laws and ensuring that workers are protected and have access to benefits to which they are legally entitled. Unions make a substantial and measurable difference in the implementation of labor laws. Legislated labor protections are sometimes considered alternatives to collective bargaining in the workplace, but the fact of the matter is that a top-down strategy of legislating protections may not be influential unless there is also an effective voice and intermediary for workers at the workplace—unions. In all of the research surveyed, no institutional factor appears as capable as unions of acting in workers' interests (Weil 2003). Labor legislation and unionization are best thought of as complements, not substitutes. Conclusion This paper has presented evidence on some of the advantages that unionized workers enjoy as the result of union organization and collective bargaining: higher wages; more and better benefits; more effective utilization of social insurance programs; and more effective enforcement of legislated labor protections such as safety, health, and overtime regulations. Unions also set pay standards and practices that raise the wages of nonunionized workers in occupations and industries where there is a strong union presence. Collective bargaining fuels innovations in wages, benefits, and work practices that affect both unionized and nonunionized workers. However, this review does not paint a full picture of the role of unions in workers lives, as unions enable due process in the workplace and facilitate a strong worker voice in the broader community and in politics. Many observers have stated, correctly, that a strong labor movement is essential to a thriving democracy. Nor does this review address how unionism and collective bargaining affect individual firms and the economy more generally. Analyses of the union effect on firms and the economy have generally found unions to be a positive force, improving the performance of firms and contributing to economic growth (Freeman and Medoff 1984; Mishel and Voos 1992; Belman 1992; Belman and Block 2002; Stiglitz 2000; Freeman and Kleiner 1999; Hristus and Laroche 2003; with a dissenting view in Hirsch 1997). There is nothing in the extensive economic analysis of unions to suggest that there are economic costs that offset the positive union impact on the wages, benefits, and labor protections of unionized and nonunionized workers. Unions not only improve workers' benefits, they also contribute to due process and provide a democratic voice for workers at the workplace and in the larger society.

CLASS WARS, SICK SOCIETIES

2009-02-17T11:02:00.001Z

SOUTH AMERICAN REVOLUTION If the nature of a revolution can be established by the manner of its dress, then the one led by Hugo Chávez in Venezuela must rate as one of history’s more ambiguous upheavals. Chávez has had three standard outfits during his five-year presidency – baseball kit, military fatigues, Italian suit and silk tie – and he has generated an ideological froth to match. On returning from the Middle East, he proclaimed that his country should turn to Islam; when back from Cuba, his preferences turned to the rigours of communism. Like a compass surrounded by attractions, his heroes and sacred texts pull the president in as many different directions as there are forms of punishing the rich. “Where is this revolution going?” Chávez asked himself in an interview with Le Monde Diplomatique at the end of 2001, on the eve of the year that would see him ousted, reinstated, and confronted by a two-month general strike. “Well, like every revolution it’s going towards the transformation of political, social, economic and also moral structures.” For those wanting more specifics, he highlighted a recent protest by employers: “that was the first lockout [of employers] in Venezuelan history. Now, that shows we’re going in the right direction.” The travails of heroism Amid the global roster of bland, business-courting political leaders, such flagrantly provocative statements are the sort to have won Chávez a following on the international left. Selective glimpses at the recent history of his country would also suggest that the former paratrooper is rightfully seeking justice in a land of outrageous inequality. Consider, for example, the cabal which toppled him for two days in April 2002. One meeting just hours before the coup was held in the offices of the Venevisión television station, and featured Latin American media tycoon Gustavo Cisneros, employers’ federation chief Pedro Carmona, and hereditary oil magnates. Carmona then journeyed to the army headquarters, seized power, annulled the constitution, and suspended all elected officials – all to a sigh of approval from the White House. The romantic vision of Chávez would then no doubt proceed to tell of the tens of thousands of incensed shanty-town dwellers who descended on the capital, at great risk to themselves. “The top dogs are coming back, the old bunch of thieves,” they shouted; and Chávez, aided by a bout of infighting in the military, reassumed a mandate to last until 2006. Any reasonable judgment, based on the rhetoric and the personalities, would indeed opt for the corner of the people’s hero. But Venezuela is ample proof that the course of revolutionary government does not always follow its precepts, and can well betray them. Does it really serve the interests of the poor to enrage the middle and upper classes with forty-nine laws in the space of a year (2001), including ones designed to hand out land, stiffen “Bolivarian” school education and “democratise capital” in the banking sector, while also offending the mighty in Washington by likening the attack on Afghanistan to terrorism? On paper it may, but in the context of Venezuela, these were essential precursors to a year of civil breakdown, economic collapse and huge capital flight. The bombast of Hugo Chávez in the face of what he termed a “rancid oligarchy” did not so much empower the underprivileged as bring to the surface Venezuela’s latent class war. The current cost is a decline of 29% in GDP in the first three months of 2003, the bankruptcy of 15% of businesses, interest rates in the region of 50%, and unprecedented levels of civil paranoia and crime. Chavez may try as hard as he can to shift all the blame for these figures onto the shoulders of the “squalid” overlords, who in his eyes spent the 1970s sampling French cheese and Scotch whisky, but he is also responsible for committing the cardinal Latin America error of ignoring the economic balance of power. The same occurred to Alan García’s Aprista government in Peru during the second half of the 1980s. This pledged to pay in debt servicing no more than 10% of the value of its exports, only to find hyperinflation and the flowering of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla insurgency hastening its downfall. Fidel Castro’s Cuba, of course, is the epitome of beneficial action for the poor gone wrong. At present, some 700,000 Cubans out of a population of 11 million have been to university, only to graduate before a vista of minimal employment and enrichment. Venezuela, in Chavez’s Bolivarian imprint of revolutionary associations, a schooling boom and an intense dislike for business, is heading in precisely the same direction, with one principle consolation: while Cuba exports tobacco and sugar, Venezuela deals in oil. Venezuela: class war, sick society Yet seen through the prism of Venezuelan society, the reading of Hugo Chávez as self-destructive philanthropist is far too contrived. Such is the polarisation of opinion around Venezuela that blame for the country’s economic and civil implosion is attributed wholly either to Chávez or to the oligarchy (which, as if to emphasise the country’s singularity, includes the trade union movement). This marks a social divide that is astonishing in its production of blinkered hatred. The seam that has always run through Venezuela – separating anyone with formal employment from the 60-70% of the population clinging to semi-urban hillsides and scraping by – has now become an abyss, across which empathy and understanding rarely travel. Plead for neutrality, and you are sure to be hounded: a television reporter for one of the five private television stations, all of which openly despise Chávez, revealed that her efforts to give objective coverage of a street fight received short shrift from the producer. “Go on, say it was the chavistas who attacked with stones. Say it, or you’re fired.” The prospect of a referendum on the president’s rule, which is constitutionally permitted from 19 August onwards, is now the principal hope for the opposition, and will doubtless renew the bitter political contest. Thus, as much as the chavistas may fume and lambast their enemies, the alternative they represent is no more enlightened or accommodating. “I had a gold mine with 250 employees and we managed to extract 1,300 kilograms of gold,” recalls Héctor Mezones, who recently fled to Madrid to set up an exclusive restaurant. “But Chávez ordered a revision of the concessions, and that halted all activity. I wasn’t going to stay around to see how we were going to be ruined in a society where the proletariat is happy with having bread to eat, but doesn’t realise it has lived through a forty-year educational and cultural regression.” In these circumstances, which resemble the racially-tinged class cleavages of Allende’s Chile or Central America in the 1980s, Chávez’s haranguing and occasional persecution of the television bosses, the oil executives and his political opponents is understandable, if not laudable or wise. Should anyone question his mission, the president can easily point to his election in 1998 with 56% of the vote, and his success in no less than four referenda that followed to ratify a new constitution. These events together signalled fundamental landslide reactions to an unsustainable system of government and distribution of the social spoils. The medicine for such a sickened society was always going to be painful. Forty years for the locust From the Punto Fijo pact of 1958 which opened the way to a new constitution, to Hugo Chávez’s victory forty years later, Venezuela appeared to the outsider to be a relatively rich, stable two-party democracy. This appearance, however, shrouded a Hispanic hacienda tradition which treated the state as private property, accentuated by an oil boom fuelling over half the government’s revenues without any contribution from the public. Vast quantities of money were wasted, crony-run monopolies multiplied (in beer and canned food, for example), and the poor who flocked to the city fringes received just enough through the circuits of patronage to sustain them, without ever having a larger claim over the dollars that magically filled state coffers. This was a society shorn of democratic entitlement and responsibility, hinging on elections yet without a shared public life. Inevitably, it collapsed. In February 1989, following a steep decline in the world price of oil, President Carlos Andrés Pérez (prompted by the IMF) announced a 30% increase in bus prices: the poor were to pay for the absence of oil riches. Over the days of rioting, looting and police repression that followed, some 400 people were killed, constituting the bloodiest uprising in recent South American history. In February 1992, Hugo Chávez, a paratrooper and thereby a member of the sole institution that was open to all sectors of Venezuelan society, mounted his one and only coup. It failed; he nevertheless became a national hero. For those seeking vindication of Chávez’s regime, there is no better reference: while the so-called “Caracazo” riots illustrated the absolute exclusion of the marginalised poor from Venezuelan political life (their only options were violent), Chávez seemingly represents an effort to bind these people to the system, to channel their legitimate grievances. There is certainly evidence to support the claim. His Bolivarian circles and creation of local councils, as Dan Storey discusses in openDemocracy, appear to have inserted political practice into the heart of previously anarchic and combustible communities. He is, evidently, the president of the poor. Populism or patience? Yet placed against Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva in Brazil, or even Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, the demagogic populism, the buffoonery and love of outrage take much of the shine off Chávez. He is, in truth, a traditional Latin American populist, a man who has violent fringes, as shown by bombs in embassies, television stations and even the Organisation of American States (OAS) offices; peculiar allies, including China, Qatar and Saddam Hussein; and an interminable Sunday evening television show, Aló Presidente, a That’s Life spin-off where people’s problems are solved and the president vents his spleen. All government flows through him, a fact he excuses by arguing that his will and the real interests of the Venezuelan nation are one and the same passion, born from his 1992 coup: “the people even invented a prayer: ‘Our Chávez who art in prison, hallowed be thy name.’ How do you fight that? It’s messianic, yes. But not because I pushed for it.” Not unlike those shantytown rebels in 1989 who stole the best whisky and champagne from the boutiques of Caracas, Chávez seems to have partaken too much of the political culture that preceded him. While the international banks speak of “second-generation” institutional reforms in the continent, Chávez is the relic who goes to a EU conference in Spain and berates the massacres of the conquistadors. Lula, by contrast, comes from a background even more deprived than that of Chavez, yet assiduously courts foreign capital and manages the world stage with ease. He is just as determined to bring the poor into the social mainstream, but wishes it to happen through the rule of law, business creation, and some variant of European consumer capitalism. The terrific austerity now being imposed in Brazil is the exertion to be made before the “orchestra” is tuned up, and in his words, “the symphony can begin.” The comparison between Lula and Chávez does not flatter the Venezuelan leader – though the latter would certainly protest, with some justice, that civil society is much more mature in Brazil, and its elites far more perceptive. Indeed, Lula himself has been inclined to indulge Chavez rather than rebuke him, and (as well as welcoming the Cuban leader to Brazil) has turned an approving eye to the intensifying mutual aid between Fidel Castro and Venezuela – the sugar factories, health services and university places are contributed by Cuba, the oil by Venezuela. Both within Brazil and in forays to the richer nations, Lula has never failed to listen to the bankers and portray his policies in terms of the future profitability of business. In a Latin American perspective, however, the arrival in power of the Workers’ Party leader is also part of a continental shift in which a certain space for repositioning is perceptible. Washington’s hawkish US assistant secretary of state Otto Reich, who played some part in the April 2002 coup against Chávez, is no more. Chile and Mexico successfully resisted US pressure for a second Iraq resolution in the UN Security Council. And the renegade revolutionaries from Cuba and Venezuela, their economies in tatters, are once again on the guest list for major functions across the continent, which the two men enjoy enormously. One simple reason to explain Chavez’s embrace of the revolutionary left is that semi-tropical export economies tend to present a highly-circumscribed choice of leader: as one impoverished Venezuelan put it to a visiting reporter, “he’s an idiot, but he’s our idiot.” Another, more significant consideration is that both Chávez and Castro lie within the political spectrum of the fight for equity in hostile surroundings. They stand at the destructive extreme of levelling politics, yet Lula must be aware that the pole they represent is a useful and persuasive menace in his own coming battles with business, land and financial elites. Many of the goals espoused by the three leaders are after all similar. Where they differ is over the extent to which historical conditions and ideological dogma have driven each to see different group interests as essentially incompatible – and society as a zero-sum contest between rich and poor. The hold of an inclusive vision, which argues for mutual benefits between classes and ethnicities, has always been tenuous on the continent: the more defective the underlying political and social settlement, the more likely that economic orthodoxy and the democratic rule-book will be flouted.

GENEROUS SOCIALISM FOR THE RICH

2009-02-17T10:43:00.004Z

While the Poor are told to play the Free Market Game Those of us further to the left always had some difficulties with the notion, but George W. Bush's administration (and perhaps some of his acolytes nearer home) appear to have found a new approach: socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. In building a left polity without a basis in common ownership, a generation of Fabians and social democratic thinkers constructed a polity where the less well-off in society would be provided with a safety net - and indeed equality would be promoted, particularly through comprehensive education - while the richest could enjoy relatively laissez-faire pro-capitalist politics, their only cost being progressive taxation to fund the 'socialism' of the poor. Compared with much of the philosophy of the New Labour era, it was quite progressive, and it certainly isn't the purpose of the current article to criticise it. I was always sceptical that a single polity - the sum of the policies for rich, middling and poor - could really serve the interests of all three. At best it could serve the interests of two out of the three, and two contiguous groups. As such, I've always seen it as my business to try and design policies that serve the interests of those on moderate and low incomes, even if those policies run contrary to the interests (the immediate, material interests, at any rate) of the rich. But of course, all manner of states have intervened in all manner of economies, and just because we are used to the notion of state intervention as being part of the politics of the left, we must not ignore the potential of the state to intervene in the interests of the wealthy, even where the intervention may run contrary to the interests of those on moderate and low incomes. Of course, it may be the case that - in the interests of people of all manner of incomes, and across the world not just in the US - $700 billion (or more) will have to go to bail-out the gambling debts of the super-wealthy. It may be that that's what we have to do, because actually capitalism - even if you try and just reserve it for the rich - is inherently flawed, and is all-consuming. Our interests have - like it or not - become bound up with those of Wall Street and the City of London; and because governments in many countries have allowed the gamblers to have their fun (never bailing out those who truly lost when the losses consisted of the savings or pensions of people on moderate or low incomes) we have arrived at moment of emergency intervention. But this is also the moment of the test. Do we throw billions of dollars and pounds and euros at this tainted industry just to allow it to start again? For pinstriped gamblers to pocket billions in future boom years, and the rest of us to bail them out again when the next bust comes along? Can we afford that little bit of 'socialism' to keep the rich in business; the super-wealthy winning in boom and bust, while those on moderate and low incomes take the hit in both conditions too? After all, $700 billion dollars is an extraordinary amount of money; earlier debates about money in Congress this year have been about just how big the cuts in Medicare provision should be. John McCain - proud to have played his part in securing $700 billion dollars for bankers - has a set of policies that involve cutting Medicare further, getting rid of tax incentives for employer-paid health insurance... After all - ordinary people should be subject to the whims of the market. In the UK, we have closed down Remploy factories, while reducing the number of people eligible to claim a decent Disability Living Allowance amongst other 'welfare reforms' where we look after the pennies, while the pounds pour into the wealthiest people's back pockets and keep funding city bonuses. If it wasn't for the human cost of the nascent crisis, one could almost laugh that George W. Bush - that great ideologue of capitalism - should be presiding over such a great crisis of capital that he has had to occasionally take up the old cry of 'nationalise the banks!' But the important thing for us is to ensure - in the UK at least, where we have potential power over such decisions - that the interests of those on moderate and low incomes are kept at the forefront of all our decision-making, regulation and intervention. Underwriting the poison with tax money and public debt, while selling off the gold to another set of gamblers does not come under that heading. We also need to ensure that we rethink the stuctures of high finance - fundamentally and entirely - in the interests of those same members of society - even if that should run counter to the interests of the wealthiest. That is the lesson of the crisis, and it's a lesson we need to learn quickly and well.

MAKING OF THE NEW LATIN LEFT

2009-02-17T10:31:00.002Z

Latin American authoritarianism: the 19th century's post-independence strongmen (including capricious butchers such as Paraguay's Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia); the mid-20th century's military rulers, inspired by national-security doctrines and the demonisation of the left after the Cuban revolution; and - today - the "third wave" represented by Morales and Chávez. The former shunned democracy entirely, while the latter shelved altogether the need for popular consultation ("the ballots boxes are in safe keeping" proclaimed the Argentine junta of 1976); what marks the current generation (so the argument goes) is that it rules through the "tyranny of the majority", exploiting long pent-up grievances to overrun all state institutions and taint opposition with the stigma of being oligarchs, imperial lapdogs, and enemies of the poor. This story, wholeheartedly propounded by the US military's southern command (whose chief, General Bantz J Craddock, predicts a "backwater of violent, inward-looking states") is not without its truths. At the level of rhetoric, both Morales and Chávez do specialise in bombast and confrontation. The actions of their states tend to be sudden, top-down, and geared to mass approval: take the 1 May nationalisation of Bolivia's hydrocarbons, or Chávez's blizzard of forty-nine decrees in 2001 and his incessant military build-up. Inside the states, and despite differences of circumstance and history, new prerogatives of presidential power emerge. Some $15 billion, taken from "surplus" oil revenues and central bank reserves, are now under the control of Venezuela's development fund, Fonden - an organisation run by a president-appointed board, with decisions rubber-stamped by a parliament where all 167 seats are occupied by chavistas. "Others used them (presidential decrees) to put their hands in people's pockets," Kirchner recently explained of his own ruling habits in Argentina. "I use them to fill pensioners' pockets and protect people." As the various legs and arms of public power become occupied - first the executive and parliament, then the courts, the civil service, the armed and security forces, state-run companies, and finally the press and provinces (which not even Chávez has yet achieved) - the mística of power intensifies. The Venezuelan leader, according to his brilliant ex-guerrilla opponent Teodoro Petkoff, exerts a "magical-religious" thrall; López Obrador, though he will have to wait, is denounced for "messianic" tendencies; Morales received his ceremonial vestments of the Great Condor at Tiwanaku a day before his presidential sash. "There is a classic and well-known fear of freedom, an insidious and pernicious feeling," writes Chilean author Jorge Edwards, with urbane disillusion, of the continent's penchant for "Napoleon's imitators." A question of land The criticisms are valid, but in themselves they hardly amount to the dawn of leftwing tyranny. In all cases, barring Cuba, the opposition is alive and vociferous, the ballot secret, the press free, and the courts still function; there is definitely no sign that prison cells are receiving political inmates. Yet the sense of imminent institutional shutdown is undeniably strong. Middle and upper classes in Bolivia and Venezuela look to Havana with grave foreboding, uncertain what the much-vaunted Chávez-Morales-Castro "axis of good" might entail. They find swaggering populism tolerable, even normal: it is and always has been the default mode of the right across the region. But a state that extends its purported revolutionary mission into a country's most ingrained institution - private property - is quite another thing. The extent to which the fears of Latin America's wealthier social strata, the denunciations of encroaching dictatorship, and the attempts to reorder a nation's ownership structure are strapped together should never be underestimated. Time and again, the region's societies have tolerated far-reaching reform, only to snap into warring factions when the issue of land deeds is broached. The seed of Chile's coup in September 1973 can largely be found in fears of a property revolution that had in fact been initiated in the 1960s, under a reforming Christian Democratic government. And as a recent, unofficial biography of Chávez makes clear, the item in the waterfall of Bolivarian legislation in 2001 "that provoked the greatest agitation" concerned legal controls over land and agrarian development; Chávez termed it "hot stuff"' and said "I worked on it myself." The raw neurosis that the lexicon of land reform produces - the word "expropriation" has similar connotations to violent mugging in Latin America - stems from firm historical roots. Shaped by an invasive, colonial rule, the region's economies generated centuries of fine living for some, married to low-paid extraction and harvest for the rest. Ownership, in other words, bequeathed wealth and status; it defined social identity in a profoundly conservative fashion, sapping the continent of the less fecund north's capacity for market innovation, mobility, and industrial investment. When attempts are made to rewrite the underlying property structure, the margin for democratic compromise appears minimal: those who gain do so at the expense of someone else's loss. This is, more than anything, a zero-sum game. Bolivia is now living the early stages of this conflict. Some thirty-five million acres, say government officials, are to be distributed to 2.5 million people, or 28% of the population, by 2011; this in a country where, according to the Catholic church, 50,000 families own 90% of the land. "The historical enemies of the poor must accept this land revolution," declared Morales in June. According to his vice-president and strategic mastermind, Álvaro García Linera, the eventual goal is a three-tiered "Andean capitalism": modern industry (initially gas production), urban trade, and traditional farming. Already the countryside has witnessed shootouts and deaths. The strident opposition in the eastern Santa Cruz lowlands has spawned a protest network (Nación Camba). It boasts vigilante, racist tendencies and an agenda of halting land reform, as well as a civic leader, Germán Antelo, who excoriates the government for "authoritarian fascism", and for its "manuals of subversion written in foreign lands." It is no coincidence that the lion's share of the land destined for redistribution - on the basis of laws passed in 1953 and 1996, albeit to little effect - should lie in the fertile east. It may be predictable, but there is still something unsettling in the way Bolivia's great popular awakening, that of Morales's landslide election in December 2005, should have so soon produced a stand-off threatening the very foundations of democracy. "In this tug of war, democracy keeps going only as a precarious balance between demands for social change and the interests that resist it," explains Ana María Romero de Campero, who heads the Unir-Bolivia foundation, devoted to the unenviable task of pacifying the country. The conflicts, she says, are still building up, "exacerbated by one side, then another." Other countries in the left-leaning quadrant, where urban population densities are much higher, have not suffered the same extreme polarisation through agrarian reform. But the propertied still shiver with anxiety at the morning news: a tremendous row is brewing within chavista ranks - oxymoronic as that may seem to some - over decrees to expropriate ninety-five supposedly underused properties in Caracas, two of them golf courses. Luis D'Elía, former piquetero (picketer) leader in Argentina and now a government housing official, has likewise lobbied for a more radical treatment of land, particularly the tracts in hands of foreigners - starting with 300,000 hectares belonging to United States businessman Douglas Tompkins. In these countries, however, a rather different form of redistribution provides a greater cause for alarm. Violent crime is not government policy, but the terror it generates, and its sharp recent rise - Latin American accounted for 75% of all the world's kidnappings in 2003 - would seem to express in a diffuse way the abandonment felt by the wealthy, and the vengeance that society is preparing for them. Where governments should exert firm control, there now appear territories run by sub-states forged in prisons (as in Brazil's Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command / PCC), or armed gang networks camped out in the hearts of cities. It is not difficult to imagine the panic felt by the Portuguese business community in Venezuela when, for several weeks in 2006, a list of their names and addresses were sold first at street-stalls, before then being posted on the internet. All power to the informal A populist leftwing drift is neither novel nor particularly threatening: Brazil under Getulio Vargas, Argentina under Perón, Bolivia from 1952, Peru from 1968 - all provided less democratic and constitutional varieties of the very same phenomenon. But this new political climate is marked by Cuban guidance, institutional fragility, and a bellicose rhetoric of them-and-us; for many, it seems in word and deed to be heading to a democratic dead-end and an overarching state. Were Hugo Chávez to lose in December, would he really give up power? Radical intellectuals respond with a familiar, yet powerful argument. Drawing on the great theorists of Latin American revolution, the Cuban José Martí and the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, they stress the primacy of social rights, derived from the moral urgency of combating extreme poverty. Fidel Castro still draws on huge sympathy across the continent for this very reason; his government counterpoises its extraordinary aid of 2,600 medics to Pakistan after the earthquake in October 2005, its eye-surgery for 6 million poor people across the continent, with the export of war by Washington in the name of freedom. "Democracy is under threat in Latin America, but not in Bolivia and Venezuela," argues Atilio Borón, a prominent Argentine sociologist. "The great problems are to be found in countries where governments are failing to rule in line with the expectations of the electorate, causing a very serious corrosion of legitimacy." Were social welfare and the full quota of civic and political rights incompatible, then it might be right to choose the former. But from the developed west, this trade-off sounds suspect: surely a formula in which the two feature, as they did in post-1975 Spain, would be preferable. Surely political movements and parties can reach an accommodating pact to serve the common good while also blocking authoritarian takeovers. The blueprint for best-practice democracy, however, must at some stage face up to the domestic particularities of Latin America. Spain's parties of right and left struck a constitutional deal that has brought thirty years of growth and alternation in power. Colombia in 1957 and Venezuela in 1958 witnessed very similar left-right pacts, whose signatories pledged growth, civil rights and social justice - only for Colombia to be consumed by over four decades of fratricidal conflict, and Venezuela to seize up in 1998, victim of rampant corruption and a hobbling, hapless state. "We do not know what sort of country we want to be, nor how we want to be it, nor how we can be it," reads the confession of Ramón Escovar Salom, an interior minister in the last pre-Chávez government. Those political parties which might steer a moderate course towards reform, meanwhile, have vanished from sight in the countries that would most appear to need them. The new movements - the Bolivarian cause in Venezuela, Bolivia's MAS - rose in the twilight of party systems, staking out constituencies at extreme speed through a febrile grassroots and a national media presence. And in no way do they resemble the parties they superseded: locating stable membership, manifestos and conventions is a fruitless quest. MAS is a focal-point of dozens of different social sectors and radical causes, which it does not altogether control. Chávez, meanwhile, is at the pinnacle of a bewildering array of groups and neighbourhood committees, first engendered by his propaganda trips across Venezuela in a Toyota Samurai after his release from jail in 1994. If there is any glue in these huge and powerful movements, it is a certain defining social experience. These are the quintessential products of 1990s Latin America, where the state pulled back, poverty rose, mass media spread, and formal contractual employment withered. Indeed it is the people subsisting in black market employment, accounting for 47% of all the region's urban jobs in 2003 - rising to 66.7% in Bolivia, the highest rate on the continent - who are the bedrock of this political transformation. Apart from limited labour laws, their lives are virtually without a safety net - and 75% of Latin Americans are afraid they will lose their job. The state has done nothing for them. Their homes are built, not bought: a United Nations study in 2000 found that 50% of homes in Caracas were constructed unofficially. Their hopes of social advancement are virtually nil. Argentine author Tomás Eloy Martínez memorably reported the case of one man from Berazategui in Greater Buenos Aires, who encapsulates just such a struggle with shift work, penury and constraint: a factory hand who on losing his watch, and unable to pay for a new one, regularly gets up to walk to the bus station during the night so he can ask for the time, and thus not be late to start his job at 6am. It is no surprise that voters such as these demand sweeping change. Nor is it remarkable that coarse nationalism and primetime TV proclamations are the political response. Their plea - echoed in multiple Latinobarómetro surveys from across the continent - is for effective, accessible government. Their leaders' venom against the oligarchy or petrolatifundismo (oil and estate ownership) or the empire strikes a popular chord, and soothes high expectations. But this impatience and battle-readiness is leavened with far more pragmatic demands, complicating the prognosis for imminent authoritarianism. Ideology is fuzzy and volatile: having spent five years in jail for training a revolutionary militia in the 1990s, García Linera now appears to be Bolivia's chief pacifier of the opposition and foreign investors. There is certainly no systematic revolutionary plan, nor state structure able to pull one off, nor a cold-war power willing to sponsor such a transformation. Just as significantly, the popular social demands are material - for food, health and education. Any threat to the future provision of these goods would quickly sap the leaders of authority. Chávez, for instance, may have built up a massive war chest of discretionary funds, but focus-group work by the Hinterlaces agency in Caracas in 2004 noted just how willing his supporters in that year's referendum would be to change sides should he not deliver on his promises. Inside the regimes, crude and boisterous democracy is in fact the normal working practice. Frequent governmental chaos in Bolivia, particularly involving the nationalisation of gas fields, is a faithful reflection of the clamour of so many powerful social groups, with their front line in the shanty towns of El Alto. Even if this would seem to entail a tyranny by the poor majority and the construction of huge constituencies fed by political patronage, there are sounds reasons to expect that issues such as crime, economic stability and growth - on which a future opposition might thrive - will gain greater popular leverage. For just as free trade's creative destruction promises in the long-run to make rich workers out of the world's labouring poor, so these governments are hoping to turn the marginalised into an aspiring bourgeoisie, a boli-burguesía. Horizontal movements, driven by vocal material demands, are not harbingers of dictatorship. Extreme polarisation, however, has fostered a climate in which violent action, curbs on independent institutions, electoral boycotts and vigilante groups may flourish. It is easy to lament or condemn the clumsy aggression of a populist regime; but much harder to accept that it emerges from a process of political and governmental decomposition that has left millions to survive without support, and to give their votes to the promise of instant remedies. Wise diplomacy and the counsel of neighbouring moderate governments, especially once the Brazilian election campaign is over, should serve to allay many of these tensions. Yet all concerned, inside and outside, should remember that these new leaders are not dangerous and disposable puppets, but the products of history, pouring from groundswells in their societies. Cuba's Josè Martí said it well: Injértense en nuestras repúblicas el mundo; pero el tronco ha de ser de nuestras repúblicas ("Let the world form part of our republics; but the foundation has to be of our republics").

THE FIRST MANY MOVEMENTS GET OFF THE GROUND RUNNING

2009-02-17T08:31:00.006Z

As The Expected Prosecutions of NPP Functionaries Begin A new movement that purports to be fighting for the freedom of "politically persecuted" individuals has been formed. It is FREE GYIMA MOVEMENT. It main aim is to fight for the acquittal and freedom Mr.Charles Gyima the former Boss of the National Investment Bank who is currently in the custody of the National Bureau of Investigation BNI for causing Financial loss to the state. Even before this chap is hauled before a court and determined to be either guilty or innocent this group led by Egbert Fabille ,the Editor/Publisher are shaping up to dominate the media space to primarily accuse the NDC government of witch hunting. Based on the sleaze,greed,and corruption that has gone on over the last 8 years,it will not be surprising to see t his movenement as one of many yet to come. We may soon have the likes of FREE OSAFO MARFO MOVEMENT,FREE KOJO MPIANI MOVEMENT,FREE ANANE MOVEMENT,FREE OBETSEBI MOVEMENT or even FREE Kuffour MOVEMENT. Surely the wrongs the NPP did will not be quietly swept under the rug.

GHANA'S POLICY SPACE

2009-02-16T10:44:00.001Z

TRADE POLICY PRACTICE IN GHANA Economic partnership agreements’ or free trade areas are currently being nego-tiated between the European Union and the different sub-regions of the ACP group, including ECOWAS. EPA/FTAs will have considerable consequences for domestic economies in the sub-region and therefore will be a critical element in defining the direction of the region's economic development in the next decade or two. While the ECOWAS governments and the European Commission are still agreeing the road map for the negotiations, EPAs have not been discussed fully with local stakeholders. This first workshop, organised by TWN-Africa and GAWU was a first test to measure the concerns and reactions of stakeholders – particularly producers - to this latest addition to an ‘alphabet soup’ of initiatives ostensibly aimed at reversing Africa’s economic decline. The EPA negotiations are taking place while the Government of Ghana is formulating a national trade policy. Through a series of contributions and debates, local actors from agriculture, industry, services and financial sectors presented a list of concerns and issues that should inform both government’s position in EPA negotiations as well as the content of the national trade policy. Beyond getting the right set of policies, changes in many practices on the part of the authorities are required as well. Who calls the shots? An overriding concern of national stakeholders is the excessive influence that external partners have over national policy making. While it is true that the government depends extensively on international do-nors for public financing, it was observed that development partners are pro-tecting their national interests primarily, and therefore their policy prescriptions are biased towards providing opportunities for their own multinationals and promoting their economies. Consequently, the policies that they advocate have not tended to be primarily in the interests of the local economy and its producers. It is only national actors that can identify what the national interests are. It is understood that government is constantly under pressure to liberalise and open the economy to foreign goods, services and investors. But the focus on the external had become excessive – to the detriment of local actors. While lib-eralisation may ensure cheaper imports for consumers (eg. rice, poultry), the benefits are limited to just that – lower prices. Encouraging local production, whether for export or for domestic consumption has multiplier effects that cre-ate jobs, support the growth of new sectors, contribute to social welfare as well as public finances. Conversely, when an economic sector collapses, the consequences are widespread and go well beyond the sector which is directly affected. Left by the wayside … is agriculture passé? Agriculture is the largest eco-nomic sector, but the government has not drafted an agricultural policy which would work in concert with the trade policy. It has however adopted a posture – which is that of opening up the sector to imports. The problem for the Ghanaian agricultural sector is that the playing field is not level, particularly because so many agricultural imports entering the market enjoy subsidies. Obviously our hopes of influencing change in global trade rules to tip the scales in favour of Ghana’s producers is slim, but we can find ways to work around the rules through well thought domestic policies so that the agriculture sector can thrive. A balance needs to be struck between the export driven model and the import substitution model. In the rice sector for example, there has been a loss in the domestic market of about 150 million, but at the same time, export earnings are stagnant at some 30 million. We have to question the rationale of giving up this sector if we are not able to see the quid pro quo. The poultry issue clearly begs the question to what extent is government in control of policy making and how committed is it to the local farming sector? – Adhering to WTO, World Bank and IMF policies is a questionable path if the end result is the death of the agricultural sector as a result of free-for-all imports. The emphasis on exports may make sense on paper, but it may be much more beneficial for us to focus on domestic and regional markets, rather than international markets only. Connecting the dots in export promotion policies: In countries such as South East Asia which have experienced an economic boom, companies had built their export success on the back of successes on their domestic markets. The companies that were most likely to succeed in exports were those that per-formed well in their domestic markets. National policies that are geared at strengthening the domestic producers in domestic markets will be the launch pad for growth in the export sector. Import substitution policies – as a path to industrialisation - has been aban-doned in favour of the search for foreign direct investment. Such investment has not been forthcoming. Relatively speaking FDI inflows have been inade-quate and concentrated mainly in the extractive sector. Therefore the policy of deregulating and liberalising had resulted in more consequences than benefits. The bias towards attracting FDI as one of the planks for economic growth has left local economic operators marginalized and overlooked in public policy. The support required from the state – which companies in other countries have been able to rely on – has not been forthcoming. Many of the areas that need to be addressed to make local companies competitive in a have been neglected. In fact, it is time that some survey on the impact of the policies of the last two decades on the local business sector was conducted. Local stakeholders also stated repeatedly that the issue of competitiveness vis-à-vis foreign imports had been grossly misrepresented. When it comes to com-petitiveness both in terms of price and in terms of quality, it is not clear cut that local products are automatically inferior, as tends to be the stereotype. Similarly the price differences were frequently the result of export and other subsidies that industrialised countries are able to provide their producers. Industrialised countries are able to subsidize agriculture as a result of the growth of other sectors, particularly manufacturing. Therefore the lack of active policies to support the manufacturing sector has an impact on the extent to which government is able to support agricultural producers. In parallel, the lack of support for the agricultural sector is resulting in increased poverty since this is the sector where the majority of the population gain their livelihoods. Manufacturing – how serious are we? Prices of raw materials world-wide are falling, which provides an opportunities for boosting manufacturing. How-ever much the word is disliked by donors, protecting infant industries is a ‘pas-sage obligatoire’ – an unavoidable step – in building manufacturing capacity. Rather than enjoy ‘domestic preference’ local suppliers face reverse discrimina-tion. A local manufacturer bidding for a government contract still has to pay duty on raw material inputs. Foreign suppliers are able to gain duty free access to markets, particularly where the contracts are part of foreign aid projects, which is the case in a large number of public contracts. Public procurement is one of the largest markets, but with the new government procurement bill, the state no longer has the option to support local manufacturers through public contracts. The problem with removing ‘domestic preference’ provisions in the procurement bill is that in manufacturing as in other sectors, competitiveness can only be built through practice – through learning by doing. Many industries start by producing low quality products but are able to transform their industries into manufacturers of high quality goods. For example, Ghana’s export drive in the region has been based on the plastics industry built over the years. ‘Passive protectionism’ should be distinguished from ‘active protectionism.’ In the for-mer, governments simply protected and ‘sat back’, expecting that the rest would follow. In the latter, protectionism is part of a strategy to help strengthen local manufacturing in the knowledge that trade barriers will come down and they will have to compete. Such a long term strategy seems to be lacking. Low quality imports disadvantage local producers that have a competitive ad-vantage in quality. Worse still, they affect consumer health and safety. Liberal-ising markets, without equipping regulatory institutions, such as the Ghana Standards Board is disadvantaging the country in both ways. The private sector would be prepared to support the effort to strengthen these institutions as a way of ensuring that low quality imports are not put on the Ghanaian market. Tapping potential to meet local investment requirements locally: On the subject of investment – which is needed to finance production - the poten-tial on the local market has also been overlooked in favour of attracting foreign investment which is declining. Over the past 7 years $507 million had entered the country as FDI and the figure is declining. Just 5 million Ghanaians saving 1 million cedis a year could surpass that amount. The problem was not the lack of money locally to finance investment, but a lack of creativity in finding different ways to mobilise local resources, create more savings and utilise this for in-vestment. The challenges for local resource mobilisation are a problem of policy, orienta-tion as well as institutional readiness to be more innovative. Where attempts had been made, the financial services sector had proved that it could be done. It was up to government to ensure a regulatory environment that builds the confidence of citizens to invest their savings in local production. Mainstream banking has tended to be far too conservative and unable to adopt strategies to mobilise resources that take account of the reality of the Ghanaian economy. Eyeing the services sector – the need for caution: Services are the fastest growing economic sector world wide. Services liberalisation – including of public utilities is now a heavy focus of attention in WTO negotiations. Within the WTO, countries have to indicate their intention to liberalise services sectors and may also make requests of other countries to liberalise sectors which are of interest to them. Ghana had made a number of commitments to liberalise services, and has to consider a number of requests. The Ghanaian government has also liberalised some services sectors through domestic legislation. In the EPA negotiations, the EU is demanding that services liberalisation be part of the trade agreement with ECOWAS. Decisions to liberalise sectors or otherwise had significant implications for local service providers. There is a need to review the experience of services liberali-sation to date, as in some cases the results have been fairly chaotic, particularly given the inability to monitor and regulate the activities of services operators. The results of reform of different sectors had to be assessed before commit-ments could be made at the multilateral level (WTO, EPAs etc). In particular it was stressed that decisions on liberalisation should be based on a pragmatic vision for the sector in the context of overall social and development policies, and after an objective assessment of strengths and weaknesses of the local sectors to supply such sectors. In some services areas such as cargo handling, Ghanaian companies have de-veloped expertise and are well established. Cargo handling is a valuable earner of foreign currency for the country and so considerations to open up to external operators has to be viewed in that light. Different sectors have to make their views known to clarify the direction in which services can be liberalised or oth-erwise. Meeting the challenges of the expanding fisheries industry: Though it seems obvious that policies should be chosen in the light of the national social and development policies, the full development potential of the country is lost due to the lack of comprehensive and mutually reinforcing set of policies focus-sed primarily on building local production capacity. The fisheries sector, is one of the most important non-traditional exports. However, the challenges for de-veloping a sustainable fisheries industry are many. The problem of depletion of fish resources and degradation of the coastline, combine with a list of other is-sues that require attention from policy makers. Commercial fishing relies heavily on expatriate fishing crews and not enough has been done to upgrade Ghana-ians to do these jobs. Where pricing is concerned, there is a problem of a mo-nopoly, so that it is more profitable to sell fish in neighbouring countries, in-stead of to the quasi-sole buyer in the country. Inland and artisanal fisheries sectors should also be supported and developed. The rise in illegal fishing is another matter for concern. There is an institutional vacuum because the Fish-eries Commission has not been set up. Perhaps because of the lack of a statu-tory body to oversee the industry, these problems persist in spite of numerous representations made to government to address problems. However, over and above the national constraints the fisheries sector is in diffi-culty because it has benefited from special preferences to EU markets. Now that the EU has been providing similar trade preferences to other developing regions, the position of the sector in leading the drive in non-traditional exports was being compromised, particularly when measures are taken without warning. This means that in the EPA negotiations, the Ghanaian government should try to secure a predictable margin of trade preferences over a predictable timeframe before they are phased out. Outreach efforts needed for micro operators: It is critical that policy dis-cussions are accompanied by an outreach programme that enables all economic actors to make their inputs. There are many that operate on the micro-level who never get a chance to contribute to policy. Traders are an essential part of the economy, and yet they had very little opportunity to shape policy making. Equally, not enough trouble is taken to inform them of new policies. In conse-quence, traders are left to survive by their wits, and in turn feel little obligation to respect new policies. Often traders and producers are pitted against each other, and yet this conflict of interest could be resolved by designing a policy framework that ensures that they are complementary rather than oppositional. Commerce has in fact been relegated to the informal sector – as the place for people who could not find jobs and yet the market queens are a central part of our trade policy. In the public sector, traders are immediately perceived as criminals so that they are blocked rather than facilitated by the authorities. It would be desirable for traders to be able to graduate into production – but it is impossible for them to generate the necessary capital because of requirements from banks to produce collateral. All in all, the preliminary documents presented by the Ministry of Trade as the basis for formulating the national trade policy were welcomed as useful, par-ticularly as they provided relevant data and information to enable stakeholders to assess options. The fear was that recommendations from local stakeholders that did not get the nod from donors would not be accepted. Secondly, there were many problems of administrative inefficiency and corruption that needed to addressed. Finally it was stressed that without looking at some fundamental problems – such as electricity supply – there was never any hope for the coun-try to become competitive. Electricity privatisation had been undertaken and yet problems still persisted. Economic Partnership Agreements – where do we go from here? As a result of all these difficulties and challenges, local operators were fairly sceptical about the ability of Economic Partnership Agreements to bring benefits to the country. Firstly the agenda is that of the EU: no-one in the country had asked for EPAs. However the initiative is on the table, and the success of EPAs de-pends largely on the kind of agreement that the governments are able to nego-tiate. The outlook for concluding a successful agreement is grim. To start with, the EU’s negotiating directives demonstrates that it is more clear about its de-mands of ACP countries, and much less committal when it comes to its own ob-ligations. Such nebulous language is not acceptable. While there are losses and gains in any liberalisation exercise, the country has to be assured of net gains. Furthermore, tariff reduction needed to be accom-panied by measures to cushion the costs – particularly training people to work in other sectors. Just the literacy rate now estimated now at less than 50% in-dicates the level of the challenge to deal with the human resource challenges. The data needed to undertake an adequate cost-benefit analysis of EPAs was not sufficient to negotiate competently. It was pointed out that impact assess-ments that had been conducted had not been satisfactory, and in fact there had not been any training of local capacity in impact assessments which was an ex-tremely difficult discipline. Some institutions such as UNCTAD had developed tools to assist countries to conduct such assessments, but the training in these tools still needed to be undertaken. There is heavy reliance on external consult-ants to do such work. The quality of their work is not guaranteed. Furthermore, since they are commissioned by donors most frequently, their terms of refer-ence do not prioritise the needs of the country. Building local capacity in the public sector to service these needs is further hampered by the caps on public spending and hiring that donors insist on. These practical questions make it dif-ficult to negotiate successfully in the timelines that are given. Already the negotiations have hit a stumbling block in ECOWAS because the road map does not clearly spell out that the EU is prepared to pledge additional financing to help bear the costs of EPA-FTA liberalisation. The European trade commission has stated that it only has a mandate to negotiate trade issues not financial packages. ECOWAS on the other hand is insistent that additional fi-nancing is the only way to make EPAs meaningful to support programmes to enhance the competitiveness, compensate for tax revenues, and deal with ‘ad-justment costs’ of economic sectors that will be negatively affected by liberali-sation. Therefore with so many challenges and questionable benefits, how should Ghana deal with the EPA negotiations? Should we negotiate EPAs or not? For all intents and purposes, the governments have already committed to negotiations and therefore it was not possible to backtrack. Some organisations are clearly against an arrangement of reciprocal trade with the EU particularly given that the coverage area will be between 75% and 90% of all trade between the two. Others feel that there is no point in avoiding negotiations; it is better to deal with the difficulties and ensure that the set up negotiated maximises potential advantages and minimises the costs. However a consensus emerged that the timelines are too short for the country to undertake meaningful negotiations, and there is a need to slow the process down, particularly to make informed decisions about the positions that the country should take. The debate on EPAs needs to be a public debate involving all stakeholders. It was important to prevent a situation where government is under pressure to sign an agreement that will be to the detriment to the national economy. For this to happen, different sectors have to come together and engage with the government so that it is moving forward with a mandate that reflects the con-sensus of the various national stakeholders, small and big.

"EX-GREEDY' CAUASES PUBLIC ANGER

2009-02-16T10:16:00.004Z

AS MPs Threaten the Executive Now Ghanaian know the trues colors of majority of our politicians.A bunch of corrupt greedy ,selfish and insensitive group who pretend to care about the people who put them in power. President Mills last week revised the Ex-gratia (Ex-greedy as i call it) payment that was written by the disgraced former adviser to Ex president Kuffour. This did not go down well with both the former and current Parliamentarians and government official who will benefit from it and a lot has been threaten since. Led by the chief stomach politician, Freddie Blay ,former deputy speaker and MP in the last parliament these group of beneficiaries have threaten to institute a legal action against the President for what they consider as an unjust and unconstitutional action by the president. The current parliamentarians especially those in the NPP opposition have either publicly condemned the downward revision or or quietly supported and given moral support behind the scenes. the NPP with the notable exception of P.C. Appiah Ofori are also threatening to cause problems for the the executive thorough "constitutional blackmail. (Un)Surprisingly some members of the ruling NDC are said to be angry about the action of their president are grumbling and wishing for a reversal of the decision. These insensitive politician are impervious to the angry public outcry against their excesses. The public mood is that of anger and some members of the the suffering Ghanaian populace are so disillusioned they have threatened not to vote again since all the politicians from both sides are the same.

RICH PEOPLES EXCESSES CAUSING THE POOR

2009-02-16T09:10:00.004Z

In the gilded age (less than 2 years ago)the rich had it so good that their excesses became a constant feature our our times. We became so used to it in some few years it became normal.Champagne flowed, private jets flew around, huge fuel guzzling SUVs were driven around and a lot of money was earned and burned by the 2% of the world population who were part of the super rich and controlled over 90% of the worlds resources.The gap between the rich and the poor widened so much that for the first time in human history more people had more money than ever before whilst at the same time more people than ever were classified as poor. Those at the fringes of the global economy actual experienced a fall in their incomes and resources and this pushed more people into poverty. It was not only in developing countries where this happened but also in the rich economies. The US led the way with the shrinking of the middle class with a inexplicable situation where at the time the richest section of the society was burgeoning , the number of people classified as poor increased about 40%. When the "masters of the universe" were devising planning and executing their financial engineering schemes it actually affected the poorest of the poor an when the crash came the poor are the first and worst sufferers. The World Bank warned last week that up to 53 million more people around the world could fall into poverty in 2009 as a result of the global economic slump, and up to 400,000 more children could die each year as a result of rising infant mortality. The statistics highlight the worldwide character of the social catastrophe being caused by the deepening crisis. The bank's new estimates for 2009 suggest that lower economic growth rates will force 53 million more people to exist on less than $2 a day than was expected prior to the downturn. This is on top of the 130-155 million people pushed into poverty in 2008 because of soaring food and fuel prices. The bank's extremely low benchmark for poverty—$2 a day—suggests that its figures vastly underestimate the actual number of people around the world who are barely able to feed, clothe and house themselves. Preliminary estimates for 2009 to 2015 forecast that an average 200,000 to 400,000 more children a year, a total of 1.4 to 2.8 million over the six-year period, may die if the crisis persists. In addition, millions of people already living in poverty "will be pushed further below the poverty line," according to the World Bank policy note,"The Global Economic Crisis: Assessing Vulnerability with a Poverty Lens." The note states: "Almost all developed and developing countries are suffering from the global economic crisis. While developed countries are experiencing some of the sharpest contractions, households in developing countries are much more vulnerable and likely to experience acute negative consequences in the short- and long-term." Almost 40 percent of 107 developing countries are "highly exposed" to the poverty and hardship effects of the crisis and the remainder are "moderately exposed," according to the report. The bank warns that three quarters of these countries will be unable to raise funds domestically or internationally to finance job-creation, the delivery of basic infrastructure and essential services—including health, education and core public administration—and safety net programs for the vulnerable. The statistics provide only a pale outline of the impoverishment, malnutrition and misery caused by the global recession. These outcomes are an indictment of the anarchy of the private profit system. First, the speculative escalation of food and fuel prices of 2007-08 threw up to 155 million people into poverty; and now the financial crash is threatening many millions more. These forecasts make a mockery of the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals, which set targets to overcome poverty by 2015. The World Bank released its forecast to coincide with the Group of Seven (G7) summit of finance ministers and central bank governors in Rome last Friday and Saturday. Anti-poverty organisations from the UN Millennium Campaign joined the bank in lobbying for the establishment of a "Vulnerability Fund" in which each developed country would devote 0.7 percent of its stimulus package to aid impoverished "developing" countries. Even this utterly inadequate proposal received short shrift from the G7 ministers. In their final communiqué, a single one-sentence reference to poorer economies said: "The G7 also stresses the need to support emerging and developing countries' access to credit and trade financing and resume private capital flows, and is committed to explore urgently ways, including through multilateral development banks, to enhance this support." In other words, the plight of hundreds of millions of destitute people must be left in the hands of the same financial system and "private capital flows" that have broken down, producing the worst global collapse since the 1930s. The Rome summit proved incapable of offering any new measures to stem the rapidly deteriorating global situation. As the meeting gathered, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) warned that worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit 50 million by the end of 2009. The ILO expressed concern that "social tensions may begin to arise." The slowdown has already claimed 3.6 million American jobs. While the number of jobs in the US has been falling since the end of 2007, the pace of layoffs in Europe, Asia and the poorest countries has now caught up, underscoring the global character of the crisis engulfing capitalism. Unemployment in Britain is expected to rise to 9.5 percent by the middle of 2010, from 6.3 percent now, according to Peter Dixon, an economist with Commerzbank in London, and Germany's jobless rate could rise to 10.5 percent from 7.8 percent. More than 20 million Chinese internal migrant workers have already been thrown out of work, and in India, another former boom economy, about 500,000 people lost jobs between October and December 2008, according to one recent analysis. "This is the worst we've had since 1929," Laurent Wauquiez, France's employment minister said in comments cited by the New York Times. "The thing that is new is that it is global, and we are always talking about that. It is in every country, and it makes the whole difference." The G7 ministers were confronted by news of a record gross domestic product (GDP) fall across the Eurozone—1.5 percent in the December quarter—and warnings by economists that Japan, the world's second largest economy, is contracting at an annualised rate of more than 10 percent. However, the summit simply reiterated calls for further stimulus and bank bailout packages of the kind that have already failed to halt the recession. Despite the global dimension of the economic and social problems, the meeting could barely paper over the mounting tensions between the major powers and the growth of protectionism. The final communiqué merely restated a perfunctory commitment toward "avoiding protectionist measures," even though a rash of such measures has occurred since the G7 ministers last met in October. On the eve of the summit, the US Congress adopted President Barack Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package with a "buy American" clause that requires the use of American steel in infrastructure-building projects. In France last week, President Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to supply low-interest loans of 3 billion euros, or $3.86 billion, each to PSA Peugeot Citroën and Renault in exchange for an agreement not to lay off French workers, which means that Eastern European plants will bear the brunt of planned cutbacks. Last month in Britain, unions organised strikes and protests against the employment of construction workers from Italy and Portugal, invoking Prime Minister Gordon Brown's earlier promise of "British jobs for British workers." These are not isolated developments. Most of the stimulus and financial bailout packages adopted since last October contain measures designed to rescue the national economy, banks and industrial sectors, directly or indirectly at the expense of those of other countries. Economists have noted the summit's failure to stem protectionism. "The G7 statement ticks all the right boxes, but as expected does not go beyond generic statements of principle and commitments that we have heard before," Marco Annunziata, the chief economist in London for UniCredit, Italy's largest bank, told Canada's Globe and Mail. Despite the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, all the national-based rescue packages have been unable to prevent the rapid growth of unemployment. None can resolve the global crisis because they are all based on protecting and upholding the interests of the financial and corporate elites in each country. While official lip service is paid to coordinated action and to avoiding protectionism, the world is once again witnessing a rise of "beggar-thy-neighbour" responses of the kind that dominated in the 1930s, culminating in the Second World War. As in Britain, France and the US, the trade unions are at the forefront of the nationalist response, which serves only to divide the international working class along national lines and divert working people from the actual source of the galloping joblessness and social misery—the private profit system itself. Rising unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to explosive protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to widespread strikes in Italy and France. But without a clear alternative political perspective there is a danger that these upheavals will be contained and trapped within a national framework. The precipitous worsening of global poverty and unemployment and the plunge into a new period of trade wars and military conflagrations can be halted in only one way. It requires a conscious international struggle by the working class on the basis of a socialist program to overturn the capitalist order and build a new world economy based on human and social need, not corporate and private wealth accumulation.

GHANA FROM THE INSIDE

2009-02-16T08:58:00.001Z

MY Perspectives from the Real Ghana as i traveled extensively in Central Region This will be the first of many blogs I will be entering while I will be on the field. Well if u are lost ; I am conducting a monitoring and evaluation as a member of a team engaged by the Ghana statistical services (GSS) together with the institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) to conduct a baseline survey of districts that will benefit from the Millennium Challenge Account . After a difficult and mostly disorganized training program preceding a waiting period of about a month we finally set of at 1:28pm from Accra on 31 March 2008 towards Winneba in the Central Region. We arrived at Winneba around 4pm. After a meeting with the District Coordinating Director who seemed preoccupied with other things he directed us to The Army Guest House to arrange for lodging. Unfortunately for us we were told the place was fully booked for weeks. We went round a couple of hotels looking for accommodation and it became apparent that the District has a very bad record in paying its bills. For this reason no hotel was willing to give us accommodation without upfront payment. We finally got an average looking guest house where we were paired two in a room. The lady among us was given a room on her own (for obvious reasons). On the first day 2 of the team members had not fully joined us. One of them lived in the region where we were working, so he chose to commute to the survey base for the first couple of days. The other called and arranged to join us on the second day. On the second day we earnestly proceeded to start preliminary work. With the assistance of the Resident District Statistician we went ahead and identified all the Enumeration Areas (EA) that contained our respondents as well as the selected households .Winneba contained 8 being a sizeable town. This exercise proved to be quiet challenging given the nature of planning and address system in the town. During the evening the hotel manager told us that the district authorities had only arranged for only 5 days of stay we were expected to check out on the 5th day. After some long enquiries we found the identity of the various assembly members for the respective electoral areas. The assemblymen are important for 2 reasons • As part of due process and protocol they are the point of reference for all the work in the chosen community or EA. • Thety are the main respondents to the community questionnaires. On the 3rd day the two group members who had not joined us turned up; compounding our already precarious accommodation problems. Work started promptly around 7:00am. The various interviewers were sent to their respective EAs to familiarize themselves with their respondents and possibly complete the 1st cycle for the chosen 5 respondents. Meanwhile myself together with the supervisor and the driver proceeded to find accommodation. First we decided to opt for free accommodation with the assistance of the assemblymen .Being the "real men and women on the ground” we had strong conviction they will be in a better place to help. We were even pleased to hear that the assembly member for electoral area who happened to be the presiding member for the Awutu-Effutu-Senya Districts was willing to help us.The Hon Alexander Markin (who seemed ubiquitous with his highly visible billboards erected everywhere there was space in town) we were told was currently in Accra and that he will be in winneba that very evening . We were given the impression that he will assist us as soon as he gets to know about us and our mission . We acquired his contact details and promptly got in touch with him. He promised to "sort us out" as soon as he got into town.We later gathered that the presiding member was coming to oversee the conduct of a second round of elections for the confirmation of of the New Municipal Chief Executive for the newly created municipality of Winneba .(The Ewutu-Effutu -Senya district had been split into 2 and the results left Winneba as a municipality ) Apparently the man nominated by th President of the Republic had failed to get enough votes needed for him to be confirmed.The grassroots people alleged that the new MCE was arrogant even though most of them do not question his ability to perform. This necessity the re-election . We finally saw the presiding member only for a brief moment and all our hope was dashed when he shrugged us off. 15 May Following our earlierConducted protocols at Senya - Beraku and Awutu Bereku we went ahead to meet with the various community leaders including Assemblymen and Chiefs. We first stopped at Senya the hometown of the late former Vice President Kow Nkensen Arkaa. It is a mainly fishing community with an estimated population of about 18,000.The town is a semi-urban area with paved roads police station ,post office,a secondary school etc.A colonial fort and a huge mansion on the seashore are the main prominent structure in the town. We met the King of the town,a towering bulky man who has dignity written in his demeanor.He revealed that he is the Presiding Member for the newly created Awutu -Senya district .He was very welcoming and seemed eager to assist.He assured us he together with his assemblymen and unit committee members will secure accommodation for the interviewers who will stay in the community and facilitate the work. 16th May We dropped the team members off at their various stations :Alex at Aberful,Rashid at Bontrase ,Awotwe at Senya - Beraku and Josephine at Awutu Bereku. On Monday 19th May we visited a 72 year old feisty woman in the Winneba township to look for accommodation .The interesting aspect of the meeting was how from nowhere she managed to bring the Chieftancy issue that had dogged the town for years into the conversation. The level of her knowledge and passion suggested she was an interested party. 5/22/08 I have seen deprived schools in my lifetime but nothing prepared me for the absolutely shocking condition of the Awutu -Bereku AME Zion Primary and JHS.The school is housed in a flimsy wooden structure ,without a concrete floor ,window, doors or p 5/23/08 We took our GPS reading and school questionnaire from the AME Zion J.H.S. The condition of the school is simply abject. Situated in a flood- prone zone ,it sorrounded by a lagoon and stinks of rotten bog. The head gave a sorrowful rendition of the myriad problems that the school faces including the fact that classes have to be ended whenever clouds gather and rain threatens. He also complained about the working condition of teachers in general and how pupils who passed through the school go on to earn certificates as community health nurses and get paid 2 to 3 times more than himself.He remostrated on how the gap in salary of teachers and nurses which used to be at par has suddenly widened over last decade .

Science, religion and society

2009-02-14T16:47:00.000Z

It was refreshing to see the publication of Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion. It is not every day that one of the premier evolutionary biologists in the world publishes a text dedicated to the defense of atheism. Dawkins has done us a service, if only in making more acceptable the general proposition that religion and science are at odds with each other, and that it is science that should win out. The God Delusion has received an enthusiastic response from the public, including in the United States, generally considered the most religious of all industrialized countries. Dawkins book has so far spent 24 weeks in New York Times bestseller top 15 for nonfiction. During a book tour in the US last year, Dawkins drew large and sympathetic crowds, including at some states (such as Kansas), more often associated with religious fundamentalism. Some of the interest generated by Dawkins’s book is no doubt due to the author, whose books, including The Selfish Gene, have become standard texts in evolutionary biology. Whether or not one agrees with everything he says about the theory of evolution, it is certainly true that Dawkins is a gifted writer with a capacity to explain complicated issues in direct and clear language. However, there is more involved than this. There is a hunger for alternative perspectives, for views that challenge supposedly universally accepted propositions. There is a latent and widespread oppositional sentiment, and Dawkins’s book appeals to a deep hostility to the religious fundamentalism and backwardness that increasingly characterize governments in Britain, the US and internationally. Against the “appeasement” of religion There are certain severe limitations to Dawkins’s presentation of religion, which will be discussed below. However, perhaps most laudatory in the book is its willingness to challenge not only religious orthodoxy of various stripes, but also those within the scientific community who insist upon attempting to reconcile religion and science. The perspective of these thinkers (who Dawkins dubs the “Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists”) is that science can best be defended from fundamentalists (such as those who want to ban evolution from public school curricula) by accommodating non-fundamentalist strands of religion. This is done, according to these thinkers, by insisting that religion and science need not be in conflict, that perhaps they are complementary, or at least address different questions. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould has been closely associated with this perspective, arguing that religion and science occupy what he called “non-overlapping magisteria,” using a verbose term to cloak an extremely superficial idea. “To cite old clichés,” Gould once wrote, as quoted by Dawkins, “science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, and religion how to go to heaven.” Dawkins gives the adequate reply: “This sounds terrific—right up until you give it a moment’s thought.” One of Dawkins central claims is, “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice—or not yet—a decided one. So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes of the faithful.” In other words, if God exists and is anything more than a vacuous concept, he/she/it must have some effect on the world. This, certainly, is the belief of most religiously-minded people, who believe that God intervenes in the world, performs miracles, answers prayers, etc. Dawkins cites one experiment finding that patients who receive prayers don’t actually do better than patients who don’t receive them. This may seem a somewhat silly experiment (which was actually performed by supporters of religion) but it does illustrate the basic point—if religious phenomena exist, they can be tested scientifically. While this is an important observation, there is something missing in Dawkins’s presentation of science and religion. He treats the “God hypothesis” as basically equivalent to the claim, for example, that a teapot is in orbit around Mars (a famous proposition given by Bertrand Russell, who pointed out that though he may not technically know that such a teapot does not exist, he is not obliged to be agnostic about it). His ultimate justification for his atheism is that it is very probable that God does not exist, just as it is very probable that there is no teapot orbiting Mars. The preponderance of evidence indicates, says Dawkins, that God does not exist. This “99 percent atheism” actually leaves the door open for skepticism if seriously challenged. The God hypothesis, however, is a very different type of hypothesis from the teapot hypothesis. Indeed, it is not really a hypothesis at all, since it involves at its core the claim that the process of scientific investigation—including the testing of hypotheses— cannot arrive at truth (or at least the complete truth). The religious proposition involves the belief that there exists truth outside the possibility of scientific investigation, and therefore the statement that there can be no scientific justification for religious belief is—from the point of view of the religious individual—beside the point. One is merely question begging by asking, “But what are your scientific grounds for your non-belief in science?” The conflict between science and religion lies at a more fundamental level than Dawkins’s empiricism. The foundation for atheist belief is not really that God is an unlikely proposition (though the hypothesis, if taken as a scientific hypothesis, is the most unlikely hypothesis one can come up with), but that atheism flows from a materialist world-outlook—a philosophical position that holds that everything that exists consists of the law-governed development of matter in its various forms. Since matter is law-governed, it can be subject to scientific investigation, and at the same time science requires the presumption that the objects of its investigation follow causal relationships. This, ultimately, is the central conflict between religion and science, which is conflict between materialism and idealism, rationality and irrationality. The proof of the materialist world outlook lies in the entire historical experience of mankind in its interaction with nature, particularly in the extraordinary development of scientific knowledge over the past several hundred years. The proof of materialism is demonstrated in this historical practice, whereby mankind has not only formed hypotheses, but realized these hypotheses in the transformation of the material world. It has become a fad among those who argue that science and religion are compatible, while also arguing strongly for the teaching of evolution in schools (and perhaps most prominent among these is Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education), to make a distinction between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. Science, according to these thinkers, depends on methodological naturalism—the assumption during scientific experimentation that there exists nothing outside the material world of cause and effect. This is distinct from the claim that there is actually nothing outside of this material world of cause and effect. Such an argument, taken up by those who would defend science education, in fact undermines the foundation of science altogether, since it eliminates any solid connection between scientific investigation and reality. There may exist a God—or any other supernatural entity—but science can never discover this underlying truth (what Kant would term the noumena), since science relies on the assumption of causal relationships and natural law-governed processes, which supposedly may or may not allow humans to arrive at a complete understanding of the universe. The ability of science to predict and transform the material world demonstrates, however, that it is not only a useful method, but a means of arriving at an understanding of the real world. Through a rigorous system of observation, reason, hypotheses and experimentation, science allows humans to arrive at truths about the world as it is “in itself.” It is a systematic means of testing the truth of our conceptions through practical interaction with the world. Its rationality is what distinguishes science from religion, which in one way or another relies on the irrational, on superstition, on “faith.” Religious belief and social history Dawkins does not deal seriously with any of these philosophical issues, and his defense of atheism, while important, is ultimately unconvincing and superficial. He devotes a considerable amount of space in his book to discussing the various “proofs” for the existence of God (the cosmological argument, the argument from design, etc.), all of which have been refuted a hundred times already, and to which Dawkins adds nothing new. Most of these proofs (such as the assertion that every effect must have a cause, a recession that must lead ultimately to an uncaused cause, which is God) are not remotely convincing to anyone who does not already believe in God, and their refutation will not in general be convincing to anyone who does. On the more frequently invoked “argument from design,” Dawkins points out that Darwin put an end to this proof in his theory of evolution, which explained how complex, apparently intelligently-designed organisms, are the product of a long process of natural selection. In discussing the origins and perpetuation of religious beliefs, much more is required than a review of the various proofs for God’s existence. A scientist must also examine why these beliefs arose and why they are perpetuated. Here Dawkins enters what is for him somewhat foreign territory, and he frequently stumbles, due in large part to his failure to take seriously the role of social relations in shaping and perpetuating religious belief. To adopt a materialist, scientific, approach to religion is first of all to recognize that religion is fundamentally a product of society. Culture is a social, not an individual, phenomenon, and in the process of his development the individual adopts in one form or another ideas present in the broader social milieu. A materialist explanation of religious belief must therefore be rooted in a materialist approach to society. As with many natural scientists, however, Dawkins does not carry through his materialism to social and cultural history. He ends up resorting to various idealistic explanations for religious belief. Historical materialism—that is, Marxism—sees ideology, including religion, as rooted in the process of production and the social relations humans enter into in order to produce. As Marx wrote in his famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” On the one hand, religion is perpetuated by the ruling elite during different stages of historical development as a means of justifying particular social arrangements. In the Middle Ages, for example, the Catholic Church in Europe was one of the principal institutional and ideological props of feudalism, not to mention one of the largest landowners. With control over the productive forces, the ruling elite, in alliance with the church, could perpetuate religious belief through myriad means. In addition to justifying various hierarchies, religion has been used to tell the poor and exploited that salvation lies in the next world, rather than this one. On the other hand, religion frequently plays the role of “opiate,” i.e., it provides comfort for the poor and exploited, a hope for salvation and a better life in another world. For this reason, religious ideology can have a receptive response among broader sections of the population. Religion, Marx wrote in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, is the “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions.” Of course, the history of religion, like that of any ideological phenomenon, is complex. Religious ideology takes on a semi-independent existence, with its own internal logic. There is also a trend in religious evolution. As humans come to understand the natural world through the process of scientific explanation, the concept of God has tended to become more abstract, more removed from day-to-day events. Religion tends to occupy the realms of human experience that scientific knowledge has yet to penetrate, though this is not an entirely linear trajectory. In general, however, social progress has been associated with the advance of science and the retreat of religion. The point is that this explanation of religion imbues any discussion of religion with the social content necessary for its comprehension. Dawkins completely dismisses this perspective. “Nor are Darwinians satisfied by political explanations, such as ‘religion is a tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the underclass’,” he writes. “It is surely true that black slaves in America were consoled by promises of another life, which blunted their dissatisfaction with this one and thereby benefited their owners. The question of whether religions are deliberately designed by cynical priests or rulers is an interesting one, to which historians should attend. But it is not, in itself, a Darwinian question. The Darwinians still want to know why people are vulnerable to the charms of religion and therefore open to exploitation by priests, politicians and kings.” This is a fair enough point when discussing the historical origins of religious belief in the evolution of man (though the talk of “cynical priests and rulers” is a mechanical and one-sided presentation of the Marxist theory of religion, which Dawkins here alludes to without naming). Given the way in which religious beliefs of some sort or another have emerged on numerous occasions in almost every society, it is certainly legitimate to ask if there is something in our biological makeup that predisposes human society to adopt religious conceptions, even if one insists that the social dimension takes precedence in man’s later development. There might be other ideologies that could serve the same social function as religion does, so one is led to ask why religion predominates. Dawkins would like to discuss what it is in our evolutionary heritage that makes religious explanations particularly attractive, that makes religious ideology particularly universal. We will return to the limitations of this approach below, after first going into some detail about Dawkins’s views on the question that he would like to focus on. In giving his own answer, Dawkins notes that an evolutionary explanation of religious belief need not postulate an evolutionary benefit for religion itself. “I am one of an increasing number of biologists who see religion as a by-product of something else,” he writes. “More generally, I believe that we who speculate about Darwinian survival value need to ‘think by-product.’ When we ask about the survival value of anything, we may be asking the wrong question.” Dawkins proposal for an evolutionary foundation of religious belief is not particularly profound: We have evolved to believe what we are told by our elders. This is beneficial, Dawkins says, because generally our elders are right, and those who believed what they were told benefited from the accumulated experience of their elders. This may be true, but it leaves open the question as to why it was religion that has been passed on from elders to children, rather than something else. The fact that Dawkins does not consider this obvious objection to his theory is an indication that he has not really thought through this question very seriously. More promising is the theory presented by Daniel Dennett that religion is fundamentally misplaced intentionality. Humans evolved to interpret certain actions, particularly actions that they did not understand, to be the product of intentional agents. This was useful when dealing with actual intentional agents, because it allowed early humans to better predict the behavior of animals or fellow humans (a particularly useful quality as social relations developed). Religion is the imputation of intentionality on the natural world: It is a god that causes the rain to fall and the rivers to flood; it is a god that is the cause of life and death, etc. While these various proposals are interesting, they are not particularly useful unless they are rooted in an investigation of the scientific evidence, including archaeology. As of yet, both Dennett and Dawkins have been engaging largely in armchair evolutionary biology in discussing this question. More fundamentally, theories such as those proposed by Dawkins and Dennett do not further our understanding of the history of religion, which is really the most important question in understanding its persistence and nature today. Supposing that religion had an initial impulse in misplaced intentionality or in the tendency of children to believe what they are told, this does not explain why it should continue even when science has led us to the conclusion that this intentionality is in fact misplaced, and does not explain why children continue to be indoctrinated in the existence of fictional beings. It also does not explain why religion has evolved as it has over the years. To deal with this question, Dawkins (and Dennett) resort to the theory of the “meme,” a supposed cultural equivalent of the gene. A meme is a purported “unit of cultural inheritance,” and certain memes have a greater tendency to reproduce themselves, etc. A more detailed critique can be found in James Brookfield’s review of Dennett’s book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a natural phenomena. Here it is sufficient to note that by locating the basis for the spread of an ideology in the idea itself (rather than the society in which the idea emerges and spreads), the proponents of meme theory generally fall into an idealist interpretation of history, one that has great difficulty in explaining what accounts for ideological development. Dawkins confesses the difficulty he has in explaining cultural evolution when he writes about the “moral zeitgeist,” which he says is “a mysterious consensus, which changes over the decades” and accounts for changes in moral or religious conceptions. He has no real explanation for the changes in this “moral zeitgeist,” but, Dawkins writes, “The onus is not on me to answer.” If all Dawkins aimed to do was provide a logical proof for the non-existence of God, or propose theories for why religion may have emerged in the development of early human society, we might accept this statement. But in fact Dawkins aims to do much more. He wants to tackle contemporary social and political issues, and without any serious basis for explaining why religions persist he is left floundering, often finding his way into quite reactionary positions. Religion and politics The problem Dawkins and others confront in explaining religious and ideological change lies ultimately in their refusal to take up Marxist theory. Dawkins refers to Marx only once in passing, and deals with class theory only in the paragraph quoted above. For Dawkins, religion has no social or political significance. He treats it merely as an idea without any real connections to the more material conditions of life. He writes, to cite one example, “The Afghan Taliban and the American Taliban [Christian fundamentalism in the United States] are good examples of what happens when people take their scriptures literally and seriously.” Certainly scripture plays a role, but both the Afghan Taliban and the “American Taliban” are products of deeper social relations in their respective societies, and in fact the differences between these societies impart different characters to the respective ideologies. This approach to religion has definite political consequences. Early on in the book, Dawkins discusses the case of the anti-Islamic cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which produced sharp protests in February 2006. Press and governments around the world denounced the protests as attacks on free speech, and defended those who decided to publish the bigoted cartoons as proponents of free speech. Dawkins accepts this interpretation entirely. One need not be a supporter of the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism to recognize that what was really involved was not a defense of free speech by a Danish newspaper, but a deliberate provocation designed to whip up anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe and elsewhere. The protests, on the other hand, reflected anger that was more than merely religious in character. There is seething resentment against the United States and European governments to their policies in countries composed largely of Muslims. The fact that discontent in many regions of the Middle East and other areas often takes a religious character is also a product of historical and political factors. The perspective of secular bourgeois nationalist movements has failed utterly, secular socialist and internationalist movements have been systematically betrayed by Stalinism, and the United States and other powers have worked for a long time to undermine secular movements of all stripes because they have viewed these movements as more of a threat to their interests than religions movements. Both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are in part products of the American intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the US waged a proxy war against the Soviet Union by generously funding the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists. On the other hand, a movement such as Hamas in the Palestinian territories—which is very different phenomenon from Al Qaeda—has gained traction in part because it provides critical social resources and services not provided through any other channels, particularly as the Palestinian Liberation Organization has moved increasingly to the right, accommodating itself to American imperialism. Dawkins’s blindness to the social and political roots of religious ideology leads him toward quite reactionary positions. He goes so far as to quote approvingly the words of Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, who has written: “Could it be that the young men who committed suicide were neither on the fringes of Muslim society in Britain, nor following an eccentric and extremist interpretation of their faith, but rather that they came from the very core of the Muslim community and were motivated by a mainstream interpretation of Islam?” One rubs ones eyes in disbelief when one reads the uncritical representation of these words by Dawkins. The Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity is an evangelical outfit whose main aim is to promote anti-Islamic chauvinism, which is precisely the aim of Sookhdeo’s sentence quoted above. One might give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt in assuming that he quotes without real knowledge of who he is quoting, but regardless it is certainly a misfortune that Dawkins, an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq and an opponent of Christian ideology as much as Islamic, should lend his authority to such a vile perspective. But such is the consequence of remaining blind to the social and political issues that lie behind most religious questions. Approaching such matters from an idealist perspective, Dawkins is easily led to the conclusion that Islamic fundamentalists must simply be a product of Islam as a religion, and this leads him into the same bed with such utter reactionaries as Sookhdeo. There is a tendency among the advocates of atheism—and this is perhaps most clear in the works of Sam Harris, who Dawkins also quotes approvingly on several occasions—to adopt a contemptuous attitude toward the religiously-minded population, which is still a majority of the working class around the world. Since religion is conceived of only as an ideological phenomenon, it is ultimately the population itself that is to blame for belief in religion and whatever policies are justified in the name of religion. Not only does this often lead to right-wing political positions, it also fails utterly in offering a suggestion for how the influence of religion can be diminished. Marxists too want to undermine the influence of religious movements, in the Middle East, in the United States, and around the world. Religion is inherently anti-scientific. It cloaks the real nature of society and repression, and it often serves as an ideological buttress for social reaction and militarism. However, to realize this aim requires that one first of all comprehend the actual social and political basis of religious belief. As Marx wrote in the same work quoted above, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their conditions is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions...Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.” In other words, the fight for scientific consciousness among masses of people, and with this a materialist world outlook, must be bound up with the attempt to explain to people the real nature of society and oppression. It must be bound up with a political struggle and a socialist movement.

The rising tide of economic nationalism

2009-02-14T16:42:00.001Z

As the global economic crisis continues to deepen, the unmistakable stench of economic nationalism is on the rise around the world. Confronted with collapsing industries and growing anger over job losses, governments are reaching for protectionist measures despite the disastrous consequences of such beggar-thy-neighbour policies in the 1930s. At the G-20 summit in mid-November, the leaders of the world’s largest economies pledged not to raise barriers to trade and investment—even those allowed under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules—for a year. The joint communiqué also promised to restart the failed Doha round of trade talks as a means of boosting world trade. However, as the Financial Times noted this week: “The solemn pledge intended to bind its signatories for a year lasted less than 36 hours before Russia said it would go ahead with planned increases in car tariffs. Moscow’s violation of the pledge was followed by several other G-20 countries—India, Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina—all pushing for increased protection.” Since then protectionist measures under various guises have been enacted in country after country, including the US and the European Union. As for the Doha round, WTO director general Pascal Lamy last month called off a planned ministerial meeting aimed at kick-starting negotiations, declaring that there was “an unacceptably high risk of failure which could damage not only the round but also the WTO system”. This week, Lamy tried to sound a more optimistic note. In an interview on British television, he described the completion of the round as “low-hanging fruit” and emphasised that 80 percent of the package had been finished. But there is no sign of any end to the bitter wrangling over the “remaining 20 percent” that led to the collapse of talks last year. The new Obama administration spurred on the rising tide of protectionism with the comments last week of Treasury Secretary nominee Tim Geithner accusing China of manipulating its currency to boost exports. Designating Beijing as a “currency manipulator” would allow the White House to invoke a broad range of punitive tariffs and other economic penalties against China under US trade legislation. The Democrats in the House of Representatives went one step further by including a “Buy American” provision in Obama’s $825 billion stimulus package approved on Wednesday. The clause, which requires infrastructure projects funded by the package to use only US-made iron and steel, has provoked protests from European steelmakers. Democrat senator Byron Dorgan is proposing a broader measure to exclude most foreign-made manufactured goods when the package reaches the Senate. Such measures threaten to provoke escalating retaliation and a full-blown trade war. A comment in the US journal Foreign Policy warned that the “explicitly protectionist language” contained in the package would “certainly be taken as a bad sign by the rest of the world. The world can deal with a protectionist India or Indonesia. The trading system will have much more trouble if the United States starts to renege on its traditional leadership role.” Cautions about growing protectionism have been sounded already at this week’s Davos Economic Summit, including by the Chinese and Russian premiers. Igor Yurgens, a senior adviser to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, gave vent to some of the bitterness in Moscow and other capitals over the impact of the various US rescue packages. “Of course, [Mr Obama] expects the Chinese or Russians to buy US Treasury bills [to fund the massive US deficit]. That is pretty selfish and philosophically it is protectionism,” he declared. Tit-for-tat trade measures and legal challenges are on the increase. In only its second case before the WTO, China pressed ahead this week with a complaint against US measures restricting the import of steel pipes, tyres and woven sacks. After Beijing initiated the dispute last September, Washington began legal action against subsidised Chinese branded goods. China, which is the world’s second largest exporter after Germany, has been the target of seven WTO disputes, all of which involve the US. There is no shortage of economic commentators issuing dire warnings about the potential for protectionism to catapult the world economy into a depression akin to the 1930s. International trade is slowing dramatically, with the IMF forecasting this week that world trade volumes would contract 2.8 percent in 2009 after rising 4.1 percent last year. Nevertheless, as the global economy shrinks, the capitalist class in every country is driven to foist the crisis onto its international rivals as well as the working class. In 1930, many foresaw the disastrous consequences of the Smoot-Hawley tariff act, which increased nearly 900 American import duties. Some 1,028 US economists signed a petition pleading with US President Herbert Hoover not to sign the bill into law. The Economist magazine recently cited the comments of Thomas Lamont, a partner of J.P. Morgan, who recalled: “I almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley Smoot Tariff. That act intensified nationalism all over the world.” Nevertheless, Hoover signed the law, provoking an avalanche of retaliation, the collapse of world trade and the formation of antagonistic currency blocs that set the course for the Second World War. While those promoting “free trade” speak for the bankers, financiers and more globally competitive sections of capital, there is a definite constituency for protectionism among less competitive industries. The whipping up of economic nationalism also serves a vital ideological function in diverting the anger of working people over job losses and the precipitous decline in living standards outwards rather than at the real source of the crisis—the profit system itself. Those who push this reactionary poison in the working class are the trade unions and their various middle class radical allies. Far from defending jobs and conditions, economic nationalism goes hand-in-hand with the continuing impoverishment of working people. Whether in the US, Europe or any other country, the same union bureaucrats who have presided over the decimation of manufacturing industry over the past three decades now insist on the further sacrifice of wages and conditions as part of the protectionist packages to defend American or European companies. The bailout plan for the US auto industry backed by the United Auto Workers is conditional on a savage restructuring of the industry that will result in plant closures, layoffs and the systematic lowering of wages. In France, Germany and other European countries, the unions are collaborating with governments and corporations in plans to defend “their” auto industries, using the threat of job losses to enlist the support of workers. The logic of economic nationalism is class collaboration in a dog-eat-dog competition that pits workers in one country against their class brothers and sisters around the world. The end result is trade war and military conflict. The working class cannot defend its interests under the banner of either protectionism or “free trade”. The precondition for any genuine struggle to defend jobs and living standards is the political independence of workers from all wings of the capitalist class. The natural allies of workers in advanced economies such as US and Europe are workers in cheap labour platforms like China and India who are often exploited by the same global corporations and share a common class interest in abolishing the anarchic profit system and replacing it with a world-planned socialist economy. That is the perspective advanced by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International.

2009-02-14T16:42:00.000Z

Gloom, perplexity, divisions dominate World Economic Forum in Davos

2009-02-14T16:33:00.001Z

The World Economic Forum was first launched by its founder and still-president, the Swiss economist and businessman, Klaus Schwab, in 1971 in the midst of a mounting financial crisis that led in August of that year to the collapse of the Bretton Woods System, the international monetary framework, based on US dollar-gold convertibility, that had undergirded the post-war economic expansion. In the ensuing years, the forum developed into a semi-official gathering of business chiefs and government officials that discussed and debated both international economic and political issues. In the more recent period, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has become a venue to affirm the supposed triumph of the "free enterprise system," with American investment bankers holding court, surrounded by a small army of economists and media, complemented by film stars and other celebrities. One year ago, after the initial collapse of the US housing market and eruption of the credit crisis, concern at the forum over these worrisome developments, which had been almost universally unanticipated, was tempered by assurances from American bankers and politicians that the disorder would be quickly resolved and that, in the worst case scenario, a US recession would be mild and brief. Most of the discussion centered on the widely held notion that the problems in US financial markets would not spread to Europe or Asia, due to the phenomenon of "decoupling." Robert Greenhill, the forum's chief business officer, set the tone for this year's forum by declaring, "The meeting was founded at a time of division and uncertainty in the 1970s and this year is a return to its roots. People are coming to compare notes on what they need to do to emerge from a serious crisis." Just how serious and universal a crisis was underscored on the opening day of the forum by the International Monetary Fund's downwardly revised estimate of world economic growth for 2009 of a mere 0.5 percent, including major contractions in the US, Britain, France, Germany and Japan. That followed the previous week's IMF forecast that world trade volumes would shrink 2.8 percent in 2009. Also on Wednesday, the International Labour Organization warned that some 51 million jobs could be lost worldwide this year. The two dominant and interrelated features of this year's forum are a general sense of shock and near-panic over the inexorable and rapid manner in which the crisis has overtaken the efforts of central banks and governments to shore up the banks and revive economic activity—amounting to trillions of dollars in loans, guarantees and cash infusions—and the devastating loss of American prestige and credibility. The Financial Times on Wednesday wrote: "Most notably, faith that a mix of globalization, financial innovation and free-market competition would build a better financial system has withered away, as bank losses have piled up. Thus the critical question that now hangs over this year's meeting at Davos is: ‘What, if anything, can replace this creed?' " Along similar lines, the New York Times on Friday quoted James Rosenfeld, a co-founder or Cambridge Energy Research Associates, as saying, "We've all been building this big, integrated financial system. We didn't consider what would happen when it disintegrated." As for the position of the United States, the opening day of the forum was given over to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, both of whom lambasted the US, without directly naming the target of their attacks, for precipitating the world crisis, and called for measures to lessen US dominance on world financial markets. Wen urged an expansion of regulatory "coverage of the international financial system, with particular emphasis on strengthening the supervision on major reserve currencies." He said the financial crisis was "attributable to inappropriate macroeconomic policies of some economies and their unsustainable model of development characterized by prolonged low savings and high consumption, excessive expansion of financial institutions in blind pursuit of profit." He also denounced "the failure of financial supervision." Putin was, if anything, more blunt. He attacked the concept of a "unipolar world," called for an end to the privileged position of the US dollar as the world's major reserve currency, and noted that "just a year ago, American delegates speaking from this rostrum emphasized the US economy's fundamental stability and its cloudless prospects." He continued, "Today, investment banks, the pride of Wall Street, have virtually ceased to exist. In just 12 months, they have posted losses exceeding the profits they made in the last 25 years." Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, responded, "The sad thing is that we might have scoffed at this a while ago. But we really dragged the world down." The Obama administration, for its part, signaled its disinterest in any serious international coordination or financial regulation by failing to send a single high-ranking official to the forum. While an array of government leaders from around the world were in attendance, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, none of the top US delegates who had been advertised—chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, National Security Adviser General James Jones and chief of the US Central Command General David Petraeus—showed up. The virtual official boycott by the United States underscores the bitter tensions and divisions simmering beneath the diplomatic decorum of the forum. While general statements are being issued at Davos abjuring protectionism, and warnings are being made about the disastrous implications for the world economy of such policies, the reality is a growth of economic nationalism. Less than a week before the opening of the forum, US Treasury Secretary Geithner issued a provocative threat of possible trade sanctions against China, accusing the Chinese of "manipulating" their currency to obtain a trade advantage over the US. Steven Roach of Morgan Stanley Asia spoke at Davos of a "rising tide of economic nationalism." And delegates from so-called developing countries complained that the massive US deficits resulting from Obama's stimulus program and bank bailouts would suck up the bulk of available private credit on world markets. "Large economies are accessing international capital markets for themselves," said Trevor Manuel, the finance minister of South Africa. Ernesto Zedillo, the former Mexican president who was in power during that country's financial meltdown in 1994, said, "The US needs to show some proof they have a plan to get out of the fiscal problem. We, as developing countries, need to know we won't be crowded out of the capital markets, which is already happening." The New York Times cited Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, as voicing similar concerns, speaking of "the risk of a new mercantilism" centered on credit availability rather than trade. These tensions erupted into the open on Thursday, when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stormed off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a panel discussion on the Gaza crisis. Erdogan, whose government maintains close political and military ties with Israel, told Peres, "When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill." The Davos forum underscores the impossibility of developing a rational and coordinated international policy to resolve the economic crisis within the capitalist framework of private ownership of the means of production and finance and the division of the world between rival nation states. Putin, speaking as a defender of capitalism, referred to the financial parasitism that fueled the massive fortunes of the financial aristocracy over the past three decades as a "pyramid of expectations [that] would have collapsed sooner or later," and indicated who is to pay the price for its collapse: "This amounted to unearned wealth, a loan that will have to be repaid by future generations." Within the existing economic and political system, the only future is one of increasing poverty and repression and the growth of national antagonisms leading inevitably, as in the last great depression, to the horrors of global war. The specter haunting Davos is the emergence of an independent movement of the working class fighting to put an end to capitalism and build a socialist society based on the satisfaction of human needs, not private profit. The disintegration of the world economy poses with the greatest urgency the development of a unified struggle by the working class on the basis of an international socialist program.

Why the World Social Forum Needs to Be Less Like Neoliberalism

2009-02-14T16:10:00.001Z

January is a special month for the global left. Every year at this time, progressives and activists convene at the World Social Forum, usually in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In January 2005, I too was eagerly awaiting my first trip to the Forum, imagining a week of cross-cultural communication, strategic organizing, and inspiring celebrations. Although I didn’t know exactly what to expect, I did know one thing – the Forum would be an alternative to neoliberalism. So why did I walk away from Porto Alegre worried mostly about the similarities between the Forum and neoliberalism? And is there still reason to be worried, as the 2006 Forum approaches? The World Social Forum (WSF) and neoliberalism seem to have little in common. Neoliberalism is the world’s dominant political and economic ideology, promoting a system of competitive individuals governed only by the invisible hand of the almighty market. The WSF is a "people’s alternative" to the elite World Economic Forum, bringing together thousands of people to fight against neoliberalism and build another world. Despite these apparent contradictions, however, the WSF and neoliberalism both claim to create unregulated "open space" – non-hierarchical physical and social space that permits free interaction. If neoliberalism strives for unregulated open space, should social forums as well? Or could social forums be more powerful forces for social change if we focused less on protecting them as unregulated open spaces, and more on planning them as equitable, educative, and democratic spaces? What Does the Social Forum Accomplish? Before judging what kind of space the Forum should be, we need to look at what the Forum actually accomplishes as it is. The 2005 WSF consisted of six days of panels, workshops, meetings, concerts, rallies, art events, eating, producing, shopping, gatherings, and parties. So what are the results of all this activity? Many people say that the Forum mainly serves to bring people together to exchange ideas. This may be true, but people often came together without talking, and exchanged ideas without listening. To be more specific, we can say that the Forum encourages existing actions, facilitates learning, establishes new connections, and organizes new actions. Speeches, personal testimonies, and mass rallies provide people with feelings of solidarity and excitement, encouraging them to continue in their struggles. Participants learn new information, ideas, and ways of thinking, in panels, workshops, information fairs, and informal discussions. They even learn how an alternative world might work by modeling it, through an on-site solidarity economy. The Forum establishes connections between people who otherwise might not have met, by bringing together activists from many different countries, movements, and issues. Perhaps most importantly, participants organize new networks, protests, websites, organizations, listservs, meetings and campaigns. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, the 2005 Forum only partly achieved these accomplishments. For example, it encouraged plenty of actions, but most of the actions were strictly Brazilian or Latin American. The vast majority of the participants were from Brazil. Asians, Africans, and low-income people from the North, however, were underrepresented. Perhaps this is not surprising, since the costs of participation, including plane tickets, were cheapest for Brazilians and most expensive for those who participated the least. Even those who were able to attend the Forum were unable to fully participate in many of its events. Panels and workshops were often cancelled, sometimes because of competition with larger organized events. Many participants were unable to participate in chosen sessions because of insufficient translation. At least half of the sessions were in Portuguese with no translation, and the primary language of each session was not always publicized in advance. Many people had difficulty hearing or sitting through the speakers, because of the excruciating mid-summer heat, noise from the fans, and sounds from neighboring sessions. And although there seemed to be as many women as men at the Forum, panel speakers were disproportionately male. With the majority of sessions either cancelled, without translation, or uncomfortable, many of the Forum’s activities were not very productive. People often drifted in and out of events, making focused discussion difficult. Few sessions encouraged participant mixing, networking, or dialogue. Most were dominated by panel presentations, and few provided time or space for organizing or groupwork. Participants therefore had to find time for organizing outside of the Forum’s packed schedule, in informal gatherings. The opportunities for learning were often limited. Most sessions approached learning from what popular educator Paulo Freire described as the "banking" method, with expert panelists attempting to deposit information in passive participants. People may have learned about solidarity economies by participating in one, but since there were few democratic decision-making processes, there were limited opportunities to learn about democracy. Perhaps more importantly, most decisions were therefore not very democratic, but were rather made by small groups of movement leaders meeting informally. The WSF accomplished much, but not as much as it could have. Most people were inspired, learned new information and established new connections. Many people also expressed frustration at not learning as much information, meeting as many contacts or engaging in as many productive discussions as expected. So why were the Forum’s accomplishments so limited? The Problems with Unregulated Open Space The Forum’s achievements and limitations are largely a result of the type of physical and social space that organizers planned. The WSF attempted to create unregulated open space for free and non-hierarchical communication, and to some extent it succeeded. Most events were organized independently by individual organizations or coalitions, with little external control. People were free to enter and leave any event and participate as desired. This freedom was at times empowering, inspiring, and magical. The Forum’s emphasis on unregulated open space, however, also contributed to some of the problems described above: inequitable participation, unproductive activities, and undemocratic decision-making. These problems are similar to those of neoliberalism, and they can be traced to three false assumptions: regulation inherently limits free interaction, activities are more productive when left to individual discretion, and the guiding hands are neutral and benevolent. Because these assumptions are not always accurate, neither neoliberalism nor the WSF actually create spaces that are as open as claimed. By discouraging regulation, for example, neoliberalism and the WSF enable existing power hierarchies to decide economic and social interactions. For neoliberalism, reducing trade quotas, tariffs and regulations creates a more open, but not level, playing field on which more developed corporations of the North can more easily exploit less developed economies of the South. In Porto Alegre, unregulated workshop discussions and decision-making often enabled the most powerful participants to dominate – panelists, NGO experts, men, loud or confident voices, and (when the social forum is in Brazil) Portuguese speakers. Unregulated open space encourages more individual autonomy over productive activities and less coordinated planning, which can lead to wasted time and energy. As neoliberal privatization and deregulation download state planning to the market, increasingly independent corporations become increasingly wasteful (Enron, Bechtel, the US healthcare system). At the WSF, insufficient coordination between sessions led to many repetitive or cancelled workshops, while the lack of structure within sessions often made it more difficult to learn, network, and organize together. For both neoliberalism and the WSF, the power of small coordinating groups deters democratic decision-making. The architects of neoliberalism (WTO, IMF, World Bank) claim that they only facilitate the natural and inevitable course of international development, even as their decisions shape the basic conditions of this development. The WSF is allegedly driven by its participants, but logistic decisions (Forum location, dates, registration fees) of the self-selected Organizing Committee and International Council dramatically affect participation. For example, the main session organized to discuss the future of the WSF was only in Portuguese. What Kind of Space Should a Social Forum Be? If the emphasis on unregulated open space limits what the WSF can accomplish, what other kinds of space could overcome these limitations? If social forums are meant to model and lead us towards the world we want, would this world be anything more than an unregulated open space? If neoliberalism strives for unregulated open space, social forums should strive for something more. The forum participants may not agree on specific goals, but after five years we should be able to say something about another world besides that it is possible. To start, let us say that social forums and the world they seek to create should be spaces of equity, education, and democracy. By creating more equitable, educative, and democratic forums, we might learn how to build a more equitable, educative, and democratic world. 1) Equitable Space Social forums should correct resource and power inequities by promoting equitable participation. They can encourage more equitable attendance by charging higher registration fees for those with the greatest ability to attend and offering subsidies for those with the least ability to attend. This means not only charging higher fees for participants from the North, but also higher fees for participants with low travel costs and more subsidies for those coming from far away. Locating forums in cities that are cheap airline destinations would enable more people with few resources to attend. Forums could also facilitate more equitable participation amongst participants. They could promote gender equity by asking that half of speakers or facilitators at any session be women. Requesting that official speakers talk for no more than half of the session time would enable more people to participate in discussion. Higher registration fees or more volunteers could be used to provide interpreters at every event, so that participants have a more equal opportunity to understand and contribute. 2) Educative Space The spaces and activities of forums should be designed to actively facilitate learning. In 2005, the Forum moved towards more educative spaces by eliminating large plenaries; next it could request that sessions include small group discussions or activities, to encourage social learning through dialogue and deliberation. The WSF could ask session organizers to provide written or visual materials (handouts, flipcharts, pictures, PowerPoint presentations) to make information more accessible to more people in more ways. We might also recognize that formal sessions are not the only way to learn, and do more to facilitate informal social interactions throughout the Forum site and host city. The site’s discussion spaces, information tents, art exhibits, and vendors fostered more learning than many panels. Future forums could create more opportunities for informal education by further integrating educational art, movies, and popular theater into the world of panels and workshops. We could also think more about how forums could better facilitate the education of those not present, in the surrounding city and world. 3) Democratic Space Social forums should encourage and facilitate democratic decision-making. Neoliberalism is based on decisions imposed from above by the market, so alternatives need to forge more democratic decisions from below. To democratize decision-making within forums, the forum coordinators could provide session organizers with information on democratic decision-making processes, and then ask them to identify not only their session’s format but also its decision-making process. To democratize decision-making about forums, we could draw on the multi-layered decision-making of Porto Alegre’s other acclaimed innovation, participatory budgeting. For example, participants of local forums could elect delegates to regional forum councils and participants of regional forums could elect delegates to an international forum council, to help decision-making filter from the local to the global. So why has the WSF not more actively promoted equitable, educative, and democratic space? Some of its leaders have strongly opposed the Forum being anything but neutral space. Like neoliberalism, however, the Forum’s open space is not actually neutral. Its unregulated interactions and predetermined shape empower certain participants and exclude others. Without formal rules and structures, open space is only truly open for those with the power to decide the unwritten rules and control the informal structures. Open space, though, does not need to be unregulated. Rather, planning and organization can make it more genuinely open. In fact, the Forum is already becoming more than open space. Its on-site solidarity economy empowers street vendors and cooperatives while banning corporations, in an attempt to regulate an inherently unequal playing field. To become a more powerful force for social change, the Forum must recognize and move beyond the limitations of unregulated open space. This debate is not only about the WSF, however. Local, regional, and national social forums face similar challenges. Other civil society and people’s convergences, even if they are not called social forums, must also decide what kind of spaces to be. The debate over the WSF’s open space therefore points to even broader questions: What kind of spaces should progressives create to communicate and work together? How can we plan spaces for social change?

MAKING FINANCE WORK FOR HUMANS

2009-02-14T15:57:00.001Z

A bitter lessoon we have to learn the hard way The financial crisis is a systemic crisis that emerges in the context of global crises (climate, food, energy, social…) and of a new balance of power. It results from 30 years of transfer of income from labor towards capital. This tendency should be reversed. This crisis is the consequence of a capitalist system of production based on laissez-faire and fed by short term accumulation of profits by a minority, unequal redistribution of wealth, an unfair trade system, the perpetration and accumulation of irresponsible, ecological and illegitimate debt, natural resource plunder and the privatization of public services. This crisis affects the whole humanity, first of all the most vulnerable (workers, jobless, farmers, migrants, women…) and Southern countries, which are the victims of a crisis for which they are not at all responsible. The resources to get out of the crisis merely burden the public with the losses in order to save, with no real public benefit, a financial system that is at the root of the current cataclysm. Where are the resources for the populations which are the victims of the crisis? The world not only needs regulations, but also a new paradigm which puts the financial system at the service of a new international democratic system based on the satisfaction of human rights, decent work, food sovereignty, respect for the environment, cultural diversity, the social and solidarity economy and a new concept of wealth. Therefore, we demand to: • Put a reformed and democratized United Nations at the heart of the financial system reform, as the G20 is not the legitimate forum to resolve this systemic crisis. • Establish international permanent and binding mechanisms of control over capital flows. • Implement an international monetary system based on a new system of reserves, including the creation of regional reserve currencies in order to end the current supremacy of the dollar and to ensure international financial stability. • Implement a global mechanism of state and citizen control of banks and financial institutions. Financial intermediation should be recognized as a public service that is guaranteed to all citizens in the world and should be taken out of free trade agreements. • Prohibit hedge funds and over the counter markets, where derivatives and other toxic products are exchanged without any public control. • Eradicate speculation on commodities, first of all food and energy, by implementing public mechanisms of price stabilization. • Dismantle tax havens, sanction their users (individuals, companies, banks and financial intermediates) and create an international tax organization to combat tax competition and evasion. • Cancel unsustainable and illegitimate debt of impoverished countries and establish a system of democratic, accountable, fair sovereign borrowing and lending that serves sustainable and equitable development. • Establish a new international system of wealth sharing by implementing a progressive tax system at the national level and by creating global taxes (on financial transactions, polluting activities and high income) to finance global public goods. We call on NGOs, trade unions and social movements to converge in order to create a citizen struggle in favor of this new model. We urge them to mobilize all over the world, in particular in the face of the G20, from March 28th onwards.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

2009-02-13T15:13:00.002Z

>>>> NIGERIA IMPOSES FOREIGN EXCHANGE CONTROLS The global financial crisis we are told is far removed from the realities of daily tarry in the developing world ,especially Africa but the decision of the the Nigerian Central bank to impose foreign exchange restriction shows that the threat ids much nearer than we have assumed up till now. Nigeria is the indispensable big brother we in Ghana cannot do without and when it sneezes we might want to take precaution.

MORE ACTION,LESS TALK

2009-02-13T13:20:00.004Z

THE GOVERNING STYLE OF THE NEW PRESIDENT President Mill's withdrawal of the nomination of Moses Asaga's nomination as the minister designate for Works and housing is a clear indication of the style he intends to adopt for the next four years. During the electioneering campaign he promised to deal with any of his officials who will be corrupt and this has been a swift and ruthless example of how he intends to make good on his promise. Prior to this action many had berated the president of appearance "not-in-control" as a result of his inaction and absence from the public sphere. For almost week news on the activities of the president was scarce and valuable commodity and in a nation that has just gone through an era of incessant media use by the executive, it was a troubling sign. It only went further to deepen the rumors of his ill health and control by Rawlings. However when the act on Asaga emerged it sent the right signals and quietened the chatter. The Hon Asaga who was a member of the three-man economic Management Team was alleged to have signed a cheque for 25m Ghana Cedis to be disbursed to the beneficiaries of the much maligned Ex-Gratia package that was cooked the out-gone government without recourse to any one in the party or the Government. Mr Asaga exhibited poor judgment when he signed the cheque during the period when there was an angry public outcry over the Ex-gratia. President Mills duly exercised his executive powers and sacked the yet-to-confirmed minister as an example to all the rest. In the process he scored good political points and earned the praise of many including staunch opponents. His action and the manner of it shows the kind of president he will shape up to be; DOING MORE AND TALKING LESS.

HOW PROPERTY-OWNING DEMOCRACY WORKS

2009-02-13T10:27:00.004Z

>>>> As taught by the NPP NPP always prides themselves as the party of industrious and hardworking types and never fail to point that they champion what they refer to as "property-owning democracy". Some commentators and analyst have wrongly interpreted this to mean that they believe every citizen could earn their property if they worked hard in the enabling environment they will create while in government...or at least that was the narrative from the ideological czars of the party. This went down well with many Ghanaian who are largely by nature hardworking,enterprising, and industrious group of people.Ghanaian genuinely believed that if for nothing at all a lot of opportunities will be opened to them to begin to earn real wealth through honest handwork and industry. the rhetoric beginning of their reign in 2001 went down very well and created a positive buzz in the business and economic community. peoples spirits were raised by slogans like "private sectors as the engine of growth" ,"Golden age of business" etc that were floating around all over.admittedly this raised the spirits of many Ghanaian and people were ready to grant the government the goodwill to take certain difficult decisions. for instance people actually clamored for increment in the the pump price of fuels when we were all told that it was a necessary act to put our economy on a sound footing. As the government survived a first term and won a second term it began to slowly but steadily show Ghanaians the real meaning of the Property -owning Ideology. What this ideology turned out to be was a deeply corrupt system of patronage, influence peddling corruption and property grabbing in all aspects of our lives. All forms of government action were used to enrich a selected few (Few, because being an ordinary member of the party did not open the doors the property) from the ruling party. Government policies, expenditure, and action were used to enrich these few “chosen ones”

WHY RADIO GOLD MADE SO, MANY ANGRY

2009-02-10T07:43:00.003Z

Election in this country raises a lot of heckle and tensions and we had had our fair share of such this year. But the just ended one has taught us that we are not a group of perfect beings but ordinary human with extreme of emotions that can spark conflict. We have shown ourselves by this election that we can be extremist and inciteful even though we love to delude ourselves constantly and pride ourselves as a peace loving nation.Competition for power drove us to the brink. We have an exciting media scene that is extremely partisan and parochial over the last few years a lot of media organizations have sprung up on all fronts. TV stations have more than doubled over the last decade while there seem to be a radio station in every neighborhood nowadays. As for Newspaper one has lost count of the titles we have on our Newsstands with a new title appearing virtually every other month. This is different in the sense that in many places Newspapers have their political stand which coincides with the ideology and positions of parties and in some cases some activist contribute material of these papers. The case with our News papers in that most of them are conceived, planned, executed, operated and edited by hardcore politicians. They end up as propaganda tabloids which lack any sense of objectivity and fair rest. Even the basic tenets of journalism are disregarded while the paper focuses on vendetta propagate character assassination. The News print has turned into dirty and murk of political journalism at disrespect the basic laws or conventions of the profession. What makes this state of affairs troubling is that even though these on the face of it are insignificant given their scanty circulation and poor finishing quality, their content are given oxygen by radio stations with wide-ranging, thorough an extensive review. Now this is the context where Radio Gold comes. in over the last 8 year The NPP has proven to be slick media operators from their days in opposition up till now. They cultivated the major players in the media landscape and learned back then how powerful a tool the media can be both in governance and opposition. This lesson was extensively used when they came into government and occupied the media space at every opportunity with dozens of spin-doctors and apologist. Almost all their media friends whilst in opposition followed them into government and became appendages of the government. They defended the NPP to the hilt even disregarding their principles. What made the matter worse was the perceived (and to some extend real) anti-media posture of the NDC. It was a strange situation when some individual journalists are heard strongly defending issues in favor of the NPP government when we know from their past they are repulsed by it. The media became Guard dogs of the NPP government; instead of the Watchdogs of society they should have been. All the media houses and practitioner that towed the NPP line and sang their hymns were duly rewarded with juicy advertisements, events and foreign travels. Overnight some 4 page pamphlets became full color tabloids. Even some senior journalists in some newspapers were persuaded to start out on their own with assurances of support and patronage. Those that did not tow the line were severely punished and discredited. Salacious and dirty lies were told about such journalists who did not tow the line by their own colleagues and some of them were hounded out of some platforms. They were starved of advertisements and revenues and the only thing that kept them in the newspaper business was their passion for the profession. Now what happened was bound to bring a sharp division on the media front. This division crystallized into two deeply antagonistic sides; pro-NPP and ant-NPP factions. The ANTI NPP front converged under the umbrella of radio gold which has a militant anti NPP posture, the reputation and the platform to pose any challenge to the domineering NPP media machinery. The radio Gold platform had its excesses but in a way one can say it was the right counter to the excesses of the NPP and their media onslaught. The NPP ruthlessly dominated the media landscape and ruled it with swagger. By this they could get away with anything. NPP was so obsessed with the media that they paid more attention to it that the actual act of governing. The president changed his media and public relations teams anytime there was a hitch and there were spokespersons for every conceivable government action. These spokespersons were everywhere, executing a well planned media strategy. Radio Gold necessarily became militant to counter this brazen abuse of the media and they had to become more militant especially during the electioneering campaign and the elections itself if they desired to play their roles properly. Most of the coverage was biased in favor of the NPP or in the least benign to the immoderation of the NPP.

THE EXPERT SCARE

2009-01-19T18:10:00.004Z

We are being hounded by the friends and apologist of the "Tecnocrats" who decided to become fulltime elephants despite the express frown on such practices by the Civil Servants code. These apologist wants the incoming government to keep them in the spirit of reconciliation as was announced by the new president during his inauguration. But what thses people refuse to see how pervasive this offensive practice was during the NPP years

GHANA ON THE BRINK

2009-01-01T19:19:00.002Z

Thanks to the NPP Ghana is slowly tiptoeing into a conflict situation Are you not ashamed by the actions of the NPP in the aftermath of the Run-off? You seem to notice all the misdemeanor of the NDC but blind to all the infractions of the NPP. There were independent (both local and foreign ) reports of serious irregularities in Asante region perpetuated by the NPP. There even attempts by the NPP to doctor the results of three constituencies in the KMA area. There was even a case where one constituency (Manhyia) recorded a turnout of above 95%. NDC election monitors were beaten and prevented from doing their jobs while media personnel who were perceived to be sympathetic to NDC were harassed. In the Volta region where the NPP is disputing the fairness of the polls , the NPP government sent an unusually high number of military personnel to the region while in some communities helicopters landed in polling stations. In some places police brutalized and intimidated voters. Wilie i accept that the NDC is not made up of angels ,we have been led to believe that the NPP was. Their action has dismayed many people who liked them for their rhetoric of rule of law and respect for human rights. But what has happened on the last few days has actually afforded Ghanaian to see the true colors of the Danquah-Busia tradition.The regional chairman of the NDC in the Ashanti region was attacked by Their action has dismayed many people who liked them for their rhetoric of rule of law and respect for human rights. But what has happened on the last few days has actually afforded Ghanaian to see the true colors of the Danquah-Busia tradition.The regional chairman of the NDC in the Ashanti region was attacked by matchet and club weilding NPP hoodlums in his house. You are calling for Prof Mills to concede when indeed he is claerly in the lead and romping to victory. Arent you afraid of what the NPP is bringng upon Ghana? just this morning it took the vigilance of some lawyers to stop the NPP from placing an injunction on the EC restraining it from doing its work.

End of the Greenspan error

2008-11-21T16:47:00.003Z

HOW THE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE STRIPPED HIMSELF At least he was sincere about it and that is the only In saying he was "absolutely" wrong about how markets behave, Alan Greenspan has admitted his own ignorance There was a time when investors and members of Congress hung on Alan Greenspan's every nuanced word. Now and then some may have politely suggested that perhaps he should ease up on interest rates, but they would never have dared to think that his encyclopedic view of the economy was in any way flawed or mistaken. Yesterday Greenspan broke that bubble by admitting that he may have been wrong in an appearance before the House oversight and government reform committee: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," Mr. Greenspan said. The mistake was fundamental. "You found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right, it was not working?" said California congressman Henry A Waxman, the committee chairman. "Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan said. "You know, that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well." To hear Alan Greenspan admit that his way of seeing the world was "absolutely, precisely" wrong is to mark the end of an era. There was a time when Greenspan conferred his blessing on the proliferation of derivatives. He opposed regulating derivatives because they spread the risk and made cheap credit more widely available. The trouble is that the prices of this cheap credit began to lose any connection to reality as derivatives proliferated. As mortgages - which themselves were based on a real estate bubble - were dismembered and repackaged, the resulting derivatives became detached from the value of the underlying assets. Collateralised Debt Obligations, or CDOs, were given triple-A credit ratings and traded by bankers who never saw the properties or looked at the credit profiles of the borrowers. The risk may have been spread, but the price of the risk was badly underestimated. Two weeks ago, Nell Minow of the Corporate Library proposed the Paul Volcker rule (named after the former Federal Reserve chairman) in an appearance before the same House committee: "If Paul Volcker can't understand it, it shouldn't be on the market." Greenspan admitted that he and some other really smart folks didn't understand the derivatives market they had allowed to flourish, despite the "best insights of mathematicians and finance experts," sophisticated computer modeling and at least one Nobel prize in economics: The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year because the data inputted into the risk management models generally covered only the past two decades, a period of euphoria. We have seen it over and over again in the Age of Greenspan: hedge funds got their name by hedging risks, but derivatives can be used to double down on risk just as easily. New financial instruments were declared to be so diabolically clever that they couldn't possibly fail. Sophisticated equations allowed bankers and hedge fund managers to price risk to within an inch of their lives, or so they thought; they were actually living far beyond any rational capital requirements. When Long-Term Capital Management, which hired some of those Nobel laureates, failed 10 years ago, Greenspan had to orchestrate a rescue using investment bank funds. LTCM was wound up, but its techniques spread quickly through Wall Street. Investment banks, which before the Age of Greenspan made money by managing money for clients, began trading for their own account. Managers were rewarded for taking on ever larger and more exotic risks that bore little resemblance to the underlying economic reality. One doesn't need a Nobel prize to know what brought about the collapse of this intellectual edifice. Humorist Roy Blount summed it up in a talk before an audience in Philadelphia earlier this week: "Money got too abstract, and that's why it went away"

George Bush’s environmental legacy

2008-11-21T16:44:00.001Z

A STELLAR ONE INDEED WITH the elections over, one might be forgiven for thinking that George Bush has nothing left to do. Any large or controversial measures can be undone when the new administration arrives in January. So what is there left to occupy a president except long walks and a spot of fishing? In fact, there is at least one last big environmental project that Mr Bush wants to complete: creating a vast new marine nature reserve in the Pacific. Last year, Mr Bush established the world’s largest marine protected area—Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, in north-western Hawaii. The monument became the largest single conservation area in American history, home to some 7,000 species, including the monk seal, spinner dolphins and the green sea turtle. It was a big step, but now the question is whether he can pull off the same trick on an even grander scale, by fully protecting two vast areas of the Pacific Ocean from fishing and mineral exploitation. The Bush administration will be remembered for its opposition to the Kyoto protocol, and generally dragging its feet over the whole issue of climate change. Moreover, the Environmental Protection Agency has had a troubled time under his presidency. So now the question is whether Bush can, in a final departing flourish, do something to at least partly counterbalance his dubious green record. And the press reaction to the Hawaiian reserve was so positive that he wants to do the same thing again on a grander scale. At issue are two remote, American-administered regions in the western and central Pacific totalling a vast area more than 750,000 square miles in size. This includes portions of the Northern Mariana Islands (including the 6.8-mile-deep Mariana Trench, the deepest ocean canyon in the world), Rose Atoll in American Samoa and a series of atolls and reefs known as the Line Islands. Unique and extraordinary marine wildlife flourish in these remote regions. Nearby reefs are some of the most diverse and pristine in the world, with an abundance of fish and large predators that have vanished from most other reefs in the world. If only things were as simple as drawing a line on a map: behind the proposal, controversy rages. Greens want nothing less than full protection, so that no extractive or destructive activities will be allowed: no fishing, no drilling for oil or minerals, and certainly no dumping. Papahānaumokuākea is fully protected, they say, and so should this new one be. Full protection for the reserve in the central Pacific, which encompasses an area known as the Line Islands, should present few problems. It is isolated from population centres and mostly uninhabited. But there are arguments now about the extent to which full protection around the Mariana Islands would hurt the local economy by barring fishing and energy exploration. And various interest groups are lobbying behind the scenes to weaken any protection for these islands. Work on the plan will go on right up to the final days of the administration. Indeed, Claudia McMurray, America’s assistant secretary of state for oceans, environment and science, says that although everyone is working hard to get the designation sorted out, some of the final details about management may have to be worked out by the new administration (the details of Papahānaumokuākea took five years to hammer out). But an announcement about the extent of the designation is expected any day soon. And when it arrives it will be an interesting final judgement on the extent to which Mr Bush has been able to shake off his oilman’s legacy of environmental indifference, and acquire, rather surprisingly, a green halo.

CHINA IN AFRICA

2008-11-21T16:36:00.001Z

As China wades deeper into the continent’s economies, the turbulent pull of African politics grows stronger “Adopt a low profile and never take the lead,” was an axiom of China’s elder statesman, the late Deng Xiaoping. When it comes to foreign policy, China’s leaders still usually stick to it. So it is odd, perhaps, that an African country of less than vital economic and strategic importance to China has brought it out of its shell. China’s decision on July 11th to veto an American-led resolution in the United Nations that called for sanctions against Zimbabwe was an unusual move. By voting the same way as Russia, China still managed to avoid taking the lead. But its normal preference is to abstain from voting rather than veto Western initiatives in the UN. This time it decided to make a stronger point. Chinese officials and the public generally have shown little sympathy for Western concerns about election-rigging in Zimbabwe. On the sidelines of a summit of G8 leaders in Japan this month, President Hu Jintao met South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki and relayed no more than China’s “concern” about the Zimbabwean crisis. China has avoided direct condemnation of Zimbabwe’s leader, Robert Mugabe. (His message of condolence over China’s deadly earthquake in May was politely noted by the state-controlled media.) At a summit of African leaders in Beijing in 2006 and during a week-long state visit to China in 2005, Mr Mugabe was received politely. Chinese diplomats are worried about the precedent that would have been set by the proposed UN resolution: for foreign intervention in a domestic political dispute. (China does not want any such attention focused on its own internal problems, to say nothing of its putatively internal disputes with Taiwan.) It has been similarly unsettled by charges of war crimes brought by the International Criminal Court against Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir in The Hague this week. Sudan is of considerable strategic importance to China because of its oil production, much of which China buys. But there is no sign that China’s alarm over these developments will lead to greater confrontation between it and the West over Africa. China appears as anxious as ever to convince the West that it is trying, behind the scenes, to persuade Mr al-Bashir to rein in the violence in Darfur (though it will not be helped by allegations just aired by the BBC that, in violation of a UN arms embargo, China has been supplying trucks to Sudan’s military and training its pilots in Darfur). During the build-up to the Olympic games in Beijing next month China has a particularly strong incentive to appear cooperative with the West on Sudan. It does not want another public embarrassment such as it suffered in February when Steven Spielberg, a Hollywood film director, resigned from his advisory role to the games because of China’s (harmful, as he saw it) involvement in Sudan. It was embarrassed by the discovery in South Africa in April of a shipment of Chinese small arms destined for Zimbabwe. Chinese officials said the delivery was subsequently aborted. Amid widespread Western disquiet over its engagement with Africa—especially in its willingness to turn a blind eye to corruption, authoritarianism and other political problems there—China will take some heart from a recent World Bank report that notes an “encouraging trend” in its rapidly growing economic engagement with Africa. China is helping to finance infrastructure projects in more than 35 African countries, says the report, with Zimbabwe and Sudan among the big recipients (Sudan has received about $1.3 billion from China so far). Only 7% of this finance is related to resource extraction, the bank says. The rest is for “broader development”. There will be, as the bank points out, a learning process for borrowers and financiers alike in this emerging relationship. Among issues that need to be grasped, it says, are how to enforce “environmental and social standards” in the projects concerned. China pays at least lip service to such issues, but it is far from fanatical about them. Turbulence in countries like Zimbabwe may well remind China that it is plying choppy waters in Africa. It will not be able to ignore the domestic politics of its friends there forever.

A UNIPOLAR WORLD?

2008-11-21T16:23:00.002Z

The post-war global institutions have largely worked well. But rising countries and growing threats are challenging their pre-eminence THE powerful, like the victorious, do not just write history. They grab the seats at the top tables, from the United Nations Security Council to the boards of the big international economic and financial institutions. They collude behind closed doors. They decide who can join their cosy clubs and expect the rest of the world to obey the instructions they hand down. That is how many outsiders, not just in the poor world, will see the summit that takes place from July 7th to 9th of the G8, the closest the world has to an informal (ie, self-appointed) steering group. Leaders of seven of the world’s richest democracies, plus oil-and gas-fired Russia, gather this year in Toyako, on Hokkaido in northern Japan, to ruminate on climate change, rising food and energy prices, and the best way to combat global scourges from disease to nuclear proliferation. But in an age when people, money and goods move around as never before, this little group no longer commands the heights of the global economy and the world’s financial system as the core G7 used to do when their small, purposeful gatherings of the democratic world’s consenting capitalists first got going in the 1970s. Nowadays summits produce mostly lengthy communiqués and photo-opportunities. And Russia’s slide from democracy into state-directed capitalism has lowered the club’s political tone. In an effort to show that the G8 is still up with the times, Japan, like Germany last year, has invited along for a brief chat leaders from five “outreach” countries: Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Yet this handshake between those who did best out of the 20th century and some potential shapers of the 21st leaves hanging the question of how the old world order should be adapting to the new. Might the world be better managed by such a G13? Or a G15 or G16, to include a couple of weighty Islamic states too? Or, to preserve the group’s original globe-steering purpose, by a G12 of the world’s biggest economies? Meanwhile, the global institutions set up after the second world war are also having to look hard at their own futures. Unlike the G7/8, which takes on a bit of everything, these institutions basically divide into two sorts: economic and financial, and political. At the pinnacle of world political management, but looking increasingly anachronistic, is the UN Security Council. Of its 15 members, ten rotate at the whim of the various UN regional groupings. The other five, which wield vetoes and are permanent, are America, Russia, China, Britain and France, roughly speaking the victors of the last long-ago world war. Alongside them is a secretary-general (currently Ban Ki-Moon from South Korea; this job, too, tends to go by regional turn), a vast bureaucracy at UN headquarters in New York, and hundreds of specialised agencies and offshoots (see table). The world had to be saved not just from another war, but from a repeat of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That job went to a clutch of institutions: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), jointly known as the Bretton Woods institutions after the place of their creation; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a rich-country think-tank set up in 1961; the much older central bankers’ Bank for International Settlements; and the World Trade Organisation (WTO, formerly the GATT). They have been buttressed too by conventions, conferences, courts, declarations, dispute-mechanisms, special mandates and treaties governing everything from human rights to anti-dumping complaints. The whole elaborate architecture has had extra underpinning from strong regional organisations, such as the European Union, and less elaborate ones like the African Union and the various talking-shops of Latin America, the Arab world and Asia, as well as from steadying alliances, such as NATO. As a result, there has been no return to the disastrous global conflicts of the first half of the 20th century. Yet that very success has become one of three powerful pressures to adjust the way the world is run, as new economic winners (and some new losers) demand a say. Pressure also stems from intensifying resentment and frustration. After ringing declarations on human rights and even the adoption by a UN world summit in 2005 of a “responsibility to protect” against genocide and crimes against humanity, the UN Security Council still finds itself unable to agree to do much to protect the people of Darfur, Zimbabwe, Myanmar and others from the murderous contempt of their rulers—just as in the 1990s the UN failed the genocide victims in Rwanda. If the Security Council, with a charter of high principles at its back, shows such feebleness towards tyrants (or to those who cavalierly flout nuclear treaties), doesn’t it deserve to be bypassed? John McCain, the Republican candidate for president of the United States, supports the creation of a new League of Democracies which, its boosters argue, would have not only the moral legitimacy but also the will to right the world’s wrongs effectively. The third impetus to rejig the way the world organises itself is a dawning realisation on the part of governments, rich and poor, that the biggest challenges shaping their future—climate change, the flaws and the forces of globalisation, the scramble for resources, state failure, mass terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction—often need global, not just national or regional, solutions. The shift in 21st-century economic power alone is justification for rebalancing influence in the top clubs. Much harder to figure out is which bits of the global architecture need mere tweaking, which need retooling or replacing—and who should have the right to decide. After decades of dividing the world into the rich and powerful West and the developing (or emerging) “rest”, China’s rapid growth and the economic dynamism of East Asia had led to talk of a new “Pacific” century well before the old “Atlantic” one had ended. On present trends, somewhere between 2025 and 2030 three of the world’s four largest economies will be from Asia. China will just pip America to top the global league, with India and Japan, both determined but so far unsuccessful campaigners for permanent seats on the UN Security Council, following on (though Chinese and Indians will still be, on average, much poorer than Americans or Japanese). Not unipolar but what? Yet talk of an Asian century sounds quaint. Despite America’s brief “unipolar moment” as its rival pole, the Soviet Union, collapsed, Russia has recovered to join a rising China, America, Europe and Japan in a new constellation of big powers that is based on far more than the old boot-and-rocket counts of the cold war. Bring India into the snapshot, and you capture 54% of the world’s population and 70% of GDP. Whether the leaders of this multipolar world will rub along or bash elbows remains to be seen. Globalisation’s increasingly unfettered flow of information, technology, capital, goods, services and people has helped spread opportunity and influence far and wide. To re-emergent China and Russia, add not just India but Brazil (these four bracketed by Goldman Sachs in 2001 as the upcoming BRICs), Mexico, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Australia, to name just some of the new winners as money changes pockets and the world turns faster. A modern map of power and influence should also include transformational tools such as the internet; manipulators from lobbying NGOs to terrorist groups; profit-takers such as global corporations and sovereign wealth funds; and unpredictable forces such as global financial flows. The principal characteristic of this world, argues Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations in a recent Foreign Affairs article, is not multipolarity but “nonpolarity”. Dozens of actors, exercising different kinds of power, vastly complicate the effort to find a better balance of influence and responsibility. But the excuse of complexity is no answer to the demand for equity. Some clubs have proved more responsive than others. China got a new economic start simply by ditching Marx, Lenin and Mao. But its reformers were able to tap the liberal rules-based system codified in the rules of the IMF and the World Bank (and later the WTO) for ideas as well as cash. China rejoined the bank in 1980 (the Nationalist government on Taiwan had been a founder member) just as its reforms got under way. Ironically, Communist-run China has since been one of the system’s biggest beneficiaries. But it is by no means the only one. Despite the latest stockmarket dips and credit squeezes, world income per head has increased by more over the past five years than during any other similar period on record. The IMF and the World Bank, pragmatic institutions from the outset, have adapted already, in fits and starts. In April the IMF reformed the peculiar formula by which it allocates votes and financial contributions according to economic size, reserves and other measures (see chart). China’s share of votes will increase to 3.81%, still far short of its weight in the world economy. Meanwhile, old power patterns still determine who holds the two top jobs: the bank is run by an American, the fund by a European. But a bigger problem for both organisations is relevance. Until the late 1990s the IMF, monitor of exchange rates and lender of last resort to struggling governments, had plenty of work. But emerging economies, once its chief clients and source of earnings in repaid interest and loans, are these days often awash with their own cash. Earlier this year the IMF board voted to cut staff and sell off about an eighth of its gold reserves (some 400 tonnes) to meet expected future funding shortfalls. With no obvious role in coping with the aftermath of the recent banking and stockmarket turbulence, its future role may be more as an expert economic adviser. Some worry that the world may still need a lender of last resort. Critics think the fund’s days should be numbered and its reserves put to better use for development. Still others muse that what is needed is a World Investment Organisation, to set basic rules and better track the huge and complex flows of cash that now wash around in hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, banks and financial markets. The World Bank has a more certain future, but still needs to retool. Competition has stiffened from private capital markets. Many governments that once needed the bank’s help for dams, roads and other big projects are earning plenty from the sale of raw materials. Even in Africa, the readiness of China and India to spend liberally without strings in pursuit of oil and minerals means that the Sudans and the Congos can take the bank’s cash and ignore the conditions attached. Yet the bank still has a role lending to unfashionable causes, or countries which donors neglect. It could also provide global public goods: funding energy-infrastructure and climate-change projects are two examples, agriculture another. A bit too equal While the bank and the fund are steered by their biggest shareholders, the WTO, though relying on a representative caucus of states to hammer out deals, belongs to all its members: India and Brazil, for example, are at the heart of the Doha round of trade talks. But egalitarianism can be a weakness as well as a strength. Much admired, at least by government lawyers, are the 60,000 pages of jurisprudence that govern the workings of the WTO dispute mechanism, which has helped resolve many a trade spat. The WTO ensures that members do not discriminate among each other—the best deal they offer to anyone must be extended to everyone. This has helped level the playing field and expand world trade. Russia’s is the only large economy still outside the WTO, and that is its choice. Yet those wanting to join must strike deals with each of the existing members—now a daunting 152. Operating by consensus means that the Doha “development” round has bogged down in disputes between developed and developing countries over complex, reciprocal cuts in farm subsidies and tariff barriers. The prospects for moving on to services look dim. Slow progress has helped push many to forge bilateral or regional deals instead. And if the Doha round fails completely, the recriminations could run far and wide—threatening any attempt, for example, to get agreement between the developed and developing world on new mechanisms to deal with climate change. Economic and financial power is to some extent up for bids by governments with a stake in the game, and trade rules are (arduously) negotiable. Yet the distribution of political power has proved stubbornly—debilitatingly—resistant to change. Most bitterly contested is membership of the UN Security Council, which has the right (whether exclusively or not is hotly debated) to decide what constitutes a threat to world peace and security, and what to do about it. In the UN’s other big decision-making institution, the General Assembly, all the world can have its say, and does. But here outsiders take their revenge: a caucus of mostly developing countries called the G77 (but these days comprising 130 members including China) tends to dominate and filibuster. Might it assuage resentment and improve the council’s authority and the UN’s effectiveness if America, Britain, France Russia and China invited other permanent members to join them—and considered giving up their veto? When the P5, as they are called, first grabbed the most powerful slots, the UN had 51 members; decades of decolonisation and splintering self-determination later, it has 192. The obstacles to reform grow no smaller either. Most recently a concerted effort by Brazil, Germany, India and Japan (a self-styled G4) to join the council’s permanent movers and shakers was thwarted by a combination of foot-dragging, jealousy and stiff-arming. African countries failed to agree on which of their several aspirants should join the bid. Regional rivals—Argentina and Mexico, Italy, Indonesia, Pakistan and others—lobbied to block the front-runners. China made it clear it would veto Japan; America, in supporting only Japan, helped destroy its friend’s chances. New permanent members would broaden the regional balance. That could add authority and legitimacy to council decisions. Bringing in not only nuclear-armed India, but soft-powered Japan and the rest, would undercut the notion, perpetuated by the P5, that to be a winner you need first to crash the nuclear club. But might the price of a larger, permanently more diverse council be more potential spanner-tossers and thus greater deadlock? The hope would be that once difficult outsiders got their feet permanently under the table, sharing the responsibility for managing the world would stop them protecting bad elements, as South Africa (currently a rotating member) has been doing with Zimbabwe, in part to defy the permanent five. Prising the P5 from their vetoes might, however, have adverse effects. It was dependable veto power, ensuring their vital interests were never overridden, that kept America and Russia talking at the UN—and Nikita Khrushchev shoe-banging—through the darkest episodes of the cold war. Russia will not forget the mistake of the brief Soviet boycott of the council that led to force being authorised to repel North Korea at the start of the Korean war in 1950. China shows no sign of veto self-effacement, either. But staying at the table does not guarantee agreement. The UN is deliberately an organisation of states, and states differ for reasons good and bad. George Bush went to war in Iraq without explicit backing from the Security Council (just as NATO went to war to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, despite Russia’s certain veto had the issue come to a council vote). But the council’s divisions on the most contentious issues have not prevented responsible stewardship elsewhere. A Security Council summit in 1992 agreed that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was a “threat to peace and security” to be dealt with forcibly if need be. After the attacks of September 11th 2001, new resolutions were passed to curb terrorists’ finance and keep nuclear, chemical and biological weapons out of their hands. There has been a huge increase over the past 15 years in the numbers of blue helmets, with 100,000 soldiers and police currently deployed. This is credited with helping to reduce the number of conflicts between states, as well as calming civil wars from Bosnia to Haiti, from Cambodia to Sudan, from Congo to Lebanon. Acceptance, at least politically, of a “responsibility to protect” takes the council towards territory which, earlier this decade, it would not have approached: an International Criminal Court, for example, separate from the UN but able to take its referrals, and ready to prosecute the worst crimes. Yet divisions among the P5 have often slowed deployment of peacekeepers where they are most needed, such as in Sudan’s war-torn province of Darfur. Pessimists doubt that China and Russia, both arch-defenders of the Westphalian principle that state sovereignty trumps all, will ever seriously contemplate authorising forceful intervention even to end a genocide. A new UN Human Rights Council has yet to prove it is any better than its discredited predecessor at bringing brutal governments to book. Meanwhile it took years, and North Korea’s 2006 bomb test, for China to condemn Kim Jong Il’s nuclear cheating and let the Security Council pass judgment on it. The P5 plus Germany have worked together over the past three years, slapping a series of UN resolutions and sanctions on the regime in Iran for defiance over its suspect nuclear work, yet Russia and China have doggedly watered down each text, line by line. Doing it for themselves There is much the UN Security Council will never be able to do, no matter who occupies its plushest seats. And there are lots of other ways to get useful things done these days. The internet helps campaigners on human rights, as on other issues, to get their message round the world rather effectively. Stung by constant exposure and criticism of its policy in Sudan and Darfur, China appointed a special envoy (who soon found he had a lot of explaining to do) and shifted ground on the need for a UN force, even though deployment is agonisingly slow.

ARE WE IN RECCESION?

2008-11-21T13:44:00.000Z

A new yardstick for measuring slumps is long overdue THERE has been a nasty outbreak of R-word itis. Newspapers are full of stories about which of the big economies will be first to dip into recession as a result of the credit crunch. The answer depends largely on what you mean by “recession”. Most economists assume that it implies a fall in real GDP. But this has created a lot of confusion: the standard definition of recession needs rethinking. In the second quarter of this year, America’s GDP rose at a surprisingly robust annualised rate of 3.3%, while output in the euro area and Japan fell, and Britain’s was flat. Many economists reckon that both Japan and the euro area could see a second quarter of decline in the three months to September. This, according to a widely used rule of thumb, would put them in recession, a fate which America has so far avoided. But on measures other than GDP, America has been the economic laggard over the past year. The chart looks at several different ways to judge the severity of the economic slowdown since the start of the credit crunch in August 2007. On GDP growth, America has outperformed Europe and Japan. Unemployment, however, tells a very different tale. America’s jobless rate hit 6.1% in August, up from 4.7% a year earlier, and within spitting distance of its peak of 6.3% during the previous recession after the dotcom bust. Other countries have so far published figures only for July, but their jobless rates have barely moved over the past year: Japan’s has risen by only 0.2%, the euro area’s has fallen slightly (though in absolute terms it is still a bit higher than America’s). Another yardstick, GDP per head, takes account of the fact that America’s population is rising rapidly, whereas Japan’s has started to shrink. Since the third quarter of 2007 America’s average income per person has barely increased; Japan’s has enjoyed the biggest gain. To the average person, a large rise in unemployment means a recession. By contrast, the economists’ rule that a recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of falling GDP is silly. If an economy grows by 2% in one quarter and then contracts by 0.5% in each of the next two quarters, it is deemed to be in recession. But if GDP contracts by 2% in one quarter, rises by 0.5% in the next, then falls by 2% in the third, it escapes, even though the economy is obviously weaker. In fact, America’s GDP did not decline for two consecutive quarters during the 2001 recession. However, it is not just the “two-quarter” rule that is flawed; GDP figures themselves can be misleading. The first problem is that they are subject to large revisions. An analysis by Kevin Daly, an economist at Goldman Sachs, finds that since 1999, America’s quarterly GDP growth has on average been revised down by an annualised 0.4 percentage points between the first and final estimates. In contrast, figures in the euro area and Britain have been revised up by an average of 0.5 percentage points. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that America’s recent growth will be revised down. An alternative measure, gross domestic income (GDI), should, in theory, be identical to GDP. Yet real GDI has risen by a mere 0.1% since the third quarter of 2007, well below the 1% gain in GDP. A study by economists at the Federal Reserve found that GDI is often more reliable than GDP in spotting the start of a recession.

The Sources of Growth

2008-11-19T08:35:00.001Z

I have watched with keen interest the claims by this Government for the relative economic success this country is enjoying over the last decade. Mr Arthur Kennedy must be told that the best performing sectors that are driving the growth is the result of at least two decades reforms. The explosive growth in the Financial sector is the result of the various FINSAP reforms over the years coupled with the coincidence of good reforms in Nigeria. The growth in the service sector especially in the Tourism and Telecom sub sectors are the fruits of about a decade of persistent reforms and innovations which the NPP alone cannot claim for itself. Lets try and do a simple arithmetic of the $16bn nominal GDP being bandied about.Out of this figure , we are told $4bn comes from inwards remittances of underemployed Ghanaian living abroad while the telecom sector alone contributes not less than $3bn to the economy.The financial sector contributes not less than $3bn while the mining sector add about $1.5bn.These figures adds up to $11.5bn. These figures account for the lopsided nature of the growth which is the result of the widening income inequality as noted by the 2007 Human Development Report. the NPP has to be more ambitious and stop this glorification mediocrity.

Bush cheers “free enterprise” as US capitalism goes bust

2008-11-17T12:28:00.000Z

US President George W. Bush came to Wall Street Thursday to deliver a speech extolling the virtues of the "free enterprise" system even as multiple economic indicators made it clear that the so-called "magic of the market" is spelling misery for millions more working people in the US and around the globe. Bush delivered his paean to American capitalism at Federal Hall, just a stone's throw from the New York Stock Exchange. The historic building was the site of the inauguration of George Washington and the first sessions of the US Congress. The august setting stood in stark contrast to the character of the select audience, which, in the gap between its ideological proclivities and socioeconomic reality, resembled a meeting of the flat earth society. A total of 175 people turned out for the session, organized by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank that specializes in demonizing the poor while promoting tax cuts, financial deregulation, the dismantling of social programs and the decimation of public education. The lame-duck president timed his speech for the eve of this weekend's G20 summit in Washington, which will bring together heads of state from the world's major economies for the ostensible purpose of working out a common agenda for confronting the global financial meltdown. Behind the banalities and boosterism, Bush's message to those assembling in Washington was clear: Nothing will be accepted that interferes with the unfettered accumulation of wealth by America's financial elite and the defense of their interests, regardless the cost to the world's population. Bush effectively acknowledged at the outset that the gathering of presidents and prime ministers this weekend will accomplish nothing—and that his administration will block any attempt to reach binding agreements. "The undertaking is too large to be accomplished in a single session," he said. "The issues are too complex, the problem is too significant to try to solve, or to come up with reasonable recommendations in just one meeting." Rather, he insisted, the summit should be dedicated to "developing principles," above all, the reaffirmation that "free market principles offer the surest path to lasting prosperity." Given the state of the economy, confronting its most profound crisis since the 1930s, Bush's remarks appeared delusional. He spoke in the wake of official figures showing that more than half a million American workers filed for unemployment benefits the week before, and over 85,000 homes had been foreclosed in October. The Treasury Department announced a record budget deficit of $237.2 billion for the month of October, and just a day before, its secretary, former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, was forced to make an emergency announcement that the $700 billion approved by Congress to buy up "toxic" mortgage-backed assets must now be redirected to prop up not only the major banks, but also the failing consumer credit industry. Bush felt compelled to acknowledge that "in the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and the right are equating the free enterprise system with greed and exploitation and failure." While admitting some isolated failings, Bush rejected any indictment of the capitalist system. "The crisis was not a failure of the free market system," he proclaimed. "And the answer is not to try to reinvent that system. It is to fix the problems we face, make the reforms we need, and move forward with the free-market principles that have delivered prosperity and hope to people all across the globe." The "fixes" that Bush proposed were so vague as to be meaningless: "improving accounting rules," ensuring that "financial products are properly regulated" and taking a "fresh look at the rules governing market manipulation and fraud." His faith in the "free market," however, remained rock solid: "Like any other system designed by man, capitalism is not perfect [presumably, only the eternal free market created by God in the hereafter can attain such a state]. It can be subject to excesses and abuse. But it is by far the most efficient and just way of structuring an economy. At its most basic level, it offers people the freedom to choose where they work and what they do." He continued: "Free market capitalism is more than an economic theory. It is the engine of social mobility—the highway to the American Dream." "Freedom to choose where they work?" Whom does he think he's kidding? According to official figures, 10 million American workers are now out of work and cannot find jobs. Their ranks have been swollen by 1 million in the last year alone. If one counts those who are underemployed—involuntarily relegated to part-time jobs—and so-called "discouraged" workers, who have been dropped from the jobless rolls, fully one of eight not only can't choose where he or she works, but cannot get full-time work at all. And this is only the beginning, with mass layoffs being announced daily, threatening to create an army of unemployed larger than any seen since the Great Depression. As for free-market capitalism serving as an "engine of social mobility," this movement has increasingly been in opposite directions, with those at the top of the social ladder increasing their share of total wealth to unprecedented levels, while the vast majority, the working people, have seen their incomes stagnate and decline. The gap between wealth and poverty in the US is now greater than at any time since the 1920s. It is this amassing of wealth by those at the top that Bush is determined to defend. As the Washington Post pointed out Friday, among the proposals being put forward by other heads of state attending the Washington summit that "Bush and his aides do not favor" is the call for "restrictions on executive pay." Bush was forced to admit that even his commitment to the free market has limits. "We are faced with the prospect of a global meltdown," he said. "And so we've responded with bold measures. I'm a market-oriented guy, but not when I'm faced with the prospect of a global meltdown." These "bold measures"—backed not only by Bush but also by President-elect Barack Obama—have amounted to the looting of trillions of dollars in social wealth in order to bail out the country's biggest banks and Wall Street finance houses. Hundreds of billions of dollars of this money is flowing directly into bonuses for financial executives and dividends for wealthy shareholders, while facilitating the consolidation of banks and the further concentration of wealth. "Free-market principles" continue to apply in full force, however, to workers who have lost their jobs and to families facing foreclosure on their homes. For them there is no bailout, only the prospect of being forced to pay for the trillions lavished on Wall Street through further attacks on living standards, jobs and social programs. Earlier in his presidency, Bush restricted his public appearances largely to military audiences, bound by command discipline to treat him with respect. Now, in the waning days of his presidency, he apparently feels comfortable only in addressing small groups of right-wing ideologues like those assembled by the Manhattan Institute. For good reason. Outside of this rarified atmosphere, the popularity of capitalism and the "free market" is sinking to that of the outgoing president himself, whose poll numbers have plumbed depths never reached by any previous occupant of the White House. Millions are indeed beginning to identify the "free enterprise system" with "greed and corruption and failure." As the Obama administration takes office and seeks to defend this same system, popular anger over the social conditions created by capitalism must inevitably take the form of mass struggles against his government.

TENSIONS AT G-20 AS EMERGING POWERS BECOME ASSERTIVE

2008-11-17T12:21:00.001Z

AS LITTLE IS OFFERED The G-20 summit to discuss the world financial turmoil concluded on Saturday after meeting for less than six hours in Washington. All of the leaders acknowledged the need for international cooperation amid the worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, but the joint communiqué contained little in the way of concrete measures to stabilise financial markets and reverse the rapid slide into global recession. Behind the public façade of goodwill and collaboration aimed at reassuring global markets, sharp tensions between the major powers were barely concealed. French President Nicolas Sarkozy led the push by European countries for "a new international financial architecture" to rein in the excesses of Anglo-Saxon financial deregulation, while US President George Bush insisted any changes should not inhibit "free-market capitalism". China and India pressed for greater representation in global institutions. Lesser economies, such as Australia, Argentina, South Africa and Indonesia, struggled to have their voices heard at all. The G-20 statement congratulated the participants for their "urgent and exceptional measures to support the global economy and stabilise financial markets" and urged that these efforts continue. But for all the talk of international cooperation, the G-20 leaders decided to leave matters largely in the hands of the individual national regulatory bodies that failed so spectacularly to foresee or deal with the current financial turmoil. "At the same time," the communiqué added, "we must lay the foundation for reform to help to ensure that a global crisis, such as this one, does not happen again." To say the least, it is somewhat premature to speak of a future financial crisis when the present one is far from over. Last Friday, the eurozone officially entered recession. Japan's third quarter figures released today showed a second quarter of negative growth. Both the International Monetary Fund and World Bank are forecasting recession for the world's developed economies next year. And fears of recession are already feeding back into the financial markets and contributing to unprecedented volatility on share markets worldwide. As for the future, the statement declares: "Our work will be guided by a shared belief in market principles, open trade and investment regimes, and effectively regulated financial markets foster the dynamism, innovation, and entrepreneurship that are essential for economic growth, employment, and poverty reduction." In other words, at the insistence of the US in particular, the G-20 leaders upheld the same "free market" program that produced the financial turmoil in the first place. The European powers, on the other hand, were keen to include a condemnation of the lack of regulation in the US that triggered the crisis. The joint statement, after blaming the crisis on unsound risk management practices, excessive leverage, complex and opaque financial products, politely refers to regulators "in some advanced countries" that did not "adequately appreciate and address the risks building up in financial markets". And so, in response to this total failure of oversight, no one was held accountable. The joint statement is riddled with contradictions that reflect the competing economic interests of the major powers. The vagueness of its wording prompted former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson to declare: "This is plain vanilla stuff they could have agree on without holding a meeting. What's new, except that this is the G-20 instead of the G-7?" French President Sarkozy suggested that even this formal general agreement was only reached after heated debate. "I am a friend of the United States, but if you ask, was it easy? No, it wasn't easy," he said after the meeting. On each of the limited points of substance, it is clear bitter haggling took place. Fearful that global recession would give rise to trade war, the G-20 included a clause agreeing not to initiate new protectionist measures over the next 12 months and to make efforts to restart the stalled Doha round of trade talks. According to the Washington Post, Sarkozy "was the slowest to commit to a moratorium on protectionist measures and a reaffirmation of free trade". A senior diplomat complained to the newspaper: "Here you had everyone at the table trying to come together, and Sarkozy was out there trying to write the world according to Sarkozy. It was not helpful." The last effort to restart the stalled World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha round collapsed in June amid sharp disagreements over demands by developing countries, such as India and Brazil, for the reduction of agricultural subsidies by the US and the European Union. France in particular strongly opposes cuts to subsidies. Progress in restarting the trade talks is unlikely despite the fact that the World Bank is predicting global trade will contract next year for the first time since 1982. Already the economic downturn in the US, Europe and Japan is hitting exporting countries like India and China. In the sphere of financial regulation, Britain and France claimed to have made some gains. The British call for major international banks to be overseen by a "college of supervisors" was adopted. French President Sarkozy claimed a victory by getting international oversight on credit rating agencies included. "It is historic to have here in the United States an American administration—where Republicans and Democrats have refused to move on issues such as these—to have agreed to a shift," he said. Senior Bush administration officials, however, downplayed the remarks saying that the agreement did not represent a "pro-regulatory shift". Moreover, in a significant concession to the US, the statement declared that any changes had to ensure that "regulation is efficient, does not stifle innovation, and encourages expanded trade in financial products and services." This is simply a recipe for more of the same, given that "innovation" in financial products and the expanded trade in financial products and services had their origins in attempts to sidestep regulatory regimes. The whole system of "shadow banking" through the establishment of Special Investment Vehicles was undertaken precisely to get around regulations governing capital adequacy ratios. Likewise, there was general agreement at the G-20 summit on the need for further fiscal measures by governments to stimulate economic growth. IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn called for coordinated stimulus spending amounting to at least 2 percent of global gross domestic product. The US, however, opposed any coordinated plan, including the setting of stimulus targets. The joint communiqué simply calls for individual countries to take action, "as appropriate". The inclusion of so-called emerging economies, such as China, India, Brazil, Russia and Saudi Arabia, in the summit was presented as an effort to take account of the shifting world economic realities. As French President Sarkozy declared: "America is the No. 1 power in the world. Is it the only power? No, it isn't. We are in a new world." Chinese President Hu Jintao called for "a new international financial order that is fair, just, inclusive and orderly." Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that any new architecture had to be "genuinely multilateral with adequate representation from countries reflecting changes in economic realities." Very limited concessions were made to these appeals. The membership of the Financial Stability Forum—a Swiss-based body of finance ministers and central bankers from selected countries—is to be enlarged. But any changes to the IMF and other institutions established as part of the post-World War II Bretton Woods arrangements have been put off to the "medium term". In part, the involvement of countries such as China and Saudi Arabia was to encourage them to use their large foreign currency reserves to help bolster the IMF funds needed to bail out a growing list of countries. Having committed $100 billion to the IMF, Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso told the media: "It doesn't have to be Japan alone that would provide such funds. Oil-producing countries, China and other countries that have ample reserves could also make their contributions." However, China and Saudi Arabia are facing their own economic difficulties, as exports are plummetting. China only recently announced a package of more than half a trillion dollars to stimulate its slowing economy. President Hu remained pointedly silent on any Chinese commitment to the IMF. In Saudi Arabia, official unemployment is now 11 percent. Saudi Finance Minister Ibrahim al-Assaf told Reuters: "There were lots of rumours that we were coming here to pay the bill; there is no such thing." As for allowing the emerging economies to have a greater say in global financial institutions, Japanese Prime Minister Aso declared: "I don't think it's something that should be achieved today or tomorrow. It needs to be worked out over time." Japan is particularly concerned about the rise of rival China as an economic power in North East Asia and does not want its present advantage in international bodies undermined. Despite continuing tensions and lack of concrete measures, President Bush declared that it had been a "very productive summit". Japanese Prime Minister Aso also put a brave face on the outcome, declaring: "It does no good to panic in a crisis, and that is proven by the Great Depression of 1929. Today things are entirely different... we have a framework for cooperation." However, the G-20 leaders are in no hurry to reconvene. The next meeting will be in London in the northern spring, by April 30, 2009, to review the implementation of the decisions agreed on in Washington. By that time, the majority of the world economy will have entered recession—possibly the deepest in the post-war period—and, if the last five months are any guide, a new series of financial problems may well have emerged.

A NEW ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT THE MAJORITY

2008-11-14T11:23:00.005Z

THE LEADERS SHOULD WEAR SACKCLOTH AND ASHES AND GO THERE WITH A HEAVY HEART.........Maynard Keynes before the first Bretton Woods

IT IS tempting to dismiss the upcoming G20 meeting as a piece of political theatre. Presidents and prime ministers from a score of rich and emerging economies will descend on Washington, DC, ostensibly to remake the rules of global finance. Several have talked grandly of a sequel to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which created the post-war system of fixed exchange rates and established the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. That is nonsense. The original Bretton Woods lasted three weeks and was preceded by more than two years of technical preparation. Today’s crisis may be the gravest since the Depression, but global finance will not be remade in a five-hour powwow hosted by a lame-duck president after less preparation than many corporate board meetings. Yet for three reasons it is still a meeting worth having.

The first is that this could mark the beginning of a better multilateral economic system. The G20, created after the emerging-market crises a decade ago, is not perfect for today’s problems. It excludes a big economy with an admired system of financial regulation (Spain) but includes a mid-sized country that has become irrelevant to global finance because of its own mismanagement (Argentina). Still, the G20 includes most of the key parts of the rich and emerging world, making it a better forum for global economic co-operation than the G7 group of rich countries, which has until now held the stage.

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Don’t just stand there

In the short term that co-operation, and this weekend’s meeting, should focus on the second good reason for the Washington summit: crisis management. Although the panic in the credit markets shows signs of abating, the economic news gets ever grimmer. Global demand is slumping as rich economies plunge into what, collectively, could be their deepest recession since the 1930s. Pernicious deflation, though still unlikely, is no longer an idle risk. Emerging economies are being hit hard by weakening exports and the collapse of private capital flows. The G20 summiteers cannot prevent this, but they can stave off a slump with zealous and co-ordinated action to prop up domestic demand and provide resources to cash-strapped emerging economies.

Some countries understand the urgency. China’s stimulus plan, even if it is a little less dramatic than first trumpeted, is an important step . Others, such as Germany, are being woefully timid. A collective commitment by those who can afford it will pack more punch than individual initiatives. Useful too, would be a pledge to cushion the slump in private capital flows to emerging economies, through both central-bank swap lines and the IMF. Countries with ample reserves, particularly China, Japan and the oil exporters, should promise now, and without preconditions, that they will lend to the IMF if it needs cash in the coming months. The G20 should also pledge its unequivocal support for free trade—a pledge that would gain credence if the leaders made a commitment to complete the Doha round of trade talks.

But what of the larger ambitions of “fixing” global finance? Here the temptation for hollow promises is greatest of all. The summiteers can make progress, but only if they temper their hyperbole with realism and humility.

International finance cannot just be “fixed”, because the system is a tug-of-war between the global capital markets and national sovereignty. As cross-border financial flows have expanded and big financial institutions have far outgrown their domestic markets, finance has become one of the most globalised parts of the world economy. At the same time, finance is inherently unstable, so the state has to play a big role in making it safer by lending in a crisis in return for regulation and oversight. Governments broadly welcome the benefits of global finance, yet they are not prepared to set up either a global financial regulator, which would interfere deep inside their markets, or a global lender of last resort. Instead, regulated financial firms are overseen by disparate national supervisors (in America they are sometimes state-based). The IMF helps cash-strapped countries, but the fund was conceived in an era when capital flows were restrained. It is puny relative to the size of global markets today.

This tug-of-war helped create today’s mess. Disparate rules led to loopholes and “regulatory arbitrage”. Many emerging economies sought to protect themselves against sudden outflows of foreign capital by building up vast foreign-exchange reserves. That fuelled the global credit bubble. Given today’s crisis, the incentives to amass reserves have only grown.

The contradictory desires for national sovereignty and global capital markets limit the room for an overhaul. For all the grand rhetoric, no politician is proposing to cede sovereignty to a global regulator, let alone create a true global lender of last resort. Nor is anyone proposing a wholesale effort to curb capital flows (which is just as well). With no great design on the drawing board, it is better to concentrate on the more modest goal of improving the current muddled contraption through a series of politically feasible enhancements that together could amount to a third justification for this meeting.

Refit the existing engine

One example is Gordon Brown’s idea of a “college of supervisors” to oversee the biggest financial firms. Another is a global set of norms on what should be regulated and how: from hedge funds to leverage limits, national regulators would do a better job if they acted in concert. By all means start to look at schemes to revamp the IMF by scaling back Europe’s presence and enhancing emerging economies’ clout. But it would be a mistake to rely only on the IMF. The Fed’s new swap lines with other central banks are an important reassurance for countries that face a liquidity squeeze; those swap lines deserve to be systematised and broadened.

Modest as they sound, such repairs will be difficult and time-consuming. This summit should get them off to a start. It won’t earn anyone a place in the history books alongside John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. But it would be a lot more useful than more gusts of grandiose rhetoric.

ANOTHER BRETTON WOODS

2008-11-14T11:20:00.002Z

..... More winners this time?

AFRICA WILL NOT BE THERE BUT WE WILL BEAR THE BRUNT

This weekend President Bush will host an economic summit of the G-20 nations. This summit has been compared to the conference at Bretton Woods, NH that convened in 1944 to rebuild the global financial system after WWII. Unfortunately, the most important reform to come out of that conference so long ago does not appear to be on the agenda of this latest version.

The original Bretton Woods conference was convened primarily to structure the monetary system that would prevail after the war. The desire for a stable monetary system grew out of the experience of the 1930s competitive devaluations and high trade tariffs. Many at the time rightly came to associate these devaluations and high tariffs with war. Freer trade and a stable monetary system were associated with peace.

The result of the first Bretton Woods conference was a system that pegged the US dollar to gold with the other major currencies pegged to the dollar. This system, while having many flaws, was a source of economic stability for 26 years. Other periods of fixed exchange rates (primarily fixed to gold) also produced more stable economic systems than floating rate regimes. This stability can be observed in the low volatility of commodity prices during the fixed periods. During the period of the pure gold standard from 1880-1913 (when the Federal Reserve was established) the standard deviation of commodity prices was roughly 4.5. During the free float period from 1914-1926 the standard deviation at least doubled (there are differences depending on which commodity index is used). During the Bretton Woods era from 1945 to 1971 commodity price volatility was reduced again to a standard deviation of about 8. Since 1971 volatility has again risen to about 15.

If the goal is more stability in the economic system, this new conference must begin to address the exchange rate system. Reducing the volatility of exchange rates and therefore commodity prices is essential to reducing the risk associated with international trade. Billions of dollars have been lost over the last few months alone by companies attempting, unsuccessfully, to hedge exchange rate and commodity price risk. UAL reported a $544 million loss from fuel hedges gone wrong. Citic Pacific Ltd. Lost $1.9 billion from hedging activities related to the Australian dollar. Northwest Airlines took a $410 million write down from losses on fuel hedges. Verasun lost $100 million from hedging the price of corn and ultimately filed bankruptcy. Sadia, Brazil’s second largest food company posted a $410 million loss from currency hedging activities and had their credit rating downgraded. While some of these losses were due to actions outside company hedging policies, they wouldn’t have happened if the need to hedge were eliminated or reduced.

Expectations for the conference are being downplayed and the goals minimized with the strengthening of the IMF seemingly the only concrete expectation. Most of the participant countries seem more interested in regulatory reform and that is certainly necessary and desirable. Even during the stable periods previously mentioned, there were banking crises here in the US. Even in a stable monetary environment, fractional reserve banking has the potential to destabilize. Based on recent experience with leverage, one would think that increasing bank capital requirements is one item that could be agreed upon. Other ideas, such as closer supervision of hedge funds and credit rating agencies, may not be necessary if monetary reform and banking reform are properly addressed.

The global imbalances much discussed over the last few years are exactly what the IMF was designed to address. When the IMF was founded along with the World Bank, the first Bretton Woods conference placed them in the context of a stable monetary system. Reforming the IMF without reforming the monetary system will not yield a more stable system. We would have to depend on the IMF not only to anticipate problems but also to act on them in a politically charged environment. The performance of the IMF since the fall of the first Bretton Woods agreement suggests that is too much to ask.

Monetary reform will not be easy. China and most of the emerging Asian economies will fight hard to maintain a currency advantage that they see as vital to the growth of exports that have fueled their past growth. The US will be reluctant to agree to a system that weakens the role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The Europeans will press for a greater role for the Euro in international trade. These three currency blocs will all have their own agendas but the current global economic slowdown may be the perfect opportunity to address the issue of monetary reform. Global economic cooperation is no longer optional; this crisis has affected every region of the world.

Over the last 60 years we have witnessed a movement toward freer trade, freer markets and freer movement of capital that has raised living standards around the world. That movement accelerated over the last 30 years and the reduction in world wide poverty during that period is nothing short of astounding. It is critical that we construct a global monetary system that provides a stable structure within which we can extend this record and realize the full benefits of the free market.

The Unrepentant capitalist

2008-11-14T09:38:00.006Z

....Still preaching their free-market vice On Thursday 13 Nov outgoing US president addressed the Manhattan Institute ,a Free marketeer think tank during which he stubbornly defended the 'virtues' of unfettered capitalism. bereft of humility and realism the worst president in the US history went ahead to proselytize to the rest of the world how we should all converge and worship avidly at the alter of capitalism. Mr. Bush is convinced that it is the only hope for mankind if were are to make material and welfare progress. Admittedly he proposed a better supervisory regime to safeguard the system , even though that comes with caveat; no regulation must alter the system. This is a time for new thinking on the future of economic policy and shed the old ways that have domintaed the world for the last 30 decades and occassionally ends in tears and destroys lives. sure capitalism has its many virtues and dont let think its alien to any sovciety but western ones. All societties have engaged in capitalist systems that have worked to thier benefit ver millenia, hoewevr the extreme form we are experiencing will ultimately lead to our collective destruction as we have found. The excesses of capitalism is too potent , its drowns out reason and moderation and usually ends us in misery The other side of the debate that espouses moderated capitalism should not allow the extremists to continue preaching their vice but take the stage and make the arguments that will definitely prevail because of its reasonableness. The likes of Bush and his cronies should not be allowed to get tell us this failure is only a hic-up and that we should prepare to resume business as usual. the status quo must change

CLARITY AND SIMPLICITY WINS THE DAY FOR NDOUM

2008-10-31T11:47:00.002Z

>>>> IN A COMPETITIVE DEBATE Many people around the world world see Ghana as a ripe democracy despite its many flaws and shortcomings. this was shown when a debate was organized by the Institute of Economic Affairs for four of the 8 presidential candidates who have filed to contest the upcoming elections Even though most commentators have dismissed it as something less than a "Debate" The stage was all set for the four presidential candidates to do verbal battle. A lot was expected from them , particularly , the assumed front runners Akuffo Addo and Atta Mills. However the debate was set up in a way that some had everything to lose and others have everything to gain. Paa Kwesi Ndoum was in a special position

2008-10-30T09:14:00.000Z

WHY THE CENTRAL BANK WILL NOT LOWER INETEREST RATE

2008-10-23T12:58:00.002Z

Even in the face of Impending Crisis I can bet my last Ghana Pesewa on it that the outcome of the ongoing Monetary policy will not lead to the lowering of of the Prime rate.

WHY NOT LET THEM FAIL

2008-10-23T12:49:00.004Z

THE MORAL OF THE MIGHTY BAIL-OUT

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone(1). The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services - such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater - that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.

The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation.

Gordon Brown, for example, was as much in denial about financial realities as any toxic debt trader. In June last year, during his Mansion House speech, he boasted that 40 per cent of the world’s foreign equities are now traded here. “I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London.”(2) The financial sector’s success had come about, he said, partly because the government had taken “a risk-based regulatory approach”. In the same hall three years before, he pledged that “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”(3). Can anyone, surveying this mess, now doubt the value of the precautionary principle?

Ecology and economy are both derived from the Greek word oikos - a house or dwelling. Our survival depends upon the rational management of this home: the space in which life can be sustained. The rules are the same in both cases. If you extract resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment, your stock will collapse. That’s another noun which reminds us of the connection. The OED gives 69 definitions of stock. When it means a fund or store, the word evokes the trunk - or stock - of a tree, “from which the gains are an outgrowth”(4). Collapse occurs when you prune the tree so heavily that it dies. Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows.

The two crises feed each other. As a result of Iceland’s financial collapse, it is now contemplating joining the European Union, which means surrendering its fishing grounds to the Common Fisheries Policy. Already the prime minister Geir Haarde has suggested that his countrymen concentrate on exploiting the ocean(5). The economic disaster will cause an ecological disaster.

Normally it’s the other way around. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond shows how ecological crisis is often the prelude to social catatrosphe(6). The obvious example is Easter Island, where society disintegrated soon after the population reached its highest historical numbers, the last trees were cut down and the construction of stone monuments peaked. The island chiefs had competed to erect ever bigger statues. These required wood and rope (made from bark) for transport and extra food for the labourers. As the trees and soils on which the islanders depended disappeared, the population crashed and the survivors turned to cannibalism. (Let’s hope Iceland doesn’t go the same way.) Diamond wonders what the Easter islander who cut down the last palm tree might have thought. “Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees!’? Or: ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood.’? Or: ‘We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter … your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering’?”(7).

Ecological collapse, Diamond shows, is as likely to be the result of economic success as of economic failure. The Maya of Central America, for example, were among the most advanced and successful people of their time. But a combination of population growth, extravagant construction projects and poor land management wiped out between 90 and 99% of the population. The Mayan collapse was accelerated by “the competition among kings and nobles that led to a chronic emphasis on war and erecting monuments rather than on solving underlying problems”(8). Does any of this sound familiar?

Again, the largest monuments were erected just before the ecosystem crashed. Again, this extravagance was partly responsible for the collapse: trees were used for making plaster with which to decorate their temples. The plaster became thicker and thicker as the kings sought to outdo each other’s conspicuous consumption.

Here are some of the reasons why people fail to prevent ecological collapse. Their resources appear at first to be inexhaustible; a long-term trend of depletion is concealed by short-term fluctuations; small numbers of powerful people advance their interests by damaging those of everyone else; short-term profits trump long-term survival. The same, in all cases, can be said of the collapse of financial systems. Is this how human beings are destined to behave? If we cannot act until stocks - of either kind - start sliding towards oblivion, we’re knackered.

But one of the benefits of modernity is our ability to spot trends and predict results. If fish in a depleted ecosystem grow by 5% a year and the catch expands by 10% a year, the fishery will collapse. If the global economy keeps growing at 3% a year (or 1700% a century) it too will hit the wall.

I’m not going to suggest, as some scoundrel who shares a name with me did on these pages last year(9), that we should welcome a recession. But the financial crisis provides us with an opportunity to rethink this trajectory; an opportunity which is not available during periods of economic success. Governments restructuring their economies should read Herman Daly’s book Steady-State Economics(10).

As usual I haven’t left enough space to discuss this, so the details will have to wait for another column. Or you can read the summary published by the Sustainable Development Commission(11). But what Daly suggests is that nations which are already rich should replace growth (”more of the same stuff”) with development (”the same amount of better stuff”). A steady state economy has a constant stock of capital maintained by a rate of throughput no higher than the ecosystem can absorb. The use of resources is capped and the right to exploit them is auctioned. Poverty is addressed through the redistribution of wealth. The banks can lend only as much money as they possess.

Alternatively, we can persist in the magical thinking whose results have just come crashing home. The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires. Now we must learn to live in the real world.

ECONOMICS DEDATE DROWNED OUT

2008-10-22T11:10:00.003Z

In the current era of global financial crisis , its amazing how petty politicking has overshadowed the crucial concerns of ordinary people in the electioneering campaign. Instead of the the "clean and issue based" campaign we were promised what we have is the traditional mudslinging and dirty politicking by the 2 major parties. fanned by the media the whole nation is engrossed in the lowest common denominator game of who is doing most of the insulting and whose insult is worst.

Technology and the credit cruch

2008-10-22T10:43:00.002Z

Will the credit crunch and the impending Recession affect Technology Innovation? Here in Ghana we have benefited in a limited degree from the gilded age in terms of technology We have seen enormous expenditure on research and development over the last decade after the Correction of the Dot Com Bubble that yielded some exciting and pretty useful technologies. Computing power has increased and more can now be done thanks to the availability of easy,cheap tech With the expected downturn in the economy most corporations will cut their R&D budgets

THE GULF IS WIDENING

2008-10-22T09:46:00.003Z

Inequality in the Ghanaian Economy is Getting Worse ...... and it Poses a lot of danger The 2008 edition of the Human Development Report gave some interesting illuminations on the direction Ghana is heading in its socio-economic development. One of the most critical concerns thrown up by the Index was the level of income inequality that characteristic the Ghanaian Economy. The non-redistributive growth we have had over the last 8 years have continued and even worsen. The HDI only confirms in scintific terms what we experince and notice arround us everyday in the streets and in the sqaulid villages and impoverished communities around the country.

THE COALITION OF WINNERS

2008-10-22T07:51:00.004Z

The Great and the Good of the Current Ghanaian Society Tightly Sympathetic to The elitist Sections of the Country In tune with the general trend of our society, a new culture of elitist patronage by the people in power. This presidency and their Strategist have done very well in drawing some very key people in society into its fold. When the president announced the nominees for National Awards this year, one could not help but notice the conscious efforts of the Government to reward and also tap into the popularity some particular individuals.This Government realizes how important it is to appeal to the masses through the patronage of the people the masses adore. They are acute aware of how quickly governments becomes popular through their actions or inaction. So they cultivate the popular figures in society who have a dedicated fan base and influence. The national awards nominees was virtually a roster of who is popular in Ghana. it did not in practice have anything to do with achievement or excellence.

GHANA BREAKS RANKS WITH ECOWAS OVER EPA

2008-10-01T17:22:00.002Z

... Further Sign of the Excessive Western Orientations of Kuffour's administration

THE LOOMING DANGER

2008-09-19T17:06:00.006Z

.... Without a Dramatic Change , this years elections will definitely be violent The whole country has decided to engage ourselves in self-delusion ,extolling our infinite virtues and non-violent nature. But we are definitely wrong as we have demonstrated our vile side time and again.Most of our leaders have simply closed their eyes to the glaring truth about what is about to hit us and instead engaged themselves in further self disillusionment.The signs are all clear that there is a massive potential for this terms election to be violent and riddled with problems. this elections will surely test the deepness and richness of our young democracy. The signs are so clear as events in the electioneering campaign unfolds. There have been violence all over the country associated with the elections. There is so much at stake in this elections and the direction of governance over the last few years makes most politicians think its a zero-sum game:winners take everything and losers take nothing.

WHAT GHANA MUST LEARN FROM AMERICA ON CAPITALISM

2008-09-19T17:06:00.002Z

... UNFETTERED FREE MARKET IS SUICIDAL Within a matter of i week the Republican(they are puritan capitalists) Governed US has dramatically moved against the tenets of their ideology and saved the American financial system by acquiring majority shares in Major banks that were in danger of failing. But here in Ghana the government does not protect business in trouble nor does it protect the economic interest of Ghanaian s o the pretext of " business is not the business of government" They even go further to divest well performing national assets to foreigners.

WE WILL REVERSE SALE OF GT

2008-08-07T13:18:00.002Z

CPP Declares As the current controversy surrounding the sale of Ghana Telecom becomes more confusing and complicated by the day, the CPP has told Vodafone that it risks losing its investment if they go ahead to sign this stinking deal. Citing precedents from Nigeria and pointing out the obvious anomalies in the contract, the CPP made it clear that if it won power it will not condone with the disposal of such a vital national asset in such a manner.

KUFFOUR SHOWS 'MERCY'

2008-07-15T14:53:00.000Z

... Vague and Tentative Package to mitigate hardships The president announced a package yesterday to ameliorate the hardships being suffered by most Ghanaians as a result of increases in the prices of fuels and food grains. Giving a background to the crisis , the president indicated that the import bill for petroleum products has increased from $550m to $2.1bn between 2002-2007.He also pointed to the record price of crude oil on futures market coated at $135 per barrel. To back up his claims he further cited the food riots in other parts of the world especially in Africa. In order to make lives better for suffering Ghanaians the Government has announced some measures These include The removal of two forms of taxes on pre-mix fuels and marine gas oil. Reduction in the excise taxes on desiel Total suspension of tariffs on imported grains Subsidization of fertilisers.

POLICE FORCE DEEPLY INVOLVED IN DRUGS

2008-07-15T14:18:00.000Z

... $6m worth of cocaine missing from police exhibit room. The Government has reacted angrily to an attempt by the police service to cover up its culpability in the case of the missing cocaine from the exhibit room at the police headquarters. The Government had set up a committee headed by the CPP MP ,Hon Kojo Armah to look into the case.The Armah committee submitted a report that described in sordid details ,the incompetence and deep corruption in the police service even at the Headquarters . The Committee had been formed to look into the case of the disappearance of $6m worth of cocaine from the exhibit vault at the Police Headquarters in Accra .The committee's report revealed some very disturbing incompetence and sleaze especially in the war on drugs .There were even allegations of the police complicity and corroboration in the drug plague . In a posture characteristic of this Government ,there has a disturbing lack of decisive action or any strong show of leadership in this matter as it is with other issues.The head of the police service under whose very nose this abberation happened is still at post while none of the officers in charge of the case has had any action taken against them. This indeed is very worrying given the threats to our democracy and security staring us in the face if this country becomes a drug hub in the region.According to the UN agency leading the fight against drug trafficking and its related crimes ,Ghana has become the major transit point for cocaine and heroine smuggling between South America ,South Asia as countries of origin and Europe and America as destinations. The sordid happenings in high places in relation to the drug scandal probably shows that the criminals have succeeded in infiltrating ,co-opting and corrupting our security services and other Government officials. In a weak state like Ghana it will definitely lead to collapse of the state leading lawlessness and conflict .

NDC AND NPP ENGAGED IN POLITICAL PINPONG WITH DEEP ISSUES

2008-07-09T11:08:00.001Z

In quintesential partisan poltical fashion ,the NPP and NDC have duly resumed their unproductive shouting match.The NPP organised a press conference on 17th may to react to the issues that were raised at the launch of the NDC campaign a week before . The NPP's major issue was to debunk the points raised by the NDC particularly the Government's handling of the drug menace and whether it is relevant to make the comparison of records the basis of electioneering campaign.The main speaker at the NPP press conference ,Mr. Mac Manu angrily attacked the NDC for daring to challenge the NPP'S record on drugs . He defended the NPP'S track record on drugs saying that they have arrested many drug couriers and barons . The evidence however points to different facts.Ghana is currently ranked as the prime transit point for drugs heading towards Europe and America .

This is very typical of how politics is conducted in this country.Instead of engaging in intellectual debate that will lead to solutions for pressing issues, the political class prefers to engage pointless propaganda war that ultimately drowns out the real issue .

POLICE FORCE DEEPLY INVOLVED IN DRUGS

2008-07-09T10:58:00.001Z

... $6m worth of cocaine missing from police exhibit room.

The Government has reacted angrily to an attempt by the police service to cover up its culpability in the case of the missing cocaine from the exhibit room at the police headquarters.

The Government had set up a committee headed by the CPP MP ,Hon Kojo Armah to look into the case.The Armah committee submitted a report that described in sordid details ,the incompetence and deep corruption in the police service even at the Headquarters .

The Committee had been formed to look into the case of the disappearance of $6m worth of cocaine from the exhibit vault at the Police Headquarters in Accra .The committee's report revealed some very disturbing incompetence and sleaze especially in the war on drugs .There were even allegations of the police complicity and corroboration in the drug plague .

In a posture characteristic of this Government ,there has a disturbing lack of decisive action or any strong show of leadership in this matter as it is with other issues.The head of the police service under whose very nose this abberation happened is still at post while none of the officers in charge of the case has had any action taken against them.

This indeed is very worrying given the threats to our democracy and security staring us in the face if this country becomes a drug hub in the region.According to the UN agency leading the fight against drug trafficking and its related crimes ,Ghana has become the major transit point for cocaine and heroine smuggling between South America ,South Asia as countries of origin and Europe and America as destinations.

The sordid happenings in high places in relation to the drug scandal probably shows that the criminals have succeeded in infiltrating ,co-opting and corrupting our security services and other Government officials.

In a weak state like Ghana it will definitely lead to collapse of the state leading lawlessness and conflict .

NDC LAUNCHES IT CAMPAIGN

2008-07-09T10:34:00.000Z

NDC LAUNCHES IT CAMPAIGN

...With Huge and colourful media blitz.

IT is probably the biggest media event in the country since the beginning of year.In a strong show of crowd power preparedness for the upcoming General Elections ,the NDC launched its campaign and outdoored their Running Mate.Significantly ,the event witnessed some very positive developments in the party - the return of some dormant and departed former members back into the fold.Also the absence of Former President Rawlings was a further confirmation of the gradually decoupling of the 'big man' from the core of the party.

The infectious John Mahama was the center of attention throughout the day and his speech gave away a little of what he will offer the politics of this country in the years to come.

His statement that Ghanaians should not be tricked into engaging in a futile exercise of trying to compare the mediocre achievements of the two biggest parties but rather chose the party that will take us to our dreamland.

The event undoubtedly re-energised the NDC faithful into a strong resolve to work hard more than ever to haul themselves back into Government .

This media event was the latest of the new campaign climate dominated by slick media savvy party workers that is sweeping the country .This year's elections will mark a watershed in the political culture in this country .

My fear is that we will have an equally competent and independent media to help the ordinary Ghanaian sift real facts from propaganda .It is very easy for a young and under-resourced media industry like ours to fall into the hands of powerful political interests.

...With Huge and colourful media blitz.

The infectious John Mahama was the center of attention throughout the day and his speech gave away a little of what he will offer the politics of this country in the years to come.

The event undoubtedly re-energised the NDC faithful into a strong resolve to work hard more than ever to haul themselves back into Government .

POLITICAL HOLOCAUST HITS NPP

2008-07-09T10:27:00.000Z

APRIL 17 2008,

As Alan Cash Resigns From Party.

This past few weeks has given meaning to the phrase " political season "as major political events unfolds.From a week dominated by huge controversy surrounding the nomination of a running mate to partner the NDC Flagbearer Prof.Atta Mills; to another week that saw a political bombshell of Holocaust proportions.

On Thursday 17 April, without any warning or foreboding Alan Kyeremanten ,the failed NPP Flagbearer contestant reportedly tendered in his resignation from the NPP party to the Headquarters of the Party.

His aides cited intimidation and victimization of his supporters as the main reason for his sudden departure from the party he was trying to lead only a couple of months ago.The Alan camp alleges that,they have been at the wrong end of many decisions and actions of the victors-the Akkufo-Addo cabal.

The news of Alan's departure from the came at a time when the Akkufo -Addo was beginning to realise how difficult the task of winning the presidency will be.

The bombshell came just 48 hours his arch opponent ;the NDC Flagbearer Prof. Atta-Mills chose John Mahama ,the NDC MP for Bole Bamboi in the Upper -East Region of Ghana as his running mate.That formidable choice in itself threw a rough challenge to the NPP camp and would have taken NPP strategists and campaign gurus a lot of time and intellectual effort to come round it. This will certainly distract some of

CORUPTION SCANDAL!!

2008-07-09T10:19:00.000Z

Dr.Amoako Tuffour Axed....Thanks to Kwesi Pratt's Vigilance

The Committee for Joint Action CJA has notched another laurel in addition to its long list of political activism.Their Vigilance and incessant pressure to seek righteousness has forced the NPP Government to lower the axe on the Head of Dr.Amoako Tuffour ,who until then was the man in charge of the School Feeding Program.

THE BEST STRATEGIC DECISION FOR THE CPP

2008-07-09T10:06:00.001Z

There is a split among members of the CPP over what is the best strategy for the party in terms of its electoral moving towards the 2008 General Election.

After 50 years of Independence, it would be quite nice to have the party of the Great father of the Nation, ease back into power and lead us towards desired aspirations. But from all indications it seems it wile take a lot of doing before such a wishful thinking could become reality.

This division in strategy has two man sides, the parliamentary Action Group (PAG) which has changed somehow but the tendencies and practices has not gone yet and the National Executives. There is also another side to it with the Patriot Group also joining the fray with a less clear and aloof views on which way to go.

The PAG is adamant that the only way forward for the CPP is to build up a presence in parliament by doing the ‘electoral deals’ with other parties, particularly the NPP (which is very strange given the history and ideological gap between the two traditions). They contend that the only way to organize a winnable party is to make it very visible in parliament and that from there the CPP can effectively challenge for presidential power.

This group was led by the CPP members of parliament including the current presidential candidate Paa Kwesi Ndoum, and some publicly acclaimed members of the party. They took their ideas too far to the extent of publicly campaigning for Kuffour and activity campaigning against George Agguddey, the CPP Flag bearer in the 2004 elections. It was such an ugly experience for the CPP and I’m sure any one of them with any introspection will look back on it with much shame.

The other side led by the National executive and central committee is absolutely against any such collaboration, and certainly not the NPP which historically is diametrical opposed to the beliefs and philosophy of the CPP. They believe that as a presidential system, does not give room for building the support from parliament and making deals with the devil is certainly not a clear roadman towards presidential power. They consider such an action as patently against the best interest of the great party.

The National Executives and the Central Committee could be said to be the purists who believe it is not worth compromising on party’s core values and philosophies for any parliamentary offers .they believe that presenting a presidential candidate provides the party with a good chance of galvanizing solid grassroots support for all other structures of the party and it provides the only way to present creditable alternative in our political system which is an Executive presidential system.

They considered the actions of the PAG as disingenuous and subsequent instituted disciplinary action against them. This has resulted in a vicious in-fighting among the members of PAG and many Central Committee members This has arrested the needed focus needed to run the affairs of the party and also led to a huge lack of public trust in this party founded by the greatest African ever to live.

These energies have been more expended on pitching battles as to who is smarter instead of concentrating on the important task raising resources and finding a good organizational structure for the party. What is most frustrating to the foot soldiers of the party and the sympathetic second generation Nkrumaists is that those with huge clout and publicity leverage have used their opportunities and platforms to widen the gap between the two sides.

But seriously what are the merits of the arguments of these two sides?

It is worth dissecting the position of the PAG and their allies since their suggestion of winnable strategy is the most radical and unconventional yet seen in the country’s political history. Their insistence on having a so-so-called ‘strategic alliance’ with the NPP to shore up its presence in parliament raises a lot of questions.

In the context of Ghanaian constitutional configuration of the fourth republic and the political experience of the country it a highly contentions suggestion.

Ghana runs an executive presidential system where all policies and programmes are made an implemented by the executive cabinet led by the president.

Our constitution does not allow for the horse trading, negotiation and coalition building that characterizes political practice in exclusively parliamentary Democracies. Also given the trend and practice of legislation in Ghanaian parliament it effectively the ruling party that can initiate and pass laws.

Given this background any alliance that allows CPP members few seats in parliament only gives the CPP no more than few lame ducks. Bearing in mind that NPP and CPP have very little to share in terms of ideology and political tradition even if some CPP MPs are appointed as ministers, then will be obliged to implement the polices and programs of the president not that the CPPs (as has happened with Dr. Kwesi Ndoum). In competitive politics which is being practiced in Ghana, it is only the executive that influence the direction of the country and it is presidential power that would make the electorate feel the impact of the party on their lives.

The Ghanaian electorate has many sides to them but despite the tendance for the “skirt and blouse” phenomena in few constituencies, the general trend is that they vote for parties with better prospect of prendential power. we are not in such a brave new world tha,t the electorate would suddenly see a few CPP MPs as a sign of credible power and influence.

What is more, the practice where such an alliance results in the smaller party joining the majority bench and for all intents and purposes fall under the whip of the majority. We know how strong the whip is and how often it is used in Ghana’s parliament.

Furthermore the history of parliamentary practice in the country has taught us that it is only the Government that has the wherewithal to initiate and push through any legislation in parliament.

In the long and eventful history of the 4^th Republican parliament, there is not even single instance of a private members bill or legislation being initiated in the house. So the position of the PAG that with a good representation in parliament, CPP can achieve clout and push through some of its ideas, practices and programs is only a naïve wishful thinking. The voting record of the few CPP members in parliament actually shows that the power of the whip is more potent than ideas and independence in the chamber of parliament.

Furthermore it looks as if the PAG and their allies have over estimated the magnanimity of the NP.

How far is the NPP going to go to tolerate the parliamentary hunger of the PAG and the CPP for that matter? How may seats the NPP willin and able to cede to CPP in exchange for the support of the NPPs presidential candidate?

The reality is that the NPP is also involved in competitive politics and have different dynamics at play in their party plus it having to deal with the NDC.

For the CPP to have any sort of influence or significance in parliament it must win at least 30 seats in parliament However it must be emphatically stated that the NPP will not be willing to cede that much to the CPP. It will not even go beyond 10 seats. These seats will definitely be in NPP dominant areas. The PAG and their allies will have their fingers burned and leave them bitterly disappointed just like they were before in 1992 and 1996 election when alliances were formed with the NPP and NDC respectively in traditionally CPP territory seat that the CPP could have won on its own.

It must be made clear that strategically such an alliance will not help the CPP achieve its ultimate aim -presidential power to steer the country back on the development track.

What even bad about the PAG is the way the go about their agitation; behaving like a rat that scatters grains it cannot eat. Having failed to convince their fellow members they decided to publicly ridicule and campaign against their presidential candidate duly elected by the party congress in 2004.Their actions only succeeded in disturbing the internal organization that was badly needed to rebuild the party.

The PAG and their sympathizers must realize that their strategic alliance suggestion is not good enough and they must come but with a better one or leave the running of the party to their executives who have been duly elected according to the constitution of the party.

The PAG must accept to work with the confines of the CPP constitution and stop their tyranny of ideas tactics which is dividing and destroying the party. I am sure they do not think of themselves as wiser than the over 1000 delegates that decided that their strategy was not good enough from a strategic point of view as been explained above… it is fatally flawed.

If they really wish to remain in this great party they must accept the wisdom of the majority and the constitution of the party.

I also urge the National executives of the CPP to be accommodating to fresh thinking and suggestion and adopt reconciliatory tone in their dealings with all party member especially those with some clout.

The must crucial element that can lead the party back to power is organization. There are 3 main strategies in the tool box to rebuilding the party; these are is organization, organization and organization.

Ideologies are well and good but the crust of the matter is that the ordinary voter responds better to organization than fancy articulation academic ideology.

The CPP must be prepared breach it old traditions and conventional structure to re-organize to attract the voters in the middle.

POLITICAL VIOLENCE

2008-04-01T18:48:00.001Z

NPP &NDC In Deadly Clash This

THE UNSUNG HEROES

2008-03-25T10:00:00.000Z

How local entreprenuers thrive even in the hostile environment For a couple of years until now there has been a lot of debate about what should be the most appropriate response of the government in the face of the trouble most of the agric and industrial sectors have be going through. The industrial sector led by the textile industrial are looking for higher tariffs on textile import and a cool on strongly and dumping. Manufacturers of consumables want the same. Even giants like Unilever are believed to have sent an SOS for similar relieves. The rice and poultry sub-sector want protection from dumping by subsidized imports from the US, Europe and some Asia countries. Then comes in those into assert that these companies and sector players are living in the past where protectionism was the ruling principle. They assent that these companies are structurally ill-suited to participation in the new global trade system. They contend that Ghanaian companies use out-dated production method and are managed badly. So what they actually need is not protection but a new approach to management and production. They asset that we are in such brave – new world where protectionism has been expunged from the dictionary of economies and international trade. They also contend that the poor Ghanaian consumer should not be made to bear the brunt of gross inefficiency by these companies. They say the prices of Ghanaian companies are uncompetitive due to their inefficiencies and that Ghanaian consumers should not suffer for it through the use tariff, and other protectionist measures. This group is led by very powerful government official, cabinet ministries and is the President himself. Their ideological subscription to the high octane-Smithsonian liberal economics disposes than to oppose protection of any form. They cite the stable macro- economic condition as sufficient and that is all the government can afford to do. So in their perspective those companies crying for protection are merely incompetent industrialist who turn to government to perpetuate their inefficiency. So is it really true that Ghanaian companies are simply inefficient and don’t have any clue about the intricacies of the new global competitions environment? I say a big No! There people who venture and risk all they have to start and maintain these productive business in the most hostile business environment deserve much more praise than that. So lets explore the difficulties these companies go through. I don’t think anybody by any stretch of the imagination will expect companies and firms who operate in an economy where inflation is double digits (13.1% in February 2008). In an era where the macro economic indicators are stable, the headline interest rate is 13.5% in March 2008. This rate is even for below what is actually charged by commercial banks which is 29% on average. How can Ghanaians business involved in risky productive ventures compete in the global marketplace with similar companies elsewhere who produce under interest rate regimes of 5% and below and inflation rate of 6.25% and below? For instance Chinese textiles companies who compete with ours live under interest of 4.75%. Firms in Europe and America operate under even lower interest rates. Save the high interest rates, the Banks are even reluctant to lend to these perceived high risk businesses. Yet these companies have been living under such condition and even higher interest rates and harsher macroeconomic condition for years in the era where interest and inflation rates were hovering above 40%. After going through 5 years of public service reforms and institutional renewal in the golden age of businesses, it takes more than a week to register a business. It takes eternity and a ‘greasing of the palm’ to get documents signed and when it comes to information and up to date data, it would be more cost effective to commission a brand new one than to obtain one from government agencies. In an age where information is such a powerful tool for creating wealth it only goes to show how handicapped Ghanaian business are. Our firms are supposed to compete globally when they don’t’ even have the most vital and basic resource to work with: human resource. Most firms have to spend lots of money and time training the nation’s brightest graduate to make them suitable for employment. In most of the countries that Ghanaian companies are competing against, them government are firm promoters of business. This comes in the form vigorous protection, through tariffs and other trade barrier. Others take the form of subsides and various form of support. There is no gainsaying the amount of subsides granted by us and EU to their firm. One of the most potent vehicles of business development is through research and development (R&D). In most countries government is a leader in R&D that supports even the most profitable industries. For instance the American and British governments gave more than 20% grants to the R&D budget of some of the most profitable multi billion dollar pharmaceutical firms such Merck, GSK, Roche and Pfizer. Nobody can ever forget the spicy details of the huge subsides the governments of US and EU spent to prop up Boeing and Airbus respectively. The US Department of Commerce estimate that the EU spent about $13.5 billion in subsidies on Airbus between 1970 and 1990 while in a counter claim the EU Trade Commissioner put subsidies to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas by the US government at $22 billion between 1976 and 1990. These subsidy claims still continue till date and threaten to more blight trade relation between the two powers. Unlike elsewhere; in Ghana where any remote mention of subsidies is considered an economic heresy.Considering what the biggest and most profitable companies in the large economies receive in terms of support, it begs the question as to whether our local firms can survive. To say that Ghana’s infrastructure is severely business hampering is an understatement. Ghanaian business operate under the most inhospitable and distressing infrastructural environment found anywhere in the world .Imagine a company that has to spend about two months just clearing machinery and raw material from the port and still has to meet inventory requirement and keep production running. How can our businesses remain competitive globally when their phone keeps cutting (both landline and cell phone) in the middle of conversations and when internet connection is miserably unreliable? In this age of hyper-technology, when a minute of technology failure is the thin line between survival and bankruptcy, it is absolutely vital to get communication technology right. We expect Ghanaian business to compute favourably with their counterparts in other parts of world while they spend hours in banking halls just to transact business; precious hours that could have been more productively spent. We are not in an energy emergency situation but most manufacturing firms are used to unannounced power cuts and power surges. Companies that use water are even in a much direr situation… in most cases these companies get access to water a few hours per week and the catch is it flows at midnight! In a country where only less than 30% of all roads are tarred, railroad only stretches to a few kilometer and internal air transport runs between only two cities all be it irregular and expensive; transportation difficulties is an everyday reality. Can you imagine how Ghanaian firms cope when they have to beat deadlines but spend hour to make a few kilometers of road trip? This is really the crust of the matter not the blame game. Then companies have to deal with the almighty bureaucracy of the public services. The least said about this the better. Our government on other hand fails to initiate Research and Development (R & D) and worst still fail to support those undertaken by private concerns. Even as staunch Smithsonians, the Ghanaian government has failed in its most fundamental function of regulating the market. Ghanaian companies have been exposed to dumping and smuggling and his has affected their performance. By Ghanaian firm I’m not referring to the rent-seeking importers and traders and those in the service industry, am referring to farmers and industrialists. These people are real heroes who have distinguished themselves in the face of such crippling handicap. I am not endorsing mediocrity but people have to understand the context in which these businesses are operating and vilifying than for their shortcomings will not help matters. We cannot reach the middle income status we are craving if we do not build home grown successful businesses. These people are the unsung heroes of our time and deserve more praise to inspire other people to start productive ventures.