April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

cutting the Hitachi deal. As a result, even pro-corporate Business Day
newspaper joined more than 60 local civil society groups and 80 others
around the world in formally denouncing $3.75 billion World Bank loan to
Eskom which were granted by neoconservative-neoliberal Bank president
Robert Zoellick last April.
Other beneficiaries of Washington’s upcoming trade finance package for
Eskom include two desperate multinational corporations: Black & Veatch
from Kansas and Bucyrus from Wisconsin. The latter showed its clout last
October when in order to fund machinery exports to the huge Sasan coalfired
plant in India with US Export-Import Bank subsidies, the Milwaukee
firm yanked members of Congress so hard that they in turn compelled the
Bank to reverse an earlier decision not to fund Sasan on climate grounds.
But now, after the EPA’s slapdown of Spruce No. 1, Bucyrus must be really
nervous. Forty years ago, John Prine wrote the haunting song ‘Paradise’
about the strip-mining of his Kentucky homeland, with this verse
describing a creature known as ‘Big Hog’:
• Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
Big Hog was a Bucyrus-Erie 3850-B dragline shovel. With West Virginia coal
companies no longer buying these monsters, the company is fanatical
about overseas sales. As a result, last Thursday, two dozen of us gathered
by Friends of the Earth and Sierra found ourselves shouting slogans against
Eskom and Bucyrus outside the Ex-Im Bank’s Washington headquarters.
The Milwaukee corporation rebutted that Ex-Im financing was justifiable
because of a Johannesburg Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) partner
plus Wisconsin steelworkers jobs, even though this means that South
African counterparts – especially a Joburg company, Rham, that will
apparently fire scores of local employees – lose out. Bucyrus’s 2010
contract to supply Eskom with coal mining equipment became a scandal
subject to a parliamentary investigation last September. Given the
Witwatersrand area’s historical world leadership in mining equipment,
businesses there claim there’s no obvious reason why local firms cannot
supply Eskom at much lower cost (one third of Bucyrus’ in that particular
case).
Most importantly, the poor will repay this finance at a time South Africa
has become the world's most unequal society and unemployment is raging.
For Eskom to cover interest bills on Medupi and Kusile loans requires a 127
percent electricity price increase for ordinary consumers over four years.
This has already raised power disconnection rates for poor households, and
on Monday, Durban police made 25 arrests of shackdwellers for electricity
theft.
This multiple set of interlinked climate-energy-economic travesties can
only be reversed by grassroots and labor activism. At the Durban COP 17,
don’t expect a global deal that can save the planet, given prevailing
adverse power relations. Instead of relying on paralyzed politicians and
lazy bureaucrats, South Africa’s environmental, community, women’s,
youth and labor voices will be demanding serious action to address the
greatest crisis of our times:
• Major investments in Green Jobs would let metalworkers weld millions