Have Financial Stability Proposals Been Implemented Properly?

Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer

Many countries have developed policies to address financial stability since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the Great Recession (GR). How far these policies have been fully implemented and how far those policies can contribute to avoiding the next financial crisis, or mitigating its effects, are interesting questions.

The focus of policies to ensure financial stability should be on proper regulation of the financial sector. Proposals that aim to ensure financial stability have been put forward and we briefly comment on them. The main proposals are the US Dodd-Frank Act, the UK Vickers Report, the European Liikanen Report, the IMF Report, and the Basle III Report.

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The Fight Against Mining Companies Goes Global

Can an Historic Victory Over Irresponsible Mining in Central America Spur a Win in Asia?

Robin Broad and John Cavanagh

Robin Broad, a professor of development studies at American University in Washington, D.C., is writing a book about mining as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow.  John Cavanagh directs the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. They are co-authors of (among others) Plundering Paradise: The Struggle for the Environment in the Philippines.

In March 2017, the small nation of El Salvador took a huge step towards protecting its environment for present and future generations when its legislature passed a law outlawing all metals mining. It was a momentous vote — a vote heard round the world.

Indeed, that vote ricocheted across the Pacific to the Philippines, which has emerged as one of the hot spots in the global fight of “water protectors” to end destructive industrial mining.  In November 2017, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte surprised many by listening to the call of strong peoples’ movements as he declared that a ban on new open pit-mining in that country would remain in place. This, despite a concerted campaign by the country’s mining interests to end that ban.

The open pit ban is a significant victory for communities across the Philippines, especially in the southern island of Mindanao where groups have waged a decades-long battle to block the construction of what would be one of the largest gold and copper mines in Southeast Asia. And it gives a boost to groups fighting to shut down the destructive mining activities of the very same Australian-Canadian mining giant, OceanaGold, that sued El Salvador in an effort to mine gold there.  As a result, OceanaGold has become a symbol of irresponsible mining around the world and a prominent target of global anti-mining movements.

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WTO and Food Security: Biting the Hand that Feeds the Poor

Timothy A. Wise

Since 2013, controversy has swirled around India’s National Food Security Act (NFSA), the most ambitious food security initiative in the world, with its plans to buy food grains from small-scale farmers to distribute to some 840 million poor Indians, two-thirds of the country’s people. The controversy came at the World Trade Organization (WTO), where the U.S. government accused India of unfairly subsidizing its farmers by paying a support price above market prices.

At the WTO biannual ministerial conference in Bali, India stood firm, questioning the subsidy calculation as an artifact of old WTO rulemaking and asserting that, in any case, such programs that are used for legitimate food security purposes should be exempt from such restrictions. The conflict nearly torpedoed the WTO’s modest negotiated agreements in Bali, but a “Peace Clause” granted India and other developing countries with such programs a grace period while negotiators tried to reach a permanent solution. (See my coverage of the controversy here.)

That grace period is up now, as trade ministers from across the globe board planes for the December 10 opening of the WTO’s 11th Ministerial Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. With no progress on the matter at the 2015 conference in Nairobi, Kenya, India and other developing countries have called for a simple exemption of such programs from WTO restrictions. U.S. negotiators, themselves under fire for “dumping” agricultural surpluses on global markets at prices below the costs of production, are demanding more restrictive measures and further concessions from developing countries.

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E-Com at MC11 is effort to hijack basic internet governance issues

Chakravarthi Raghavan

As issues relating to the monopolistic/oligopolistic control over information and data by the Silicon Valley technology giants and their platforms are beginning to attract adverse public and political attention around the world, these technology platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter) are attempting to hijack the issue of internet governance and democracy by writing trade rules at the WTO under the rubric of “e-commerce”.

Scholars and specialists in communication issues have been studying and focussing on this issue for a while, but some recent “incidents” and actions by these platforms have now brought the issue to the centre of political debate in various countries in relation to issues of Democracy, pluralism and democratic governance.

The latest example is that the “tweets” from The Hindu were not appearing in Twitter’s search results. The Hindu is a leading English language daily newspaper of India printed and published from several centres, and its Twitter handle has over 4.5 million verified followers. And when The Hindu’s attention was drawn to this, and its internet desk took up the matter with Twitter, its tweets began appearing again in the “search results”. (See article here by The Hindu’s Readers’ Editor A. S. Panneerselvan.)

Twitter admitted to The Hindu digital team that @the_hindu handle got “inadvertently” caught in its spam filter. Funnily though, real spams seem to escape the “spam filters” of most email service enterprises/platforms, and flood the regular in-boxes of email users, often resulting in recipients’ mailboxes “becoming full, and unable to accept new genuine messages”.

So much for the ability of these tech giants and platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft) to filter out spams!

In an email communication to this writer, Prof. Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Washington DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), comments that it is an “amazing story” of The Hindu’s tweets not appearing on Twitter’s search results, and Twitter’s explanation that The Hindu’s tweets “inadvertently” got caught in its spam filter.

“There are a variety of different issues here,” Prof. Baker says. “But most immediately, these huge platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter) need to be regulated in the same way the phone company was regulated when it had a monopoly.”

“The phone company could not ‘accidentally’ deny service to a political party or organization it didn’t like. We need similar rules for these platforms. They also should not be allowed to use their platforms as springboards to other lines of business. That isn’t the whole story of a democratic media, but it seems a simple first step.”

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