Costas Lapavitsas, Guest Blogger
The interview below is from a series on The Real News Network’s Reality Asserts Itself, with Paul Jay. Jay interviews Costas Lapavitsas, professor of economics at the School of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of London, and author of the book Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (Verso). Lapavitsas recently did an interview with Triple Crisis blog and Dollars & Sense magazine, serialized here (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).
The premier international conference on public health policy is the World Health Assembly, organised by the World Health Organisation, which attracts Ministers of Health and other top health officials as well as non-governmental organisations to Geneva every year. This is where the latest trends in public health problems are presented and debated, and action plans for solutions are adopted. This year’s Assembly, which closed on May 24, had 3,500 participants and saw a record number of issues debated and resolutions adopted.
One of the key buzzwords during the Assembly was “universal health coverage” (UHC). This is being promoted by the WHO and several governments as one of the goals for the United Nations’ post-2015 Development Agenda. There is no precise definition for the term, but it is widely taken to mean that everyone should have access to medical treatment and other health services. Inability to pay should not prevent someone from being “covered” by the health system, and people should not become financially burdened in order to receive treatment.
The UHC concept is a great one, similar to the “health for all by the year 2000” slogan that the WHO adopted in the 1980s. The “right to health” is one of the human rights recognised by the United Nations.
The premier international conference on public health policy is the World Health Assembly, organised by the World Health Organisation, which attracts Ministers of Health and other top health officials as well as non-governmental organisations to Geneva every year. This is where the latest trends in public health problems are presented and debated, and action plans for solutions are adopted. This year’s Assembly, which closed on May 24, had 3,500 participants and saw a record number of issues debated and resolutions adopted.
One of the key buzzwords during the Assembly was “universal health coverage” (UHC). This is being promoted by the WHO and several governments as one of the goals for the United Nations’ post-2015 Development Agenda. There is no precise definition for the term, but it is widely taken to mean that everyone should have access to medical treatment and other health services. Inability to pay should not prevent someone from being “covered” by the health system, and people should not become financially burdened in order to receive treatment.
The UHC concept is a great one, similar to the “health for all by the year 2000” slogan that the WHO adopted in the 1980s. The “right to health” is one of the human rights recognised by the United Nations.
Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer
The recent book Capital in the 21st Century by Thomas Piketty (2014) has attracted an enviable amount of attention with its detailed history of income and wealth inequality. A central idea in this book comes from (r > g); that is, the idea that the rate of return on wealth (r) exceeds by a considerable margin the rate of economic growth (g) so far as Western industrialised countries are concerned. This, Piketty argues, has implications for rising inequality especially of wealth and of rentier income.
The basic mechanism is that when the rate of return is greater than the income growth rate, then savings made out of the return on wealth received in the form of dividends, rents, interest and capital gains adds to wealth, which then rises at a rate determined by these savings (and equal to savings propensity out of wealth (s), multiplied by the rate of return (r), (i.e., s∙r), and then the stock of wealth rises faster than income. The wealth to income ratio then rises, and the gains from wealth rise faster than other incomes. Wealth inequality also rises on the basis that rich wealth owners can achieve higher returns on their wealth than the poorer wealth owners. This is a substantial, though not complete, part of the general rises in inequality over the past three or more decades (and a large part of his book is concerned with documenting those rises in inequality).
Climate change has a surprising new follower: the U.S. president. The U.S. government has been the biggest bugbear in climate change negotiations. Since discussions began on this issue in the early 1990s, the United States has stymied all efforts for an effective and fair deal. It has blocked action by arguing that countries like China and India must first do more. Worse, successive governments have even denied that the threat from a changing climate is real, let alone urgent. President Barack Obama, who came to power in the first term with the promise of change in dealing with climate change, was noticeably coy about the issue in the recent years.
But in May this year, the U.S. government released its National Climate Assessment, which puts together carefully peer reviewed scientific information on the impacts in the United States. It makes clear that even the United States is not immune to the dangers of climate change. In fact, many trends are visible and the country is already hurting.
Sasha Breger Bush, Guest Blogger
Passed in 2012, Colorado’s Amendment 64 legalized the growing and selling of marijuana on a recreational basis. With medical marijuana, recreational marijuana has helped lift the people of Denver out of the Great Recession by inspiring leagues of new small businesses, creating new jobs, boosting commercial real estate values, and increasing state and local tax revenues. It turns out that the local marijuana market is fairly recession-proof and is actually bolstering local resilience to global crisis.
As I’ve watched this novelty unfold over the past couple of years (with considerable delight, to be frank) and witnessed first hand the important benefits for our local economy, I’ve grown increasingly concerned about the possibility of legalization on the federal level. While state level legalization has—for all of its still considerable problems—motivated economic recovery and helped working and middle class folks earn more income, get better jobs and enjoy more robust public services, federal legalization risks these benefits leaking out of local economies into the pockets of Big Business.
Triple Crisis contributor Timothy A. Wise’s analysis of genetically modified maize and the risks to Mexico, the world’s cradle of maize cultivation, continues. His previous posts on the topic can be read here and here.
I had come to Mexico to investigate the ongoing controversy over the proposed introduction of genetically modified (GM) maize into the birthplace of this important global food crop. The issue was hot, because last October a Mexican judge had issued an injunction halting all experimental and commercial planting of GM maize, a process that was well underway in six northern states. The ruling cited the need for precaution to ensure that Mexico’s rich diversity of maize varieties were protected from inadvertent “gene flow” from GM maize.
As I began to investigate this most controversial of biotech initiatives, the question that most puzzled me was: why anyone in Mexico thinks the country needs anything that transgenic maize has to offer?
Monsanto, of course, had an answer to that question. I met with a group of company officials in their high-rise offices in Mexico City’s transnational business district of Santa Fe. They offered their “Vision 2020,” in which transgenic maize is key to feeding the world. In Mexico, they argued, it would help double Mexican maize production, reduce persistent rural poverty among the country’s small-scale maize farmers, restore the country’s self-sufficiency in its key food staple and reduce the negative environmental impacts of maize farming. They even used the term “food sovereignty” to describe their goal for Mexico. This was more than a vision; this was a hallucination.
Triple Crisis contributor Timothy A. Wise’s analysis of genetically modified maize and the risks to Mexico, the world’s cradle of maize cultivation, continues. His previous posts on the topic can be read here and here.
I had come to Mexico to investigate the ongoing controversy over the proposed introduction of genetically modified (GM) maize into the birthplace of this important global food crop. The issue was hot, because last October a Mexican judge had issued an injunction halting all experimental and commercial planting of GM maize, a process that was well underway in six northern states. The ruling cited the need for precaution to ensure that Mexico’s rich diversity of maize varieties were protected from inadvertent “gene flow” from GM maize.
As I began to investigate this most controversial of biotech initiatives, the question that most puzzled me was: why anyone in Mexico thinks the country needs anything that transgenic maize has to offer?
Monsanto, of course, had an answer to that question. I met with a group of company officials in their high-rise offices in Mexico City’s transnational business district of Santa Fe. They offered their “Vision 2020,” in which transgenic maize is key to feeding the world. In Mexico, they argued, it would help double Mexican maize production, reduce persistent rural poverty among the country’s small-scale maize farmers, restore the country’s self-sufficiency in its key food staple and reduce the negative environmental impacts of maize farming. They even used the term “food sovereignty” to describe their goal for Mexico. This was more than a vision; this was a hallucination.
C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh
A perception has been gaining ground that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition suffered politically because of its commitment to welfare schemes and “handouts” to the poor rather than economic growth. The murmurs began during the election campaign—fed by the BJP’s strident denunciation—and have gained ground especially since the UPA’s and Congress Party’s comprehensive electoral defeat nationally.
The argument goes something like this: The past five years of UPA-2 were years of “policy paralysis” in which economic growth slowed down because projects were stalled by environmental and other hurdles and slow clearances; and no new “reforms” were undertaken such as deregulating whatever little is left of formal employment in the organised sector. Instead the government frittered away time and resources on “populist” schemes that were corrupt and wasteful, which the country cannot afford, and which anyway the people do not really want. This argument, in various forms, is being repeated so often that once again people assume that it must be true.
In fact it is wrong on practically all counts. To begin with, while the elections do indeed reveal the extent of public dissatisfaction with the UPA, only one-fifth of the electorate actually voted for the BJP, and many of them did so because of effective communal polarization in the Hindi heartland. The slower growth of the second UPA tenure was related not only to effects of the global economic crisis but equally the result of the mess in the infrastructure sector, with massively leveraged investments not bearing sufficient fruit for private sector interest to be retained and a looming crisis of bad debt especially for power and aviation loans of public sector banks.
Most of all, the argument that UPA-2 wasted the country’s resources on “populist” schemes is both conceptually flawed and empirically unjustified. It is analytically misconceived because it does not recognize the crucial role played by social spending on countercyclical consumption stabilizing, as well as on ensuring domestic demand and positive multiplier effects on economic activity, or the impact on future productivity because of a better fed and healthier population.
But it is also empirically wrong: UPA-2 did not really spend on these important schemes. In fact, it can be forcibly argued that the Congress and its allies would have been much better off if the government had actually put its money where its mouth was. As it happens, the UPA parties barely trumpeted any of these measures in their electoral campaigns, whether because of a lack of conviction in them or because of the guilty feeling that they had not lived up to their own promises.
Doug Orr, Guest Blogger
In his article “The Big Casino,” in the latest issue of Dollars & Sense magazine, economist Doug Orr notes the recent attention—thanks largely to Michael Lewis’ celebrated book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt—to high-speed stock trading. Lewis tells a story in which the problem goes no deeper than the rigging of the stock-market game to favor some players over others. (It is a measure of the superficiality of Lewis’ analysis that the solution on offer, and the objective of the story’s heroes, is to set up a different kind of casino!) “The problem with the stock market is not just that the casino game has been rigged to favor some gamblers,” Orr argues. “More fundamentally, the problem is the existence of the casino in the first place.”
Gamblers at a blackjack table know they will occasionally lose. But if they see a player who can take his bets off the table if he is losing and can take part of every pot as well, they will be very upset. This is why Michael Lewis’ book Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, which describes how high-frequency traders are able to “frontrun” the market, has raised such a furor in the business press. Gamblers like playing the game, but not if the game is rigged. When they finally find out how it is rigged they will protest loudly.
On April 3, in reaction to the revelations in Flash Boys, brokerage-firm founder Charles R. “Chuck” Schwab issued a statement calling high-speed trading a “growing cancer” that threatens to destroy faith in the fairness of the markets. Schwab pointed out that while the total number of trades stayed relatively flat from 2007 to 2013, the number of trade inquires rose from 50,000 per second to 300,000 per second! He called this “an explosion of head-fake ephemeral orders” designed to “skim pennies off the public markets by the billions.” He claimed that “high-frequency trading isn’t providing more efficient, liquid markets,” but rather it is “picking the pockets of legitimate market participants.” He pointed out that some high-frequency traders claim to be profitable on over 99% of their trading days, a statistical impossibility unless the game is rigged.