wide eyed wonderings of the undecided
Solutions to the global economic crisis
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The Put People First campaign makes a series of demands that amount to a global restructuring along social-democratic Keynesian principles. Whilst not overly radical many people reckon the demands are unworkable utopian dreams.
I take each in turn and show how the critics are wrong.
Ensure democratic governance of the economy
1. Compel tax havens to abide by strict international rules.
This is not difficult, in 1999 the OECD began a programme to inhibit money laundering and found that tracking and blocking movements of capital was well within their grasp. The technology is there to do it, the political will is a different question. But when you have very public officials (the prime minister for example) calling a close to, or more visibility for tax heavens, the question is far from uptopian. (It does not help that HM Revenue and Customs (our tax collector) leases its building from a company based in Jersey!)
2. Insist on fundamental governance reform of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
This already happened in the G20 meeting. The IMF has extended an international credit facility (Special Drawing Rights) to such an extent it amounts to a world currency. This is a fundamental restructuring of power at the IMF, pulling strength from the dollar, which acted as the world currency. It has given many more nation states (though not their inhabitants) far more voice at the IMF. The voting structures at the Bank, however remain thoroughly anti-democratic and require campaigning to reform.
3. Make all financial institutions, financial products and multinationals transparent and publicly accountable.
Well, the government owns huge sections of finance now in the UK. So in that sense they are much more publicly accountable. Multinationals are generally quite transparent, though obviously not publicly accountable.
Jobs: Decent jobs and public services for all
4. Ensure a massive investment in a green new deal to build a green economy based on decent work and fair pay.
There have been massive public investment programmes since the war, without which capitalism fails. So this is not a significantly unheard of demand. The idea it should go to productive use in the real economy creating jobs, rather than finance, makes this a demand for the UK to be like Sweden, France, Japan etc… and indeed to be like what the UK was between 1945-1979. So not particularly radical a demand at all.
5. Invest in and strengthen public provision of essential services.
Same as above really. Investing in public services is common to most advanced economies. It was only the US and UK that followed the radical doctrines of Thatcher & Reagan who decided not to. Even under New Labour we see massive spending in NHS, the only thing different about the Put People First demand is that it does not ask for privatisation.
6. Work to ensure sufficient emergency funding to all countries that need it, without damaging conditionalities attached.
Marshall Plan, post war. Not unprecedented… Some modern development aid, particularly all that from the Nordics and Canada follows this principle, so not at all impossible.
Justice: End global poverty and inequality
7. Deliver 0.7% of national income as aid by 2013, deliver aid more effectively and push for the cancellation of all illegitimate and unpayable developing country debts.
Debt cancellation is underway, so this is a welcome reminder but not a crazy overhaul. Same as above…
8. Ensure that poorer states are allowed to take responsibility for managing their economies, including controlling cross-border capital flows.
Capital controls have been the norm between 1940 – 1980, it took a massive recession, global restructuring program and a lot of right wing propaganda to get rid of them. Empirically capital controls have proved better for developing countries like Chile in the 1980s debt crisis, and developed countries like Germany and Spain today. Nothing at all utopian about the demand.
9. Stop pushing developing countries to liberalise and deregulate their economies, and do not attempt to rush through a completion of the Doha trade round, a deal that developing countries have rejected several times.
The 1999 WTO trade negotiation, which was in Seattle and brought to an absolute standstill by myriad protesters (communists, church-goers anarchists etc)… paved the way for civil society leaders and developing countries to call a halt to liberalisation conditions. Since then all attempts have stalled. This request follows a process that is well under way.
Climate: Build a Green Economy
10. In addition to the green new deal (recommendation 4), introduce the robust regulatory requirements and financial incentives needed to deliver a green economy.
More tricky. In terms of potential, the government owns huge amounts of finance in the UK. That is tax payers money, so reorientating how they run our banks is not impossible, but requires very outward expression of desire from people. Nationalised banks, channelling investment into the productive, job creating economy can be very progressive, yet is not utopian. Japan and South Korea built their economies on state directed credit.
11. Push for a deal at Copenhagen to agree substantial, verifiable cuts in greenhouse gases, which will limit temperature increases to well below 2°C.
Keeping global climate temperature increases to well below 2°C is by far and away the hardest and most pie-in-the-request. The concern is though that failure to do so will apparently cause all sorts of kafuffle. I would say that political will rather than human capacity remains at the core of this issue. Tradable carbon rationing would not only work as a progressive tax but also be able to tackle the issue at hand. Of course rations have been used in history, but it required a global disaster situation.
12. Commit to substantial new resource transfer from North to South, additional to Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), to support adaptation and sustainable development in poor countries.
They sort of do this, there is large amounts of aid that goes to the South. Its not helped by (a very modern) system of global finance which has, since 1987 transferred from South to North 20 times the amount of aid given from North to South ($375 billion).
Tags: economic crisis, G20, G20 protest, Put people first, Solutions
climate change has no class
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(This article appears in Insight Magazine April 2008 )
When a social movement is championed by a prince, a Cambridge graduate on the roof of parliament and Waitrose shoppers across the land, you know you have a problem. Yet to say that climate change is of interest only to the middle class of the West is to miss the point entirely.
Much of the response to last months Plane Stupid demo illustrated a growing group of critics who claim that the green movement are little more than “fear-mongering, snobbish, isolationist puritans.” They suggest that the solutions offered to climate change are riddled with class prejudice. By attacking cheap flights and mass consumption they feel the green activists are instead conveying a “shrill middle-class disgust with the greedy masses and their bad habits.”
While the growing ideological debate over how to tackle climate change threatens to obscure action, the doubts over the existence of human-made climate change have, at last given way to reason. Those who still dismiss it as the ‘new millennium bug’ would do well look at the facts.
Between 1950 and 2005 average global temperatures increased by 0.7oC. Over the same period emissions of human-made green house gasses have mushroomed by over 70%. It takes a peculiar bloody mindedness (or funding from Exxon Mobile) to ignore the link. If global temperatures increase by 2oC over pre-industrial levels, we enter the realm of runaway climate change. It is just as dramatic as it sounds. 4 billion people could suffer water shortages, sea levels could rise by 7 metres and the permafrost of the west Siberian peat bogs begins to melt, unleashing 70 billion tonnes of stored methane, the Napalm of greenhouse gases. The cautious but rather aptly titled Stern Report calculated that failing to act would cost us at least 5% but possibly 20% of global GDP.
Slowing the climate’s growing fever is the essential challenge of our age, yet the limp response so far, which is defined by both the moralistic ‘green consumerism’ and their conservative critics, is ineffective and snooty.
When legitimate concerns over emissions are voiced, they are easily perceived as killjoy rantings from a privileged minority. The thick smug that emerges from the hybrid cars of a spoilt few betrays a judgement about how the rest of society should live. And often, their case, though legitimate appears overstated: cheap short-hall flights are seen as disgusting, cheap imported meat is sick, over-boiling the kettle is genocide, and so on. Implicit in their entire effort is the wrong assumption that by changing consumer habits they have tackled climate change. Changing your light bulb is not changing the world – energy efficiency is essential but not enough.
However, the lambasting that the green movement receives from the likes of Brendan O’Neill in The Guardian and his magazine Spiked Online fails to offer any solutions to what is an accepted problem. These self-titled (and usually middle-class) libertarians moan that the entire issue is merely an elitist vehicle to meddle in the lives of ‘the masses’. Yet if this were a genuine ideological concern, they would do well to remember that liberty ends where the one person’s actions limit the freedom of another person’s actions. Unrestricted emissions from some will hinder the lives of many others. Failing to counter that argument these same critics then suggest that climate change is just an anti-progress conspiracy wrapped up in superstition. This sort of drivel fails to contend the science and ignores the fact that social and economic progress demands a stable climate. These so-called “defenders of the masses” end up protecting the interests of the wealthiest corporations instead. It’s difficult to think of many more patronising things then well-paid journalists claiming the voice of millions of working-class voices, especially when, as Green Party MEP Dr Caroline Lucas notes, “if you look at the impacts of climate change, it’s the poorest that are hit first and hardest.”
Until government takes action to draw in the whole of society – business included – the mass effort against climate change will forever be undermined by precious minorities on either side. Rather than relying on the good will of British Petroleum, or hoping that people will give up weekly flights to their holiday homes in Monaco, the government should stand up to the challenge and set an equal limit on how much carbon we can all emit.
Dr Lucas added “the science demands action. We are told we have between 8-10 years in which to put in place a rigorous policy framework to ensure serious emission reductions. It is as much a social justice issue as an environmental one.”
Through setting limits on national emissions, government can sanction one proportion for businesses and then divide the rest equally amongst citizens. Rather than attack the poor – as the much vouched-for carbon taxes do – this would progressively redistribute wealth. Those who expend less than their entitlement can sell off their excess to others who demand it. Remember that despite what they may think, the self-congratulating rich actually consume more carbon than the poor.
With similar incentives placed on businesses effective action would be demanded. It would no longer be profitable for a BP to emit a 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to produce crude oil from tar sands; instead they could employ part of their enormous annual profit to genuinely invest in sustainable alternatives.
That we should all be taking action to tackle climate change is unquestionable. But when in 1940 we were faced with a global threat to our livelihoods, the government wasn’t afraid to lead a mass campaign. Food rations were an immense sacrifice, but rather than having an elitist few telling the poor not to eat, everyone was in the same boat. The scale of this threat may not be entirely predictable as yet, but unless we move beyond are limp response, we may have to face the horror of finding out.
Tags: politics, economics, climate change, Corporate power, BP, tar-sands, class, spiked online, Brendan O'Neill, Caroline Lucas, Plane Stupid, Carbon ration, Stern Report, Green consumerism, The Guardian, Insight Magazine
A corrupting agenda
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This week in Berlin the World Bank will shuffle around the EU meeting with an upturned palm asking for more funding from the EU countries. Britain, like a guilt-ridden Christmas shopper will dig deep and throw its wallet into the hands of the Bank. For those concerned with International Development, the government might just be throwing in the towel as well.
The department for International Development (DfID) is set to see a budget increase by 11% to £7.9 billion a year by 2010-11. Unfortunately whilst its budget has swelled its department has shrunk. In the name of efficiency, demanded by opposition parties DfID will have to outsource large amounts of its work and taxpayers money to unaccountable international institutions like the World Bank.
The Bank is the largest single development agency in the world and funds grants and loans for things such as health, education and infrastructure building in the developing world. Its influence however stretches well beyond mere finance. Despite being an undemocratic and unaccountable institution itself, the Bank plays a primary role in shaping the political and economic agenda in the developing world. A lot of this revolves, somewhat ironically, around its Anti-Corruption Agenda.
Corruption is central in the challenge of development. The horror stories of developing country government elites waltzing off to Swiss Banks with millions of pounds of aid money has made development and corruption inseparable in people’s minds. Corruption is a major problem, one that infects all powers throughout the world. The worry is the way in which the World Bank uses anti-corruption to demand that developing countries fit into the Banks ideology of ‘good’ governance.
The Bank defines corruption as ‘the abuse of private office for pubic gain’. Interestingly the role that private individuals and corporations play in corruption sees no mention. This betrays the Banks profound antagonism towards government. It believes that if given any chance to interfere with the ‘logic’ of the market, governments and bureaucracy will cordon off vast sums for themselves and their supporters. Their neoliberal belief that international market liberalisation with a minimal role of government is the only path to development, is inescapable.
Cynics would suggest that the Bank’s sudden focus on corruption and governance is to absolve itself of responsibility of its failures over the last fifty years. Perhaps if the Bank were really concerned about good governance it would spare a moment for introspection. Its president is selected solely by the US government, who are accountable more to its corporate paymasters than the US population. There is also a significant problem when the democratic right of a citizen in Zambia, for example, is trampled all over by World Bank policy. In the name of good governance and ‘fiscal discipline’ the Bank demanded that education and health no longer be paid out of general taxation. Instead unaccountable private companies and NGOs took over. Predictably life expectancy fell to 40 years old and infant mortality piled higher. This strikingly poor governance had nothing to do with Zambia or its citizens.
The rhetoric coming out of the Bank, and its anti-corruption agenda is one that presents development as merely a technical, economic problem. Get the prices right and the magic of the market takes care of everything. Whilst democratically regulated markets play an essential role in development the concern is that this sort of approach excludes considerations of power structures, class and ethnic divisions, historical trajectories and so on, all of which shape the successes of development.
British taxpayers, along with developing countries deserve better than having their policies taken out of their hands. International Development (or justice) is no distant, left-wing dream, there are clear policies that can help or hinder the process. It is a political process, not an economic one. Rather than letting further accountability slip from our hands we should demand DfID ignore the World Banks plea for more funding.
HIV and AIDS is not a health problem, it’s a social injustice.
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Against a dramatic backdrop of an AIDS ribbon constructed from 6000 red flowers -one for every person that dies each day from AIDS-related illnesses, Stop AIDS campaigners from all over the country joined to demand that the UK Government keeps its 2005 promise of Universal Access to Treatment for HIV and AIDS by 2010.
In the lead up to World AIDS Day on December 1st, campaigners were keen to remind both politicians and the wider public that HIV is no longer a death sentence. “Unlike the 80s there are now medicines that can keep people living active and fulfilling lives. The devastating insult is that 71% of people who urgently need these drugs have no access to them. It is both a moral and economic imperative that the UK government takes action” remarked Rafi Rogans-Watson, BSMS student and MEDSIN activist.
For doctors and healthcare workers around the world this is particularly frustrating. Instead of battling against the disease they have to tackle the barriers placed by western governments, the world trade organisation and pharmaceutical lobbies, if they want to treat their patients.
Currently the producers of ARVs, such as Abbott Laboratories, who recorded a staggering $1.7bln profit in 2006, are awarded a 20-year patent by the WTO TRIPs law for their invention. This law prevents any other company from selling generic ‘copies’ of the drugs and therefore grants the inventor the monopoly power of charging whatever they like. Whilst rewarding inventors is essential for further research the current situation embodies the global inequalities that fracture the world. These large companies – backed by western governments and protected by a trade law that these same governments and companies shaped, are walking away with massive profits whist millions of people in the majority world die needlessly.
Where competition is allowed drug prices plummet and treatment becomes possible. Last year UK activists were instrumental in the effort of the Thai government to provide HIV treatment for its people. Thailand faced huge political and economic pressure from both Abbott Laboratories and the US government to withdraw its move of importing generic ARV drugs. Thanks to UK activists educating Hillary Benn about the situation and demanding he intervene, he spoke out directly in support of Thailand. This multilateral pressure proved sufficient to force US to reteat from its absurd position and 8000 people gained free access the HIV and AIDS treatment that will keep them alive.
In order to achieve the promise of Universal Access by 2010 the UK government needs to announce bold and ambitious measures in its new AIDS strategy due to be launched in spring 2008. Alongside promoting access to affordable medicines, the UK needs to strengthen health systems in developing countries and provide £2.5bln over the next three years to finance Universal Access. Without this bold and necessary action, student campaigners fear that the promise will be broken. “Unless the rate of scale up increases dramatically, less than 5 million people will be on treatment by 2010: a far cry from treatment for all.” Katy Athersuch, Student Stop AIDS Campaign Coordinator.
Campaigners were pleased but remained cautious with the speech made by Douglas Alexander. Though he reiterated his support for the cause he failed to commit to the funding levels required by the UK and failed to mention anything about generic drugs, care or support services.
Throughout the campaign young people have been at the forefront of progress and once again they will need to keep the pressure on the UK government to ensure that millions will not die needlessly.
You can take action and support international healthcare by demanding you’re MP raises the issue with Douglas Alexander and signs the EDM 183.
