Once crises subside, calls for more regulation, intervention and reform quickly evaporate as the government is told to withdraw. New financial opportunities are touted, instead of needed reforms.
Read the article by Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Page 46 of 88
Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention has further united women’s movements across the country, challenging the politics of the ruling AKP.
Read the article
President Gustavo Petro’s government plans to raise $20 trillion Colombian pesos through a hyper-targeted tax on less than one percent of the country’s top earners. Other nations should take notice.
We may disagree with some arguments in this OECD/Development matters article, but yes, the debt problem needs an urgent solution! And poor countries do indeed need a new start!
Countries with low access to energy and minimal contributions to greenhouse gas emissions are being asked to prioritise the low-carbon transition over economic growth.
Is this fair? Will the benefits of switching to net-zero outweigh the costs?
From an OECD Conference – read the article
What Global Social Justice already questioned in January 2019 is now becoming mainstream in the NGO world:
From the Bretton Woods Project:
“The Covid-19 pandemic and its related shocks have revealed the value of public services and social protection floors. Institutions tasked with ending poverty like the World Bank are increasingly under pressure to support vital public services and play a key role in wider universal social protection (USP) discussions. The World Bank recently released its latest commitment to social protection: A Social Protection and Jobs Compass to “chart a course towards USP,” which provides guidance to Bank staff on jobs and social protection issues.
Following a limited consultation process, civil society were eager to respond to the Compass. Lena Simet of Human Rights Watch concluded that the Compass guidance note, “makes a strong commitment to USP. However, its guidance on how countries can get there is problematic.”
The Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) have long been challenged on their claims of being pro-poor in their approach to social protection. A wealth of evidence has highlighted the flaws of the targeted approaches to social protection preferred by the BWIs, such as Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs), which have been shown to be ineffective at reaching the poorest – as the Bank itself acknowledged – prone to corruption, and less likely to protect human rights than universal schemes.
| Instead of simply dismissing public social insurance and potentially creating costly parallel structures, we call on the World Bank to support countries in adapting their social security systems to be more inclusive. DR LAURA ALFERS, WIEGO |
Pandemics, wars and recessions do not exempt states from human-rights commitments. They must tax multinationals and the richest more to protect the most vulnerable. (Magdalena Sepúlveda)
Read the article
The next time a speculative bubble is massively inflating around a fancy new asset like cryptocurrency and financial carnival barkers are screaming it will change everything, remember NFTs. Read Jacobin’s article on Bankman-Fried: After Sam Bankman-Fried’s Downfall, the Entire Crypto Fantasy Is Rapidly Unraveling (jacobin.com)
And read these lines on another ‘Petuland Plutocrat’:
“Another week, another spectacular crypto flame-out, this time the bankruptcy filing of cryptocurrency’s BlockFi, the latest “black eye,” the Wall Street Journal reports, for one of crypto’s biggest boosters, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel. Back in 2018, this self-styled Silicon Valley “disrupter” declared that “getting too late and too little in bitcoin” amounted to his “biggest mistake.” This past April, Thiel lashed out at crypto skeptics and told a Miami conference that bitcoin amounted to a “revolutionary youth movement.” One of those “revolutionaries,” Thiel protégé Blake Masters, won the Republican U.S. Senate primary in Arizona this past summer declaring that “psychopaths are running the country.” Masters lost his November race handily. A year ago, Thiel dubbed crypto “the most honest market we have.” The crypto universe is telling us, he added, that our “decrepit” ruling political world stands “just about to blow up.” What’s actually blowing up has turned out to be the speculative get-rich-quick crypto. Thiel has so far refused all comment on that blow-up.”
New data on inequality show probably the greatest reshuffling of world incomes since the industrial revolution, Branko Milanovic writes.
Read the interesting article
1. It was Thomas Kuhn who noted in his famous analysis of how revolutions in the physical sciences happen, that when the dominant paradigm that organizes our thinking and actions increasingly clashes with the reality most of us experience, that specific paradigm is ripe for change.(i)
(i): Reality does not forgive theory a single error… (Lev D. Trotsky)
2. Now, to achieve a world in which millions of people are ‘left behind,’ let alone systematically crushed, we urgently need a paradigm shift, as opposed to just a gap-filler for the ubiquitous market failures.(ii) (Beware though that there is always a danger that the powers-that-be block such a progressive shift –and that there is an equally significant danger that they coopt the shift). (A.Yamin)
(ii): Being a good consumer does not equal being a good human, despite what the current dominant paradigm would have us believe.
3. From the point of view of their genesis, the universal European principles and values (more recently also said Western) are a contradiction in terms because, if they are European, they cannot be considered universal and, if they are universal, they are not European. What distinguishes European principles is the political, economic and cultural dominance of all countries that, since the XV-XVI century, have seized the right to claim these principles as their own and impose them on others under the pretext of being universal. (Note that since the end of the First World War this claim has been Euro-American).
4. All values are universal, but some are more important than others. With John Locke (1632-1704), at the dawn of capitalism, the right to individual property preceded all others. Since then (or before) it has been legitimate to violate other of the universal principles and values, because the legitimate interpretation given to universal values is that which is set by the hegemonic power of the moment that, among other, authorizes and justifies the repression of citizens’ freedoms.
5. When it is not possible to silence the violations of universal values by the allies of the hegemonic power, such violations are trivialized or justified referencing them to other supposedly superior values. Long live the prevailing hypocrisy and duplicity!
6. Universal values are found in a catalog that can be consulted by all, but only the hegemonic powers decide what goes into these values. On the one hand, values and principles of some non-European in origin are considered Western, but non-Western contributions are not admitted into the catalog of universal values. It is appropriate to ask how long the catalog of universal values will be under Western domination and with what consequences for human rights. Will there be a transition from Eurocentrism to sinocentrism? Or can we finally aspire to a world without cardinal points or hierarchical centers where cultural and political diversity is possible, under the protection of emancipatory values that ought not be violated according to the convenience of those who have more power? (Boaventura de Sousa and Santos).
7. So, as relates to the power of domination, there are three main forms in which the paradigm establishes power over us:
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