This CAFOD report shows how the World Bank is failing in its duty to tackle poverty by promoting a model of agricultural development that benefits large-scale agribusiness at the expense of some of the world’s poorest smallholder farmers.
Sowing the seeds of poverty: How the World Bank harms poor farmers (cafod.org.uk)
At long last, the International Monetary Fund has begun to recognize that the best way to reduce sovereign debt is by boosting economic growth, rather than insisting on fiscal retrenchment. But this new understanding is being undermined by a lingering adherence to growth-inhibiting austerity policies.
Schizophrenia at the IMF by Jayati Ghosh – Project Syndicate (project-syndicate.org)
ILO Director-General calls for a Global Coalition for Social Justice and a reshaping of economic, social and environmental policies to create a more stable and equitable future.
but even more: they are hurting the poor…
Two new scientific papers break down how the rich are destroying Earth | Salon.com
Having battled one crisis after another, a fresh round of austerity could be the last straw for workers.
Mayday, mayday: a warning from the labour movement (socialeurope.eu)
The International Monetary Fund has said that it protects spending on education, health and social protection from cuts in its loan programmes through social spending floors. These measures are a welcome step forward, but are they effective?
Analysis of all 17 IMF loan programmes (Extended Credit Facilities, or ECFs, and Extended Fund Facilities, or EFFs) for low- and middle-income countries during the first two years of the pandemic shows that these floors are deeply inadequate, inconsistent, opaque and failing. They are little more than a fig leaf for harmful austerity, which is driving inequality, poverty and suffering.
Read Oxfam‘s Paper
| From Progressive International: |
| This coming Monday, we will join workers around the planet in celebrating the historic victories of the labour movement — and honoring those who continue to struggle for a better world today. International Workers’ Day is a celebration of history — the living, breathing history that is made and remade every day by working people. It was the revolutionary aspirations of workers that brought us the eight-hour workday, the weekend, the minimum wage, and the great processes that, from Petrograd to Yan’an to the Sierra Maestra, took the first bold steps towards socialism and left a permanent mark on our world. International Workers’ Day protests began in 1886. In the United States, mass protests of working people led to a general strike that mobilized 300,000 workers spanning 13,000 businesses across the country. These demonstrations lasted for days. In Chicago, police attacked picketing workers at the McCormick Reaper Works, killing six and injuring many more. The following day, during protests in Haymarket Square against this brutality, a bomb was thrown into the crowd by a suspected industrialist provocateur. In response, the police massacred scores of civilians and later executed prominent leaders of the labor movement. Today, as then, labor remains at the vanguard. From India to Britain, the Republic of Korea to the United States, workers are rising up against the ravages of neoliberalism and reactionary authoritarianism. The struggle is existential. As Workers’ Memorial Day — commemorated today around the world — reminds us, many people never come home from work. In fact, more people are killed at work each year than at war. From the lithium mines of Zimbabwe to the garment factories of Bangladesh, capitalism’s untraceable, global supply chains force workers to risk their lives in the service of bosses, shareholders, and empires. But it is the unemployed and underemployed, the healthcare workers and peasants, the fast food workers and cleaners, the textile weavers and delivery drivers, the sanitation workers, and others who, in their struggles for dignity, democracy, and peace, are history’s motor force. As Karl Marx wrote in the Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: “The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor.” Labor makes our world — and struggle makes us human. On Monday, across the Progressive International family, we will honor all workers — from those who broke the shackles of capital to construct new societies, to those fighting for dignity and rights in the face of brutal exploitation today. “As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met,” Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1894, “May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands.” Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite! In solidarity, The Progressive International Secretariat |
In theory, the World Health Organization (WHO) is the coordinating agency for global health. Influential private and public actors have claimed the relevance and central role of this United Nations (UN) agency. In practice, paradoxically, the money budgeted for health goes largely to other institutions and not to the WHO. New institutions and mechanisms have been created to which funds are channeled (GAVI, The Global Fund, Act-A, CEPI, COVAX, etc.). These institutions or mechanisms are, in most cases, public-private partnerships where the pharmaceutical industry is usually present. Official Development Assistance is important but represents only 1 per cent of what developing countries’ expenditure on health. How much is spent to promote global health and where this money goes is the subject of this paper. After the experience with COVID-19, a fundamental question that must be addressed is how the global public interest can be preserved by creating common public goods and protecting human rights in the prevention, preparedness, and response to present and future pandemics.
A research paper from the South Centre:
RP176_WHERE-DOES-GLOBAL-HEALTH-FUNDING-COME-FROM-AND-WHERE-DOES-IT-GO_EN.pdf (southcentre.int)
| NOT ONLY IN THE US8 Private equity’s presence in health care has been, in a word, disastrous. The complex financialized ownership structure that private equity has imposed on health care facilities has shuttered rural health care providers, overcharged and denied care to elderly patients, and even delayed wheelchair repairs. In nursing homes, private equity has killed. Americans for Financial Reform has uncovered deeply concerning levels of infection and death in private equity-owned nursing homes compared to all others. A broad-based coalition is now circulating a petition to demand that policy makers protect nursing homes from Wall Street greed. Add your name and, at the link below, learn more about what we can do. Americans for Financial Reform’s campaigner Ricardo Valadez explains federal proposals to mandate nursing home ownership transparency and create safe nurse-to-patient ratios. |
| READ MORE (from Inequality.org) |
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