What's the point of the post-2015 agenda?
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- Written by rles Kenny and Casey Dunning
- Category: Analysis
The UN Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals completed its outcome document a few weeks ago, putting forth 17 goals and 169 targets. The optimistic take: that’s only just over twice the number of goals in the Brazil-Germany World Cup match. But for all the space devoted to targeting almost every conceivable area of global progress, there was one topic on which the OWG was notably silent: what’s the purpose of all of this?
Illicit capital flowing out of Africa often benefits foreign invetors
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- Written by Antonio Macheve jr
- Category: Analysis
The US-Africa Summit in Washington DC has built enormous expectations for the development of Africa, particularly in what concerns economic ties, trade relations, investments and business between the nations of the African continent and the US.
Despite enormous human-rights violations, conflict, widespread disease and other ills commonly known to Africa, the focus of the conference was largely business-oriented, a forum hosted by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the US commerce department. There is certainly no harm in focusing and prioritising economic ties for growth; in fact, business is necessary and it can be tremendously beneficial for the continent through the creation of jobs lifting some of the poorest of society out of poverty and building a firm middle class. The main issue is whether investments pledged at the summit and increased trade will bring that type of prosperity to ordinary Africans.
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Culture as a cause of poverty has been wilfully misinterpreted
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- Written by Jeremy Seabrook
- Category: Analysis
When the term “culture of poverty” was first used by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis in 1959, it was seized upon as “evidence” that poverty is not caused primarily by an absence of material resources. This was never Lewis’s intention. In a 1966 essay for Scientific American, he wrote: “A culture of poverty is not just a matter of deprivation or disorganisation – a term signifying the absence of something. It is a culture in the traditional anthropological sense in that it provides human beings with a design for living, a ready-made set of solutions for human problems, and so serves a significant adaptive function.”
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The tragedy of the private
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- Written by Hilary Wainwright
- Category: Analysis
Throughout the world, public service workers, alongside their fellow community members, are not only defending public services but also struggling to make them democratic and responsive to people’s needs and desires.
This is the conclusion of “The tragedy of the private, the potential of the public”, a report published by PSI (Public Services International), which looks at how these alliances are working at different levels – local, national and international.
The unbelievable, unknowable wealth of the super rich
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- Written by Jordan Weissmann
- Category: Analysis
Back in May, when the Financial Times published an attempted takedown of the data on wealth inequality underpinning Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the newspaper managed to prove pretty much one thing. It wasn’t that Piketty had misled readers or botched his math, as the paper claimed—by almost all accounts, his response put those criticisms to rest. Rather, it was that measuring the riches of the global elite is a complicated, inexact science that economists are only beginning to grapple with. Even Piketty says that the data set he used in Capital to illustrate the American wealth gap is probably outdated. He prefers a new set that shows an even greater disparity.
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CORPORATE INFLUENCE THROUGH THE G8 NEW ALLIANCE FOR FOOD SECURITY AND NUTRITION IN AFRICA
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- Written by Social Watch
- Category: News
In recent times, new partnerships models between governments, business and civil society are increasingly gaining attention. One prominent example is the "New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition" (G8NA), inaugurated at the G8 summit 2012 in the United States.
A new working paper published by Global Policy Forum, Brot für die Welt and MISEREOR, puts a spotlight on how business interests are promoted through the G8NA. To that end, the paper shows how the initiative bundles existing policy initiatives and aligns national policies to corporate interests.
The paper concludes that the approach and objectives of the G8NA are highly problematic. The initiative serves as an enforcing mechanism for corporate driven blueprints for agriculture and sidelines national plans and international standards. It is dominated and tailored towards the interests of big corporate actors and is based on a reductionist approach of agricultural “development”. And lastly, the G8NA is poorly institutionalized and disregards fundamental principles of transparency participation and accountability.
For these reasons, the demand for radical change of this initiative – or in case of inaction its complete stop – is still valid, when the initiative enters its third year.
Discussing the social commons
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- Category: News
The Commons As a Fount of Hope
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- Written by Richard Swift
- Category: Analysis
The commons is not just a battlefield between corporate predators and those who resist them - it is also a source of hope for those willing to imagine a world beyond capitalism. It represents a space between the private market and the political state in which humanity can control and democratically root our common wealth. Both the market and the state have proved inadequate for this purpose. In different ways, they have both led to a centralization of power and decision-making. Both private monopolies and state bureaucracies have proved incapable of maintaining the ecological health of the commons or managing the fair and equitable distribution of its benefits.
South/South collaboration for a post-capitalist paradigm
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- Written by François Houtart
- Category: Analysis
How modernity has been absorbed by the logic of the market
In a short essay it is possible only to propose hypotheses based on the many writers who have reflected on the history of capitalism and of modernity from different angles, like Max Weber, Fernand Braudel, Walter Benjamin, Michel Baud, Maurice Godelier, Eric Hobsbawn, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jorge Beinstein, Samir Amin and others. In Europe, the development of modernity followed the long passage from a medieval society to the birth of mercantile capitalism, between the 12th and the 16th centuries. Forms of proto-capitalism developed in the 12th and the 13th centuries, especially in the cities of Northern Italy, thanks to increasing commercial activities with Eastern Europe (the Bogomils). In societies dominated by religious cultures, it is not strange that religious institutions and actors played a central role in this evolution.
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Bitcoin-like money in Ecuador?
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- Written by Nathan Gill
- Category: Analysis
After mortgaging most of Ecuador’s oil and gold to finance spending, President Rafael Correa is planning to create virtual money to pay the nation’s bills.
Congress last month approved legislation to start a digital currency for use alongside the U.S. dollar, the official tender in Ecuador. Once signed into law, the country will begin using the as-yet-unnamed currency as soon as October. A monetary authority will be established to regulate the money, which will be backed by “liquid assets.”
World Bank's potential big step backwards on worker's rights
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- Written by Peter Bakvis/ITUC
- Category: Analysis
The very slow but steady progress among international financial institutions (IFIs) towards recognition that their projects need to comply with fundamental workers’ rights could be reversed if the World Bank adopts the draft social and environmental safeguards policy revision that was leaked about ten days ago. It will be discussed by the World Bank’s Committee on Development Effectiveness this Wednesday, and the TUC is one of several union voices to lobby their national representatives at the World Bank.
Read more: World Bank's potential big step backwards on worker's rights
