Archive for July, 2008
The Doha Round: A Bad Deal All Round
An opinion piece in today’s Guardian by Tim Wise (former D&S editor, now of the Global Development and the Environment Institute at Tufts) and Kevin Gallagher: A bad deal all round It was US intransigence that killed the WTO talks.Developing countries were right to walk away by Timothy A. Wise and Kevin P. GallagherWednesday July ...Read more.
More on the "Fire Industrial Comlex"
Another report on the high cost of private contractors fighting fires, often saving rich people’s homes, with public money. This article from the LA Times was probably the source of the Marketplace story we posted on earlier this week.
Forest Fires, Privatization, Prison Labor
The business program Marketplace, from American Public Radio, whose economic coverage usually leans pro-business (or cheerily “neutral,” which is to say, ideological), had an interesting segment today about the business of fighting forest fires. The report discusses the privatization of forest-firefighting, and the huge bills private contractors submit, including $1,000 per day for a fancy ...Read more.
How hospitals are killing E.R. patients.
This is from Joel A. Harrison, author of our recent feature, Paying More, Getting Less, which provides a novel argument in favor of a single-payer health care system. The issue of long waits at emergency rooms has been in the news, and even the Institute of Medicine has looked at the problem of “divert status,” ...Read more.
What free markets?
Our July/August issue is (finally) going to press; here is the Editors’ Note for the issue: The government’s response to the ongoing banking and credit crises is beginning to look like a massive redistribution of wealth from taxpayers and ordinary borrowers to the financial companies that got us into these crises in the first place—and ...Read more.
Federal government trails 23 states on minimum wage
The latest Economic Snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute: The second part of a multi-stage hike in the federal minimum wage takes effect July 24, raising the wage from $5.85 to $6.55 per hour. But many states and the District of Columbia are a step ahead of the federal government when it comes to guaranteeing ...Read more.
We're not keeping up
This is from our pal J-P Ferguson: There’s a good story by Louis Uchitelle, one of the Times‘s labor reporters, today on how the economic downturn has contributed to a decline in women’s labor-force participation. (I know that household work should be included in any definition of the labor force. I agree that most modern ...Read more.
IMF = Death
A new study in the journal PLoS of Medicine by Cambridge researcher David Stuckler reports that the rise in rates of tuberculosis in Eastern Europe is strongly associated with a country’s receipt of loans from the IMF. The authors speculate that this a result of country’s reducing their expenditures on health care to qualify for ...Read more.
Companies Get $100 Million In SBA Contracts They Don't Deserve
According to the Washington Post, a new GAO report identifies over $100 million in Small Business Administration contracts that have improperly been given to businesses falsely claiming to be located in economically distressed zones. Usually the businesses just set up a fake storefront in the zone, even if their real operations are thousands of miles ...Read more.
A Stronger Social Safety Net Would Free the Fed
This is from the Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics column: It’s a widely held view that Chairman Ben Bernanke and his fellow policy makers are facing a worrisome mix of tepid growth, troubled financial conditions and rising price pressures, with few attractive options for fixing this toxic environment. The weak economy and market tumult ...Read more.
