I have now moved my blog to HeterodoxEconomics.com So check it out,  book mark it, leave comments and tell your friends.

And since the rotating pictures of my nieces were the best reviewed part of this site I'll see about getting it on the new one

Andy

The Take, a highly acclaimed documentary by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, goes inside the lives of workers, their families, factory owners, politicians and others for an unprecedented view of triumphant grass-roots activism. Post-film discussion with Tamara Falicov, KU professor of Latin American Cinema Studies Dana Collins, UMKC professor of Sociology and other guests Students FREE Seniors $5 General admission $7 for more info: 785-864-1353 or www.kcjubilee.org

Presented by the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee in association with UMKC Communication Studies

Mass protests in Mexico forced the resignation of the Attorney General attempting the political trial of the popular Left Wing Mayor Lopez Obrador. Check out the pictures of the protest here: This should let Lopez Obrador run for president.

State violence power: Police in Haiti opened fire on protestors and killed 5.

The website of the Orient Consulting Center's Iraq Projects and Business Oppurtunities is an interesting case in point of Naomi Klien's thesis of disaster capitalism.  Look at their joy in explaining the economic laws.

Or this page from the US Chamber of Commerce. Iraq Prospect on the other has found the downside of looking at thing "from  a business point of view" is that those left dieing sometimes fight back:

IraqProspect regrets that we are suspending our business operations as of November, 4th 2004 until further notice due to the deteriorating security situation in Iraq.

Which is probably also why the Rebuilding Iraq Expo 2005 was held in Jordan:

Only in Jordan
Rebuild Iraq 2005 will be held in Amman, Jordan’s secure gateway to business with Baghdad and the rest of Iraq. Jordan’s geographical proximity to, and history of trade with, Iraq makes Amman the natural and preferred venue for international companies eager to meet and do business with Iraqi entrepreneurs. Amman boasts an extraordinarily business-friendly environment: The city’s infrastructure and abundance of first-class business-oriented hotels have earned it a reputation as a business oasis in the region.

Just read that while thinking "As opposed to say.... IRAQ!"

For more on disaster capitolism in Iraq see the articles here

The report can be found here. It's a quick and simple survey of the issues involved looking at it from a human rights perspective.  This "human rights perspective" seems to me to be different words for the concept of "provisioning" in feminist economics.  Both stress ensuring that people are able to survive and are against using utility based arguments of Pareto optimality.  Of course the feminist ideas go further in incorporating ideas such as Sen's concept of capabilities, examining sustainable livelihoods, etc.

The report's discussion of improvments made to the agreements - Special and Differential Treatment and such - emphasize the impact the anti-neo-liberalism movement has has and what it still needs to accomplish.

I generally don't think too much about the Nation but now they got Naomi Klien writing for them I have to check it out. Her piece on Disaster Capitalism should be read in it entirety; here is a taste of what she said about Haiti:  

In Haiti, following the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In exchange for a $61 million loan, the bank is requiring "public-private partnership and governance in the education and health sectors," according to bank documents--i.e., private companies running schools and hospitals. Roger Noriega, US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, has made it clear that the Bush Administration shares these goals. "We will also encourage the government of Haiti to move forward, at the appropriate time, with restructuring and privatization of some public sector enterprises," he told the American Enterprise Institute on April 14, 2004.

These are extraordinarily controversial plans in a country with a powerful socialist base, and the bank admits that this is precisely why it is pushing them now, with Haiti under what approaches military rule. "The Transitional Government provide[s] a window of opportunity for implementing economic governance reforms...that may be hard for a future government to undo," the bank notes in its Economic Governance Reform Operation Project agreement. For Haitians, this is a particularly bitter irony: Many blame multilateral institutions, including the World Bank, for deepening the political crisis that led to Aristide's ouster by withholding hundreds of millions in promised loans. At the time, the Inter-American Development Bank, under pressure from the State Department, claimed Haiti was insufficiently democratic to receive the money, pointing to minor irregularities in a legislative election. But now that Aristide is out, the World Bank is openly celebrating the perks of operating in a democracy-free zone.

The wobblies go on tour

I don't know who Jeff Fugitt is but he wrote in a Letter to the editor saying "[Andy Barenberg]  associates me with some bad experiences from his past."

Actually I don't. Well.... maybe the first time I read a letter to the editor from him; but besides that, no.

For those interested the debate was over this study.  Which led to Jeff's first letter and then my response.  I suppose he is referring to me mentioning having gone through Abstinence-Pledge education and noting they are filled with incorrect information to mislead the participants into thinking condoms are useless.  I wouldn't call it a bad experience though, I had fun listening. I mean its sad that some my fellow students will probably die or having life imparing diseases as result of the lies - but that doesn't mean I would call it a bad experience.

Update: A Good study on the effects of promotion of Abstinence-only in Uganda is here.

That LA Times article had some other stuff worthy of discussion.

With opposition mounting on both sides of the border, President Bush went to bat Wednesday for the controversial agreement, saying it was needed to "create jobs and to strengthen democracy in our hemisphere." Though Central America isn't a huge market, the Bush administration considers the pact key to building a free trade zone from Alaska to the tip of South America. U.S. supporters fear that a high-profile setback would weaken that effort and others around the globe.

The trade-off between protecting drug companies' intellectual property rights and providing low-cost drugs to poor nations is being grappled with by governments and health activists around the world.

What I find interesting here is that it is seen as needed for making a hemisphere wide free trade agreement.  At the beginning of the Clinton years they were questioning if they should do regional agreements at all. "Globalization" to negotiation insiders specifically meant world wide negotiation (i.e. GATT/WTO) and was preferred over "regionalization" for having a simpler more efficient single set of rules.  You don't want GM with parts coming in from dozens of countries having to have multiple teams of lawyers for specializing in dozens of different sets of trade rules. 

But they settled on starting FTAA because it was a way to threaten Europe.  By creating a regional pact that has lower tariffs for those inside it becomes a de-facto protectionism from those outside.  By threatening to go just the regional level it gave the US leverage to demand greater flexibility from Europe. Additionally given that our greater relative economic power within the region as opposed to the world we have greater power to impose exactly the rules we want in a regional pact - note the more draconian intellectual property agreement discussed in the post below.

So now the anti-neo-liberalism movement has stalled FTAA they are going to even smaller regional agreements. This is the same as what they did with Europe but its to threaten Venezuela, Brazil, etc.  This is where the anti-neo-liberalism movement has to get sophisticated. By stalling down FTAA that we helped bring it to a point where the US is taking it to forums where the third world has even less leverage. We need to be able to address and act on all of thousands of smaller trade agreements if they are not going to be stuck in the most draconian agreements imaginable.

Via A Tiny Revolution - an excellent funny blog - found this excellent LA Time article on the protectionist measures with in the so-called Central American Free Trade Agreement.  Since registration is required for the article I have taken the liberty of quoting at length.

 Public health experts fear that hope might fade for Garcia [AIDs Patient] and thousands of the region's chronically ill if the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement, known as CAFTA, is approved this year.

Under the pact American pharmaceutical giants would gain a five-year edge on the development of new drugs by low-cost competitors. Generic versions of name-brand drugs are the main weapon for battling the AIDS pandemic in the developing world.

Healthcare activists say those intellectual property protections would drive up the cost of treating chronic conditions, particularly HIV/AIDS, sufferers of which routinely develop resistance to old medications. About 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and more than 275,000 of them live in the six Latin American CAFTA nations, according to United Nations statistics....

 For many Guatemalans, this is far more than an arcane trade dispute. Competition from generics has helped drive down prices for some antiviral drugs by as much as 98% in Guatemala, where 78,000 people are infected with HIV. That has allowed relief agencies to stretch their budgets to treat more people like Garcia. Even so, it's estimated that as many as 80% of Guatemalans who need these medicines still lack them. 

We should note that this is not a matter of if companies will get their return on their research investment or not, it question of whether they will get that then a whole lot more. Under current WTO rules generics can be made under " compulsory licensing" where if a patent holder cannot or does not make enough medication for a market a Country can require it to give a license to generic manufacturer. Under this license the generic manufacturer still has to pay royalties to the patent holder.

And we should remember that in this case - as in many similar cases - virtually all of the original research was paid for by the government.

So we have case where a government created product is getting an extended monopoly enforced by the government and it is being called a "free trade agreement." 

Jonathon Swarz jokes "So calling CAFTA a "free trade agreement" is a particularly nice touch, one I'm sure is appreciated by people in Central America with AIDS. They probably feel how I would feel about a bill called "The Protection of Jon Act" that made it legal for GlaxoSmithKline to hunt and kill me."

RYAN: Do you believe that personal retirement accounts can help us achieve solvency for the system and make those future retiree benefits more secure?

GREENSPAN: Well, I wouldn't say that the pay-as-you-go benefits are insecure, in the sense that there's nothing to prevent the federal government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The question is, how do you set up a system which assures that the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase.

Here's a letter from Argentina's Minister of Labor to Warren Mosler on the success of Programa Jefes.  It's been an honor to work with everyone listed in the letter at UMKC, and amazing to think how the ideas coming out of there are really being put to work in Argentina. 

As the letter notes the program - a weak form of Employer of Last Resort policy - helped create jobs for over two million people which helped spur the Argentina economy after years of seemingly intractable hardship. Pavlina Tcherneva has done more work on showing the effects of the program - reducing poverty and homelessness - I'll link to it as soon as see she has put it online.

Of course those wanting to find out more about Employer of Last Resort policies should check out C-FEPS

About a year and half after I wrote it my paper Islamic Financing: Effects on Development and Equaltiy  is finally being published in Oeconomicus.

Since that was only my second semester of being an Econ major I find much of what I wrote in it embarrassing now.   For some reason I got stuck reading a bunch of Mckinnon-Shaw style "Financial Repression Hypothesis" literature while I was working on it and somehow I let those ideas infect my paper. (Not sure how that happened.) In hind sight I wished I had put in some comments that increasing savings of lower income households was positive in increasing their liquidity and net wealth, not a source of funds for investment. 

For a better account of Households in the Debt Pyramid than my paper Z. Todorava got this paper in progress . If only I had been reading that instead Mckinnon-shaw back when I was first writting the paper... oh well.