A decade on from the 2007-08 global financial crisis, the majority of private banks have changed very little. Most remain solely concerned with maximising their returns, while sustainable or social goals remain subservient to this. For conventional economists, anything else remains an impossible or distant dream.
A few weeks after the May coup against Dilma Rousseff by conservative parties backed by the country's largest corporations, Brazil's “interim” government, led by Michel Temer, signed an emergency loan to the State of Rio de Janeiro to help finance infrastructure for the 2016 Olympics – in particular for a subway line connecting the sports venues. The bailout was conditional to selling off the State's public water supply and sanitation company, the Companhia Estadual de Águas e Esgotos (Cedae)
By all rights, the 2008 global financial crisis should have marked the end of the era of privatisation and the return to the more equitable mixed economy model which dominated in the post-war era.
Instead, it only ushered in a new, more extreme phase in the neoliberal project.
Business day Live - Water is an essential natural element, but around the world, it’s also an artificially endangered resource. That would explain why the parties represented at a recent international conference on water rights in Lagos ranged from remote towns with hand-pumped wells to modern public utilities in European cities. Precisely because water is universally in demand, it faces boundless threats of exploitation, in countries rich and poor.
Stockholm Water Week included a whole day of seminars with a
regional focus and I opted to attend 'Eye on Asia: Partnerships for
Water: How Can Asia Do More?'
Japanese water companies should avoid investing in for-profit water service ventures abroad, and should focus on non-profit, public-public partnerships instead.
Using research, workshops and local user's committies to help tackle corruption in the governance of private and public utilities - a case study from Kenya.
Citizen struggles for public water in Peru and Uruguay share many similarities and a common vision, with "public-community partnerships" bringing trade unions and water utility managers together on a shared platform.
The massive concentration and growth of corporate power poses a major threat to what remains of public services, highlighting the ever-deepening crisis of democracy, and the urgent need for people to reclaim the state.
A new bill has been passed in Russia that will extensively roll back Government funding of education, the arts and social services - by introducing per capita financing - that will punish smaller towns and downgrade quality in the larger ones.
The Mayapuri cobalt-60 episode shows Delhi University scientists were reprehensible and proves again that the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board is too inept, unreliable and compromised to perform its assigned functions. We need another agency.
Instead of Pentagon fighting healtcare for the lion's share of US budget, introducing a National Defense Medicare bill, lodged inside the Pentagon budget, would assume health care as just one more task in the unending challenge of defending our besieged nation.
