Multinational Monitor Editor's Blog

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games have been referred to as the “People’s Games,” the “High Tech Games” and the “Green Games,” but they could be more aptly described as the Commercial Games.

Commercialism is overrunning the Olympics. It is undermining the professed ideals of the Olympic Games, and subverting the Olympics' veneration of sport with omnipresent commercial messaging and branding.

The Olympics have auctioned off virtually every aspect of the Games to the highest bidder. In addition to multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals between the International Olympic Committee and international companies, smaller firms are paying for designations from “official home and industrial flooring supplier” to the “frozen dumplings exclusive supplier” of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

Corporate sponsors are showering money on each tier of the Olympic organizational committees: the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) and the International Federations governing each individual sport, to each country’s National Organizing Committees. Corporations are sponsoring many Olympic teams and national governing bodies for particular sports -- including virtually every national governing body in the United States -- and individual athletes themselves.

Predictably, the cheerleaders for corporate globalization are bemoaning the collapse of World Trade Organization negotiations.

"This is a very painful failure and a real setback for the global economy when we really needed some good news," said Peter Mandelson, the European Union's trade commissioner.

Even worse, says the corporate globalization rah-rah crowd, the talks' failure will hurt the developing world. After all, these negotiations were named the Doha Development Round.

“The breakdown of these talks is bad news for the world’s businesses, workers, farmers and most importantly the poor," laments U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue.

But don’t shed any tears for the purported beneficiaries of the WTO talks. If truth-in-advertising rules applied, this might have been called the Doha Anti-Development Round.

Tuberculosis, a treatable disease, kills 1.7 million people a year worldwide.

TB incidence, according to the World Health Organization, seems to be correlated to broad social factors, like access to clean water and sanitation, HIV incidence and national health expenditures.

A just published study in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine investigates the role of different possible explanatory factor: the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The researchers' study focuses on the period 1991 to 2003 for the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a region for which there is robust data.

The results: The researchers concluded "that IMF economic reform programs are strongly associated with rises in tuberculosis mortality rates in post-communist Eastern European and FSU [former Soviet Union] countries, even after correcting for potential selection bias, tuberculosis surveillance infrastructure, levels of economic development, urbanization, and HIV/AIDS."

Last month witnessed the extraordinary contrast of two perspectives on crime, punishment and ExxonMobil.

Just two days after leading climate change scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Congress that he believed ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel company CEOs "should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature" for their role in delaying a serious global response to climate change, the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that a $2.5 billion punitive judgment against Exxon for the Valdez oil spill disaster denied the company the "sense of fairness" to which it is entitled.

Each of these proclamations is extremely significant in its own right.

It's hard to dismiss the temptation to write off the G8 meetings as a meaningless talkfest.

On the other hand, when the political leaders of the most powerful countries get together and issue joint statements, it may be worth looking at what these planetary stewards have in mind. This is particularly true at a time when new global crises -- skyrocketing oil prices, the spike in food prices, the impact of the U.S. recession and accelerating global warming -- are added to ongoing public health disasters and persistent global poverty.

Is it too much to expect the G8 leaders (the political leaders of the United States, Japan, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia) to offer something meaningful in response to these problems?

With the G8 meeting in Hokkaido, Japan just concluded, the answer apparently is, yes.

Private and corporate jet sales are taking off, reflecting an increase in the extreme concentration of wealth in the United States and around the world.

Worldwide sales of private jets have more than doubled since 2003, to $19.4 billion in 2007. The number of jets sold increased 28 percent between 2006 and 2007 alone, and sales are up sharply in the first quarter of 2008. Corporate jet ownership has increased by about 70 percent since the early 1990s. Demand for private jets is so high that a used jet bought in 2006 can now be sold at a handsome profit.

But where luxury items like a fancy bottle of wine or a Picasso painting are simply a private extravagance, private jet use imposes real costs on everyone who isn't a high flyer -- and on the planet. The costs are documented in "High Flyers: How Private Jet Travel is Straining the System, Warming the Planet and Costing You Money," a new report issued today by the Institute of Policy Studies and Essential Action (an organization I direct).

Yesterday comes the news that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating potential manipulation of the oil trading market.

That's a good thing, though the CFTC is not exactly the most aggressive regulator around. (Says Judy Dugan of Consumer Watchdog: "On its face, the investigation smacks of the fox investigating a hen shortage in the chicken coop.")

Market manipulation may be contributing to the recent oil price spike -- though even in the worst case, it is only part of the story. The most important factor is supply and demand: supply is having trouble keeping up with unabated demand growth.

Is Big Oil ripping off consumers? Are Wall Street speculators manipulating oil markets? What should be done?

Whether or not Big Oil is improperly restricting refinery capacity, whether or not Wall Street traders are driving up the traded price of oil to heights completely disconnected from supply-and-demand fundamentals, a few things are clear about gas prices -- and so is the most appropriate, immediate policy response.

Last week, a Congressional committee properly raked Big Pharma over the coals for misleading advertising of pharmaceuticals.

A hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight subcommittee focused on advertising campaigns for three drugs, including the remarkable case of Robert Jarvik. Jarvik is featured in endlessly re-run ads for Pfizer's blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor. Known as the inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart, he is not a cardiologist, not a licensed medical doctor and not authorized to prescribe pharmaceuticals. He's shown in the ads engaged in vigorous rowing activity, but in fact he doesn't row. Pfizer pulled the ads in February after controversy started brewing.

Among industrialized countries, only the United States and New Zealand permit drug companies to market directly to consumers. It's a bad idea, it drives bad medicine, and it should be banned.

But although it has the highest profile, direct-to-consumer advertising is a small part of Pharma's marketing machine.

By most accounts, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is genuinely passionate about reducing global poverty.

But he is not willing to challenge the structures of the global economy that generate poverty, or the corporations that build, benefit from and maintain those structures.

Nor, apparently, is he immune to gimmicky notions of corporate leadership to support development, or the lure of high-profile summits to shed light on new plans to do -- very little.

The nations of the world are currently debating how to design new medical research and development (R&D) mechanisms to serve the twin goals of promoting innovation to meet the particular needs of developing countries and ensuring that important medicines are accessible to people in the developing world, regardless of their income.

A successful conclusion to ongoing negotiations at the World Health Organization (WHO) -- scheduled to conclude at the end of this week -- could yield dramatic public health benefits in the years and decades ahead. Long-ignored research needs of poor countries might be addressed. Important new products might become affordable for all patients, not just those who live in rich countries or happen to be wealthy. New collaborative systems of conducting R&D might yield scientific breakthroughs for emerging public health threats that might otherwise be delayed, or never occur.

Big Pharma is watching the WHO talks with trepidation. The brand-name pharmaceutical companies are open to new government resources being invested to find treatments for diseases endemic to developing countries -- this represents a new business opportunity, after all. But they fear losing their pricing prerogatives, including to charge exorbitant rich country prices in middle-income countries. The companies are also very concerned that new R&D mechanisms may displace the global patent-monopoly system around which they have built their business models -- and which enable them to earn enormous profits.

In an effort to direct the WHO negotiations away from bolder measures that would advance public health objectives but might threaten its parochial interests, the industry is deploying the diverse set of instruments in its policy-influencing toolbox.

Can the world settle on a medical research and development (R&D) system that develops medicines and other products to meet priority health needs and makes those products available on an affordable basis?

Developing a strategy to meet these twin goals is the task of World Health Organization (WHO) negotiations in their final phase this week.

For 30 years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have remade much of the developing world according to a market fundamentalist ideology.

The results -- measured by lost wealth, stunted social indicators, depletion of natural resources and trashing of the environment, rising inequality and concentration of income, damage to indigenous communities, or many other standards -- have been catastrophic.

Can the ongoing harm be undone?

Yes.

Consider one very small example, with not-so-trivial consequences: the case of school fees in Kenya.

Have things changed at the International Monetary Fund? Or is the world just witnessing yet another in a long series of global economic double standards?

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn says that the "need for public intervention" to address the global financial crisis "is becoming more evident." Strauss-Kahn has urged for a global fiscal stimulus, writing that, "Timely and targeted fiscal stimulus can add to aggregate demand in a way that supports private consumption during a critical phase." The IMF has announced its support for the fiscal stimulus plan in the United States -- a country with significant budget deficits and massive foreign debt.

The support for government intervention runs directly counter to the IMF's longstanding support for strait-jacketing governments in poor countries, by demanding "structural adjustment" -- a series of market fundamentalist, corporate-friendly policies, including hyper-restrictive macro-economic policies.

So far, there is little evidence that the IMF is changing the way it operates in developing countries. But maybe the times are changing, whether the IMF likes it or not.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the United States makes progress in closing the black-white income gap at the same rate it has since King was assassinated, there will be income equality in 537 years. If the racial wealth divide closes at the same rate as it has since 1983, it will take 634 years before African-American families have the same wealth as whites.

And that's the optimistic way of looking at things.