Multinational Monitor Editor's Blog

Thank you, George Bush. The federal government is finally acting to protect the auto industry from failure.

The $17.4 billion in loans for GM and Chrysler is not going to be enough to rescue the industry -- but it will keep these companies going until the next administration takes office.

The Big Three will be back for more money soon, and Congress and the Obama administration will have an opportunity to structure an appropriate bailout package.

A very unfortunate consequence of the Congressional debate over the bailout, and the subsequent Bush administration handling of the issue, has been to raise the near-term viability and short-term profitability of the industry as the overriding objective of any bailout.

That's an unrealistic and undesirable goal. Much better would be to focus on long-term ecological sustainability.

Nancy Pelosi says the Congressional Republicans are playing Russian Roulette with the economy by refusing to agree to an auto industry bailout.

But for that metaphor to work, you have to add that they've loaded the gun with six bullets.

The only hope is that someone -- Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson or Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke -- will come in and prevent the trigger from being pulled. Luckily, it appears they are ready to do so. A statement from the Bush administration this morning signaled that it would find a way to keep the Big Three automakers in business until next year, when a more comprehensive bailout and industry restructuring package can be worked out.

What is remarkable about the Senate Republican refusal to agree to a $15 billion loan deal for the auto industry is that they are not serving any corporate interest. A collapse of the U.S. auto industry would be bad not just for the Big Three, and the supplier networks and auto dealers, but pretty much every sector of the economy, including Wall Street.
Earlier this week, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue urged that "Congress must immediately authorize bridge loans to America’s carmakers to prevent the collapse of the U.S. auto industry and the devastating impact it would have on the economy, American workers, and national security."

With the U.S. government offering trillions of dollars in supports for the financial sector, it is startling to witness the casual way in which many policy makers and opinion leaders suggest the U.S. auto companies should be allowed to go bankrupt.

In considerable part, this attitude reflects an anti-union and anti-blue collar animus. It also reflects the diminished economic power of what was formerly known as the Big Three (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler).

The stakes are too high for policy to be influenced by misinformation and ideological bias. The auto companies need to be saved, on terms that protect workers and communities, and advance public objectives. Congress and the country should be debating those terms, not dithering with unrealistic discussions of bankruptcy or demands to reduce already shrunken union wages and benefits.

How can we look at these issues sensibly?

Over the past week, Americans -- and people around the world -- rightfully celebrated the breakthrough election of an African-American to be President of the United States.

Barack Obama's election signals a significant shift in U.S. racial attitudes, especially among younger people. Obama received a higher portion of the white vote than Democratic candidate John Kerry did in 2004 -- in fact, he won a higher share (43 percent) than any Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Obama won a strong majority of white voters under age 29 (beating McCain 54-44).

Such a performance by a Black candidate was very hard to imagine even two years ago.

But as epochal as is Obama's victory, celebrations of racial progress -- especially among Whites -- need be tempered by an acknowledgement of other racial realities.

The United States has not reached the promised land of racial equality and justice.

Good morning, America. Hello, world.

Yes, the skies over Mordor are now brightening.*

There is an almost palpable, physical sense of relief with the confirmation that the end of the Bush era is at hand.

And the election of an African American to the highest office in the land is an act of racial redemption that was almost unimaginable two years ago.

But we have a long way to go to escape from the Dark Days.

It is an extraordinary time. On Friday, the Washington Post ran a front-page story titled, "The End of American Capitalism?" Today, the banner headline is, "U.S. Forces Nine Major Banks to Accept Partial Nationalization."

There's no question that this morning's announcement from the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is remarkable.

It was also necessary.

Over the next several months, we're going to see a lot more moves like this. Government interventions in the economy that seemed unfathomable a few months ago are going to become the norm, as it quickly becomes apparent that, as Margaret Thatcher once said in a very different context, there is no alternative.

There's mounting talk on Capitol Hill that a Wall Street bailout will include some limits on executive compensation, as well as contradictory reports about whether a deal on controlling executive pay has already been reached.

Four days ago, such a move seemed very unlikely. But the pushback from Congress -- from both Democrats and Republicans -- has been surprisingly robust, thanks in considerable part to a surge of outrage from the public.

Will restrictions on CEO pay just be a symbolic retribution, as some have charged?

The answer is, it depends.

Meaningful limits not just on CEO pay, but also on the Wall Street bonus culture, could significantly affect the way the financial sector does business. Some CEO pay proposals, by contrast, would extract a pound of flesh from some executives but have little impact on incentive structures.

Here's the situation: Thanks to its own inability to control itself, Wall Street is now facing a crisis unmatched since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, a collapse of the financial sector would not only hurt rich investors, it would devastate the global economy. So, government action is imperative.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke say immediate Congressional legislation is imperative. And Congress is adjourning at the end of this week, with Members eager to get back to their districts and states to campaign.

But there is no way to handle the complexity of a $700 billion bailout in a few days.

As the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department careen from one financial meltdown to another, desperately trying to hold together the financial system -- and with it, the U.S. and global economy -- there are few voices denying that Wall Street has suffered from "excesses" over the past several years.

The current crisis is the culmination of a quarter century's deregulation. Even as the Fed and Treasury scramble to contain the damage, there must be a simultaneous effort to reconstruct a regulatory system to prevent future disasters.

There is more urgency to such an effort than immediately apparent. If the Fed and Treasury succeed in controlling the situation and avoiding a collapse of the global financial system, then it is a near certainty that Big Finance -- albeit a financial sector that will look very different than it appeared a year ago -- will rally itself to oppose new regulatory standards. And the longer the lag between the end (or tailing off) of the financial crisis and the imposition of new legislative and regulatory rules, the harder it will be to impose meaningful rules on the financial titans.

A new draft global trade treaty may interfere with fair use of copyrighted materials, require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to monitor all consumers' Internet communications, and undermine access to low-cost generic medicines.

Does the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) contain provisions that would actually do these things?

There's no way to know, because the treaty text remains secret.

More than 100 public interest organizations from around the world today called on officials from the countries negotiating ACTA -- the United States, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland Australia and New Zealand -- to publish immediately the draft text of the agreement.

It's pretty hard these days to justify astronomical executive pay. In 2007, the average CEO's pay of $10.5 million was 344 times higher on average than the average worker's wage, according to Executive Excess 2008, a joint report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies and Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. The top 50 private investment fund managers each took home more than 19,000 times the average worker's earnings.

But never fear, Jack and Suzy Welch -- the former high-flying CEO of General Electric and his wife, the former editor of the Harvard Business Review -- are willing to defend high executive pay by return to first principles and invocation of "the market economy."

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.