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	In a financialized economy the standout feature is a systemic disinvestment in public goods by Roosevelt Institute, agencies Children Defence Fund, Georgetown University, agencies USA   From Higher Education to Water Treatment, Financialization is harming the Economy, reports Carrie Sloan for the Roosevelt Institute.   One of the standout features of our increasingly financialized economy is a systemic disinvestment in public goods such as infrastructure and education. As the finance sector hoards the wealth our economy produces, wages stagnate, corporations and the wealthy avoid contributing their rightful share in taxes, and money and power coalesces at the top, revenues at all levels of government have declined.   Correspondingly, we have witnessed a turn to austerity measures including big cuts to the budgets of the entities that provide vital public goods, from water to public education. This is no accident- it’s a feature of a rigged economic system in which austerity is the price most of us pay for the wealthiest to get even wealthier.   Austerity creates vulnerability. As the stewards of public goods strive to meet the needs of the constituents they serve- from water customers to students attending public colleges- without breaking their shrinking budgets, they can become susceptible to financing schemes peddled by the financial industry.   Banks have pushed a variety of financial products, such as interest rate swaps, auction rate securities, and capital appreciation bonds, that are risky to borrowers and invariably deliver massive returns to the financial institutions selling them. Many of these deals have gone horribly wrong for public borrowers, draining even more money out their diminishing budgets.   The combination of austerity politics and a financial industry with an increasingly predatory business model has created a vicious cycle of decreased revenues, budget cuts, increased reliance on borrowing, the use of risky financial products in an attempt to save money, big losses on those risky deals, and more austerity.   Roosevelt and ReFund America Project recently released a report about the impact of toxic financial deals like interest rate swaps on colleges and universities across the country. We looked at 19 schools, from community colleges and public four-year universities to elite private schools, and found swap cost them a combined total of $2.7 billion.   Swaps, which were intended to create a synthetic fixed rate on variable rate bonds, were pitched to borrowers as a way to borrow more cheaply. But these deals turned out to be disastrous for many colleges- just as they have been for the cities, school districts, state governments, transit agencies, and water departments that also got mixed up with them.   The public colleges we looked at in our report – like public colleges around the nation- have all seen huge decreases in state funding in recent decades, and they have all tried to bridge the funding gap by raising fees and tuition on students. This disinvestment in a vital public good parallels decreases in funding for other vital infrastructure- most notably, public water and wastewater systems.   Federal funding for local water infrastructure projects has decreased almost fourfold in the last 3 decades. At the same, water systems have been aging and deteriorating to the point where most of the nation’s water infrastructure is desperately in need of repair or replacement. The problems include sewage leaking into waterways, an estimated 25% of drinking water lost to leaks, and crumbling pipes leaching lead into drinking water.   Many local water systems, facing decreased federal funding and crumbling systems, have issued bonds to invest in infrastructure projects- sometimes as part of complying with EPA consent decrees issued after an investigation of, for example, wastewater pollution of a local body of water.   Like the colleges in our recent report, many of these local water systems got stuck in risky deals that proved to be financially disastrous, leading to huge spikes in water bills for customers, water shut offs for people who couldn’t pay their skyrocketing bills, and even less money for necessary projects.   In Detroit and Baltimore, people have even lost their homes to foreclosure because of late water bills. In some cases, the end result has been a move towards private control of the water systems as a “solution” to the financing crisis. This is classic disaster capitalism.   We are seeing this across our economy. The affordability and accessibility crisis in higher education is paralleled by similar crises in water infrastructure and other forms of public goods we rely on to make our country work. These crises have direct roots in the financialization of our economy and the power the financial industry has over our political system. The consequences affect all of us.   The good news is that we have an opportunity to build an intersectional movement of ordinary people to demand a more just and fair system and to hold Wall Street and the politicians they control accountable to we the people.   http://rooseveltforward.org/higher-education-water-treatment-financialization-harming-our-economy/ http://rooseveltforward.org/blog/ http://rooseveltinstitute.org/ http://rooseveltinstitute.org/rewriting-rules-report/   Corporate tax cuts with greatly reduced funding for education and health care. (BuzzFlash)   Illinois Governor Rauner recently cut "Meals on Wheels" for seniors and at-risk youth services. Chicago residents were hit with a nearly 13% property tax increase. Some Chicago public schools could face 2017 cutbacks of an incredible 20 percent.   But six of Illinois largest corporations together paid almost zero state income taxes this year. Full payment of their taxes would have exceeded the $1.1 billion Chicago Public School deficit.   It''s much the same around the nation, as 25 of the largest U.S. corporations, with over $150 billion in U.S. profits last year, paid less than 20% in federal taxes, and barely 1% in the state taxes that are vitally important for K-12 education.   Because of the missing corporate tax revenue, House Republicans have tried to break even by proposing cuts to programs that are essential to mothers and children, such as Centers for Disease Control health programs, family planning, contraception, and - unbelievably, again - food stamps. It is estimated that almost two-thirds of the proposed cuts would largely impact low and moderate income families.   At the state level, the suffering residents of Louisiana are facing some of the steepest regressive tax increases, along with cuts to vital programs that investigate child abuse and provide pediatric day care. The maternal death rate rose dramatically in Texas after women''s health programs were cut.   In Kansas, where a Republican state senator has called Governor Brownback''s lowering of taxes on the rich a "train wreck", 2017 cuts are targeting universities, Medicaid recipients, and the Children’s Initiatives Fund.   A 2014 government report found that nearly one in five adult Americans experienced mental illness the year before. Yet in the four years before that report, states cut $5 billion in mental health services and eliminated nearly 10 percent of the nation''s psychiatric hospital beds. Over half of U.S. counties don''t have a single psychiatrist or social worker.   So jail becomes the only option. According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, there are 10 times more mentally ill Americans in prisons and jails than in state psychiatric hospitals.   In the last 15 years, two-thirds of the states have cut worker''s compensation programs or made it harder to qualify.   With Aetna, UnitedHealth, and Humana backing out of insurance coverage for sick and injured Americans, low-income families are more and more on their own.   Throughout the nation public K-12 education continues to be cut, even six years after the end of the recession.   Our state leaders are instead handing the money over to corporations. The governors of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Jersey, and Florida have together given away billions in tax breaks while cutting billions in education funding.   In the beleaguered state of Illinois, Governor Rauner has combined corporate tax cuts with greatly reduced funding for education and health care.   Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool called Rauner''s education plan a "reverse Robin Hood system" in which wealthier school districts get increases, poorer districts get cuts.   It may not improve much next year, if House Republicans have their way. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warns us about "the most severe budget cuts in modern history in assistance for Americans of limited means. These programs would be cut a stunning $3.5 trillion over ten years, eliminating, by 2026, roughly 40 percent of federal resources for low-income assistance." Nothing short of war on the poor.   http://www.childrensdefense.org/newsroom/cdf-in-the-news/press-releases/2015/PovertyReportRelease.html http://www.cbpp.org/topics/poverty-and-inequality http://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/centers-institutes/poverty-inequality/ http://talkpoverty.org/ http://www.msnbc.com/interactives/geography-of-poverty/index.html
	Global responsibility for hosting people fleeing conflict is absent by NRC, UNHCR, HRW, Guardian Australia, agencies   August 2016   Real political leadership to resolve conflicts and share global responsibility for hosting people fleeing conflict is absent, writes James Munn, director of humanitarian policy for the Norwegian Refugee Council.(NRC)   Humanitarians across the world risk their lives in the line of duty every day. They negotiate access with militias to deliver food into besieged cities, they vaccinate children in war zones, and they perform surgeries in bombed out hospitals. With over 65 million people displaced across the world, never more have we needed committed humanitarians to respond to so many complex crises.   Yet, however skilled or brave humanitarians may be, their efforts are wasted without the real political leadership to resolve conflicts and share the global responsibility for hosting people fleeing conflict. Two concrete things need to happen to ensure humanitarian work remains purposeful.   Firstly, political consensus is imperative so humanitarians can physically access communities and deliver aid. In Syria, despite lengthy UN negotiations with all sides of the conflict, relief convoys are constantly being stopped, searched and sent back. In May, well-fed Syrian soldiers blocked the delivery of baby milk to starving families in Daraya.   The responsibility for horrific conditions inside Daraya, Aleppo and other areas in Syria lies on the shoulders of the politicians who arm the soldiers.   Secondly, without the agreement of world leaders, lasting solutions to global problems will not be found. This year leaders were presented with opportunity after opportunity to show initiative and consensus to end conflicts and protect refugees. They failed monumentally.   The first ever World Humanitarian Summit hosted in May provided a high-level platform to reshape the global humanitarian system. Yet not a single concrete outcome emerged from the event to better protect civilians.   Earlier this month United Nations talks on how to better share responsibility for large movements of refugees collapsed. States buried their heads in the sand. They refused to cooperate. Nations could not even agree to resettle 10 per cent of refugees worldwide, let alone decide on how to better protect migrants from trafficking, abuse and exploitation.   The status quo of the world’s six wealthiest countries hosting less than 9 per cent of all refugees remained firmly in tact.   Europe faces a refugee crisis that is small compared to what countries like Turkey and Lebanon are responding to. In a race to the bottom, it has chosen to further distance its contact with refugees by establishing compacts with bordering countries.   In May, the Kenyan government decided to close the Dadaab refugee camp and send tens of thousands of refugees back to Somalia. One of reasons cited behind the decision was the example set by Europe in dealing with its refugee crisis. Governments are aiding and abetting populism and fear. Upholding a moral compass is a thing of the past.   The ‘out of sight out of mind’ approach is also being used by Australia. Recent reports of appalling abuse and neglect of refugees at the Nauru refugee detention centre are a disgrace to a country that was an original drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Movements to externalize borders and weaken protection set an example with devastating repercussions.   It is inspiring to see the incredible Team Refugee compete in the Rio 2016 Olympics. But will the wave of global support have any repercussions to help the millions of refugees who were not selected to participate in the games? As our world leaders abide less and less by the spirit of ‘one humanity,’ will we follow by example?   World Humanitarian Day was set up to celebrate the spirit of people helping people. Dedicated aid workers around the world stand ready to do their jobs. It’s about time that political leaders set an example and did theirs.   http://www.nrc.no/ http://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2016/6/57745ac74/behind-the-scenes-of-where-the-children-sleep.html http://www.unhcr.org/nobody-left-outside.html http://www.unhcr.org/rio-2016-refugee-olympic-team.html http://www.unhcr.org/stories.html http://ifrc-media.org/interactive/protect-humanity/   10 Aug 2016   Leaked Nauru Files show systemic failures of Australia’s Refugee Detention System, by Michael Bochenek. (Human Rights Watch)   Assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm, inhuman conditions – over 2,000 newly leaked reports paint a sordid picture of Australia’s offshore refugee detention operations on the Pacific island of Nauru. The Guardian newspaper, in reporting the leak, said it’s a system marred by “routine dysfunction and cruelty.”   That’s no exaggeration. I had a close look at the abuses during seven days on Nauru last month, when I interviewed refugees and asylum seekers for a joint report by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.   About 1,200 men, women, and children who sought refuge in Australia were forcibly transferred to Nauru as part of the Australian government’s stated policy of deterring boat arrivals. Most have been held there for three years, much of that time in overcrowded tents in prison-like conditions. They regularly endure violence, threats, and harassment from Nauruans. Nearly everybody I interviewed told me that their mental well-being had deteriorated sharply as a consequence of the abuses they’ve suffered and the prolonged uncertainty they face about their future.   Even having heard similar stories, it’s difficult to read the reports, most of which are handwritten by counselors and other service providers who have little ability to help these people. A woman who misses her husband in Australia carves his name into her chest with a knife. A girl writes in her school notebook, “I want death.” A service provider notes that two children who had returned to school after a week’s absence “were both extremely withdrawn and depressed, drawing images of children behind bars with sewn lips.” The two “expressed great sadness, anger, fear and emotion” about their living conditions, the prospect of being sent to Cambodia, and the fact that they had witnessed people harming themselves. One of the two, a girl, had swallowed detergent. “I urged them not to hurt themselves and to keep going to school and being children and learning for the future,” the service provider wrote.   More than half the reports concern children, though children make up less than one-fifth of the refugee and asylum seeker population on Nauru.   The number of assaults, acts of self-harm, and other serious incidents have not fallen over time and in some cases have escalated. Additionally, 26 former Save the Children staff – social workers, teachers, and child protection specialists – have come out publicly saying that “nowhere near the full extent of the incident reports written on a day-to-day basis have been released.”   Australia’s government has known about these abuses and has not taken action to end them – indicating a deliberate strategy to deter boat arrivals. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection issued a statement saying the leaked documents reflected “unconfirmed allegations or uncorroborated statements and claims” and “not statements of proven fact.” But it’s clear the leaked documents provide further evidence that the offshore detention and processing program has been extremely abusive, and that children are at particular risk.   Australia should promptly close its operations on Nauru, as well as a similar facility on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. It should move immediately to settle refugees in Australia or an appropriate third country. And it should begin a reckoning for the abuses its agents committed and its officials condoned.   Australia’s grubby little secret is exposed in the Nauru files. A callous bureaucracy damns itself, by Ben Doherty. (Guardian Australia)   The truth of the offshore detention regime financed, controlled and run by Australian government on the remote Pacific island of Nauru has been brutally exposed by the revelation by the Guardian of the Nauru files.   For all of the extreme measures to which the Australian government has gone to keep its offshore detention regime from public eye – moving detention centres to remote foreign islands where compliant local governments keep journalists away; an extreme and unapologetic secrecy about the “on-water matters” of boat turnbacks; legislation to jail doctors and detention centre workers who speak out on behalf of those held; and restricting access for international agencies such as the United Nations – the truth about its remote camps has continued to leak out over the four years of offshore detention. Now, it is laid bare.   The Nauru files are the most comprehensive insight into conditions in the island detention camp that the Australian public has ever been given.   They reveal suicide attempts so common as to be unremarkable: refugees find their friends hanging by their neck from bedsheets, barely conscious and moments from death; children calmly report their parents have swallowed screws and will be dead soon; parents coldly reveal their plans to carry their children as they walk into the sea.   They show children left in states of extreme vulnerability and danger. They expose the basic privation of detention: people refusing to use fetid toilets that haven’t been cleaned for weeks; women bullied into exposing their bodies to guards so they can have enough water to shower; women suffering incontinence denied sanitary pads.   And the Nauru files unveil how conditions in the camps are clinically euphemised for the outside world: critical incidents, in which refugees have attempted to kill themselves, or are raped or assaulted, are downgraded to the classifications “major” or “minor”, ensuring the security subcontractor on the island won’t be fined for failing to report them in time; doctors’ orders that someone be moved for urgent medical treatment are overruled by a department slavishly determined to uphold a policy, regardless of medical consequence.   The dry, disengaged language reduces the endless cycle of crises to mundanity. The cache of documents is, at once, horrific and banal.   The systemic failures of the Nauru detention regime have been known previously. Alongside the testimony of those detained on the island, and of those who have worked there, evidence has emerged in government inquiries and reports, in parliamentary committees, and in the promises that problems have been addressed and improved.   The files prove how the organisations running the island camp – including the Department of Immigration and Border Protection – deliberately seek to suppress the reality of the island being revealed, to stop information getting out.   They demonstrate how the detention regime’s massive bureaucracy is used to obfuscate, mislead, and distort information.   The downgrading of reports allows those running the camps to sanitise the conditions inside them, to claim that the situation is better than they are, to report to their Canberra superiors and paymasters that life in the detention centre, on the island, is under control, even improving. But the whitewashing can only cover so much.   The files vindicate the whistleblowers of the Nauru regime. People such as the traumatologist and psychologist Paul Stevenson, who said conditions on Nauru were the worst “atrocity” he had ever seen in 40 years working with the victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters, people such as Dr Peter Young, formerly the chief psychiatrist responsible for the care of asylum seekers on the island, who said the camps were “inherently toxic” and that the immigration department deliberately harmed vulnerable detainees in a process akin to torture.   The files clearly demonstrate the broader trends on the island: that mental health deteriorates precipitously the longer people are held; that the clinical advice of doctors is overridden by bureaucrats insistent that “the policy” be upheld; and, most disturbingly, that children are, by far, the most damaged by the nature and fact of indefinite detention on Nauru.   Children carry the additional burden of keeping their parents alive – mothers and fathers regularly report they would kill themselves were it not for their children. When even that is not enough, children are regularly the ones who raise the alarm when their parents do try to take their own lives.   Nauru is but one in a line of “solutions” engineered by Australia to address the issue of irregular migration (“solution” implying that people fleeing is a novel problem rather than a millennia-old human activity, and a domestic issue at that, one that can be fixed with a simple, single fix).   Australia now has a suite of these failed “solutions”: the Pacific, the Malaysia (struck down by the high court in 2012), the Papua New Guinea, the Nauru, the Cambodia. None have been solutions at all.   Fundamentally, Australia’s “Nauru solution” is built on one fundamental lie – that this place is any kind of answer at all.   http://bit.ly/2aSe4Hh http://bit.ly/2bgm9YD http://bit.ly/2b9tTIF http://bit.ly/2aPfIgY http://unhcr.org.au/news/unhcr-immediate-solutions-needed-nauru/ http://www.unhcr.org/   * Access the Nauru files via the link below, see also Unicef/Save the Children Report: http://bit.ly/2cSvQ1Q Visit the related web page
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