There is growing pressure on the Fed to abandon its zero interest rate policy. The big question is why?

Just to remind people, the reason the Fed typically raises interest rates is to slow the economy to prevent problems with inflation. Higher interest rates will discourage people from buying cars and houses. Higher interest rates will discourage businesses from investing and state and local governments from borrowing for infrastructure and other needs. Through these and other channels, higher interest rates will reduce demand and slow growth. This will mean fewer jobs. That is turn means less upward pressure on wages, which will reduce inflationary pressures in the economy.

“The freedom to demonstrate and freedom of expression are rights guaranteed by international conventions, enshrined in the Haitian constitution and supported by the law,” Sandra Honoré, the head of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), said last month following a week of protests across the country, which resulted in a number of reported deaths. Honoré added that the Haitian government must ensure that “offenders are prosecuted.” But Honoré may have an opportunity to lead by example after videos from Haitian media surfaced over the weekend showing a U.N. soldier firing a handgun in the direction of protesters. The video shows him discharge his weapon multiple times, then aggressively try to prevent a cameraman from filming him.

In a statement today, Amnesty International condemns this episode as well as injuries suffered the day before by protesters allegedly at the hands of the Haitian National Police. Protests calling for the resignation of both the president and prime minister have been occurring nationwide over the last month in response to the government’s failure to hold elections?—?now more than three years overdue. In an attempt to quell the unrest, Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe resigned Saturday night, after President Martelly signaled Friday that he would accept the recommendations of a presidential advisory committee, which had called for Lamothe’s ouster. U.S. State Department officials Thomas Shannon and Tom Adams were in Haiti last week, apparently helping pave the way for the resignation.

“The political climate in Haiti is getting tenser and tenser. It is imperative that the Haitian National Police and the MINUSTAH are able to cope with the situation in a way that ensure protection of human rights. People must be allowed to exercise their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, without fear of being shot at,” said Chiara Liguori, Caribbean researcher at Amnesty International.

Theresa Jessouroun’s new documentary, “A Queima Roupa” (“Point Blank”) tells the story of the past 20 years of massacres committed by the Rio de Janeiro military police. These chacinas are frequently committed in retribution for a killed police officer and traditionally involve coming into a poor neighborhood and killing random, Afro-Brazilian youth. In the film, Ivan Custódio, a former police officer and member of the “Cavalos Corredores” death squad that orchestrated the notorious chacina in Vigário Geral, tells how police hide most of the bodies, and claims to have killed more than 300 people. The film focuses on Rio de Janeiro, but could have been made anywhere in Brazil. Last month in the city of Belém, after an officer was killed, off-duty cops announced their massacre on Facebook and proceeded to go into a slum and kill an estimated 35 people. As usual, most of the victims were Afro-Brazilian teenagers who had no criminal record and were killed to create a climate of terror in their neighborhood.

As solidarity protests spread around the world over racially motivated police violence in Ferguson and New York, it is important to note that this problem is not limited to the United States (or Mexico). In 2012, approximately 23,100 Afro-Brazilian males between the ages of 15 and 29 were murdered in Brazil, according to Amnesty International.  A large number of these were executions, perpetrated by death squads, militias or vigilantes, three groups that are primarily made up of off duty or former police officers. A 2009 study by economist Daniel Cerqueira [PDF] found that Afro-Brazilians are twice as likely as whites to suffer violence from the police. The ratio of police officers to citizens killed by police this year was 21:1, and the National Public Security Forum estimates that 2,212 people were killed by the police in 2013, but some experts believe the actual numbers may dwarf these estimates.

Alexandre Ciconello, the researcher responsible for Amnesty International Brazil’s “Jovem Negro Vivo” campaign against what many call the genocide of young, Afro-Brazilian males, says, “We don’t know how many people the police kill in Brazil. All we have are estimates. Some states don’t report on the issue or provide very poor information. Some states include homicides committed by police outside of working hours, and others don’t. When you look at a state like Rio de Janeiro, which doesn’t calculate murders committed by off-duty police, this becomes a problem because of the militias.”

In 1999, two economists with a big vision and “a total budget smaller than some other thinktanks' entertainment funds” founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research. And for the past 15 years, CEPR has continued to serve as “a professional thorn in the side of orthodoxy”. That’s according to a 2008 editorial in the Guardiannewspaper titled “In praise of... the Center for Economic and Policy Research”, which also noted that “In a world of Goliaths, CEPR makes a rather effective David” (or Underdog, if you prefer).

The following reports on labor market policy were recently released:

Center for American Progress

We the People: Why Congress and U.S. States Must Pass Comprehensive LGBT Nondiscrimination Protections
Sarah McBride, Laura E. Durso, Hannah Hussey, Sharita Gruberg, and Bishop Gene Robinson

For Women to Lead, They Have to Stay in the Game: Why We Need Public Policy to Level the Playing Field
Judith Warner

Can Public Policy Break the Glass Ceiling? Lessons from Abroad
Dalia Ben-Galim and Amna Silim

On December 9th, CEPR Senior Associate for International Policy Alex Main testified about the human rights situation in Honduras before the Subcommittee of International Human Rights of Canada’s House of Commons.  The Subcommittee asked Alex to discuss th

This paper finds that an additional 1 percentage point of population growth through the end of the century would coincide with about an additional 2 degrees Fahrenheit in average global temperatures.

I apologize for a bit of a digression here for personal reasons (my wife has chronic Lyme disease), but if you'll bear with me, I think I can make some connections. The immediate prompt for this post is a snide article in Slate by Brian Palmer, warning readers that, "New York is about to change its medical misconduct law to protect quacks."

The "quacks" referred to in the article's sub-headline are doctors who provide long-term antibiotic treatment for people who have chronic Lyme disease. As the article tells us, chronic Lyme does not exist:

"The Infectious Diseases Society of America—the association of scientists and clinicians who study this sort of thing—has repeatedly characterized chronic Lyme disease as 'not based on scientific fact.'"

It's great that Palmer can be so confident of this assertion, but it turns out that the evidence is far weaker than the association of scientists and clinicians who study this sort of thing might lead you to believe. There are actually very few studies that have tried to evaluate the effectiveness of long-term antibiotic treatment of people who believe themselves to be suffering from chronic Lyme.

As explained in an analysis by Brown University researcher Allison DeLong, one of the studies was poorly designed so that it would have been almost impossible for it to have found a significant effect from antibiotic treatment. A second study did find evidence that treatment alleviated symptoms, however this finding was dismissed because the symptoms returned after the treatment stopped. (Effectively this study was testing whether six months of treatment would cure patients, some of whom had years of prior treatment. It really shouldn't have taken too much background in science to know the answer to that one would be no.)

The third study actually did find statistically significant evidence that treatment improved patients' outcomes by its main measure, a survey on fatigue. However it dismissed this finding because the researchers decided that the blind nature of the study had been compromised. When surveyed after the fact, 70 percent of the control group wrongly guessed that they had been treated. However two-thirds of the treatment group somehow recognized that they were being treated. Therefore the researchers decided that they could not accept the results, since the people in the treatment group knew they were being treated.

I'm not making this up. You can find the study here. It was published in a major medical journal and its negative findings are routinely cited by doctors arguing that chronic Lyme disease does not exist and long-term antibiotic treatment is pointless. (If you haven't figured it out yet, the study found exactly what you would want in the comparison between the control and the treatment group. The same percent of people in each group thought they were being treating. This means that the blind nature of the study was not compromised.) 

At a ceremony yesterday afternoon, an advisory committee handed their report over to Haitian President Michel Martelly, requesting the removal of Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe among other actions aimed at resolving Haiti’s electoral crisis. Jacqueline Charles reports for the Miami Herald:

The 10-page report, penned by an 11-member presidential commission, sets a timetable for Lamothe’s resignation. It also recommends replacing the head of the country’s Supreme Court and members of the body charged with organizing long-delayed elections. Dozens who have been arbitrarily arrested and deemed by human rights groups to be political prisoners should be released, the report said.

The Herald released a copy of the report they had received, which is available here (PDF). The Haitian government and international community, mainly the United States and United Nations, have long blamed the electoral delay on opposition from the so-called “Group of Six” senators. With parliamentary terms set to expire January 12 and no solution to the electoral crisis, it appears as though the positions of both the government and international community are softening; however it might not be enough.

The advisory commission was created by President Martelly following a week of increasingly large demonstrations throughout Haiti, calling on the president and prime minister to resign and for the holding of elections. Martelly is expected to make a decision on the recommendations by the end of the week. The moves come as the U.S. has taken on an even more visible role in trying to break the electoral impasse.  

Just months after the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, had laid the blame squarely on Haiti’s opposition for the delays, current U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Pamela White met with some opposition political parties on December 2 (although reportedly not Famni Lavalas, a party that has consistently won all of the elections that it's been allowed to participate in).  In a statement after the meeting, the U.S. embassy said that White was “extremely impressed with their analysis of the current political situation, dedication to Haiti's future and willingness to truly negotiate for the betterment of their country.” An opposition leader, Jean André Victor, told the press after the meeting with White: “We told Mrs White in no uncertain terms that the current crisis is one of Haiti's making, and it is up to Haiti to find a solution.”

But U.S. diplomatic efforts continue. Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported last night that Thomas Shannon, an advisor to Secretary of State John Kerry, arrived in Haiti yesterday and will be holding meetings with various political players in the country. A visit from Kerry himself has yet to be confirmed but has been widely expected in the coming days.

December 2014, Alexander Main