Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, on a trip to Europe to ensure continued donor support, was asked by France 24’s Marc Perelman about the ongoing cholera epidemic and U.N. responsibility. Perelman notes that “all the scientific evidence up to date points to the U.N.” but questioned Lamothe as to why the Haitian government has “never pushed for a public apology.” Lamothe stressed that the government has tried to address the issue through “direct dialogue” with the U.N., but also noted that the U.N. has an obvious “moral responsibility” to address the epidemic.

The U.N., in addition to not issuing an apology, has never accepted responsibility for the deadly epidemic that has killed over 8,260 and sickened over 675,000 in the last three years. A U.N.-backed cholera elimination plan has been unable to raise the required funds to adequately address the issue, despite Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s assurance in late 2012 that he would “use every opportunity” to raise the necessary funds. A high-level donor meeting to raise funds for the plan, scheduled for early October in Washington, has now been postponed until 2014. It had been expected that Mr. Ban, as well as World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, would attend. The plan, which requires some $450 million over its first two years, remains less than half funded.

In the meantime, cholera continues to ravage the country as the response capabilities of national actors diminish. In a bulletin earlier this week, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) noted that “resources for cholera response, including funding and staff, have been in steady decline since 2012.” OCHA concludes by stating that “if this trend continues, it would be virtually impossible to effectively and efficiently respond to the epidemic in the event of sudden outbreaks.” The lack of adequate resources also means that detailed data on where cholera outbreaks are occurring and how many are dying is becoming harder and harder to come by. The actual toll of this imported disease could be much higher than the official numbers indicate.

In late August, members of the U.N. Security Council and countries contributing to MINUSTAH met to discuss the extension of the mission’s mandate. Not a single country (PDF) raised the issue of U.N. responsibility for cholera, though many praised the Secretary General’s efforts to eliminate it. MINUSTAH’s proposed budget for 2013/2014 is $576,619,000, more than enough to fully fund the cholera elimination plan over its first two years.

In light of continued U.N. denials of responsibility, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux continue to seek legal redress on behalf of over 6,000 cholera victims. An earlier claim brought to the U.N. was dismissed as “not receivable” in February. A recent Al Jazeera Fault Lines documentary by Sebastian Walker takes a detailed look at the evolution of the epidemic, its impact on rural communities and the responsibility of the U.N. In it, Walker interviews Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary General Eduardo Del Buey. After Del Buey reads, verbatim, the U.N. press release from February, Walker pressures him to explain the decision:

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian Unlimited, 10 de septiembre, 2013En Inglés

September 2013, Eileen Appelbaum, Rose Batt and Ian Clark

UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) has published its latest annual report on union membership in the city of Los Angeles, the state of California, and the United States as a whole.  Some of their results, covering trends from 2005 through 2013, might surprise you.

As the economy continues to struggle, unionization rates have managed to hold their own or even improve somewhat relative to the situation before the recession.  In 2005 and again in 2013, 12.5 percent of US workers were union members.  Between the same two years, Los Angeles and California saw small increases in unionization rates; from 16.5 percent to 16.9 percent in California, and from 15.5 percent to 16.2 percent in Los Angeles. 

Source: IRLE’s State of the Unions in 2013

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian Unlimited, September 10, 2013En Español

Dean Baker
The Exchange (Yahoo! Finance), September 9, 2013

September 2013, David Rosnick

Dean Baker
Truthout, September 9, 2013
The Huffington Post, September 9, 2013

My friends Mike Konczal and Paul Krugman are duking it out over views about a self-correcting economy in blog posts today. It's actually not much of a fight, but there are a couple of points worth adding.

First, Krugman repeats his often stated view that this time is different, that the downturn in 2007-2009 is not self-correcting because the Fed was up against the zero lower bound. The story is that other central banks also faced the same situation. This meant there was no choice but to turn to fiscal policy to provide the necessary lift to get the economy back to full employment.

There is a small problem with this "this time is different" argument. The Fed didn't quite lower interest rates to zero in the 2001 downturn, but it got pretty damn close. Because the bounce back from recession was so weak (the economy didn't start adding jobs again until September of 2003, almost two years after the end of the recession) it lowered the federal funds rate to 1.0 percent in the summer of 2002 and kept it there for two years. 

Okay, math geeks everywhere are jumping up and down right now pointing out that 1.0 percent is not zero. This is true, but the ECB had kept its overnight rate at 1.0 percent until well into 2012. This didn't keep economists from saying that it was up against the zero lower bound. While lowering the rate to its current 0.5 percent undoubtedly gives some positive boost to the euro zone economy, and lowering it further to zero would help even more, no one seriously believes that the drop from 1.0 percent to zero makes all that much difference.

In other words, it is reasonable to say that the Fed was up against the zero lower bound following the 2001 recession. This means that such experiences are not quite as rare as some may believe. It also means that stimulatory fiscal policy might have been an appropriate response to that downturn, even if the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may not have been the best routes for boosting the economy.

The other point has to do with the long-run question. The idea is that something changes so that even if we never have any policy response to the downturn we eventually get back to something like full employment. Mike discusses the fact that workers who go unemployed long enough can eventually become unemployable. This suggests one possible route back to full employment. We eventually make enough of our workforce unemployable so that current levels of employment are consistent with full employment. (Mike doesn't push the argument this far, but it is certainly a plausible story.)

The other route suggested by both Mike and Paul is that something eventually kicks up to boost demand. This one is a bit harder to see.

Contrary to what you read in the papers, business investment is not low as share of output. It didn't fall off that much in the downturn and has pretty much recovered back to its pre-recession levels. Nor is consumption low. In fact, the share of disposable income that is going to consumption is well above the average in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It is below the peaks of the stock and housing bubble, but unless we get another bubble, it is difficult to see why it would rise back to those levels. People need to save for retirement. If anything, current savings rates are far too low for people to be able to enjoy comfortable retirements. So there is little reason to think there will be a rebound in consumption.

Dean Baker
The Guardian Unlimited, September 6, 2013