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	The Debt We Shouldn’t Pay by Robert Kuttner The New York Review of Books   May 2013   Robert Kuttner reviews "Debt: The First 5,000 Years", by David Graeber.   At the heart of the argument about how to revive a depressed economy is the question of debt. When political leaders and economists debate the subject, they refer mostly to public debt. To conservatives, the economy’s capacity for recovery is impaired by too much government borrowing.   These escalating obligations, they claim, will be passed along to our children and grandchildren, leaving America a poorer country. Liberal economists, such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, have replied that only faster growth rates and higher gross domestic product will reduce the relative weight of past debts. Budget austerity, in their view, will shrink demand and slow growth, making the debt burden that much heavier.   As important as this debate is, there’s something missing. Public debt was not implicated in the collapse of 2008, nor is it retarding the recovery today. Enlarged government deficits were the consequence of the financial crash, not the cause.1 Indeed, there’s a strong case that government deficits are keeping a weak economy out of deeper recession. When Congress raised taxes in January at an annual rate of over $180 billion to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff, and then accepted a “sequester” of $85 billion in spending cuts in March, the combined fiscal contraction cut economic growth for 2013 about in half, according to the Congressional Budget Office.   Moreover, some of the causes of public deficits, such as Medicare, reflect to a large extent inefficiency and inflation in health care rather than profligacy in public budgeting.   It was private speculative debts—exotic mortgage bonds financed by short-term borrowing at very high costs—that produced the crisis of 2008. The burden of private debts continues to hobble the economy’s potential.   In the decade prior to the collapse of 2008, private debts grew at more than triple the rate of increase of the public debt. In 22 percent of America’s homes with mortgages, the debt exceeds the value of the house. Young adults begin economic life saddled with student debt that recently reached a trillion dollars, limiting their purchasing power.   Middle-class families use debt as a substitute for wages and salaries that have lagged behind the cost of living. This private debt overhang, far more than the obsessively debated question of public debt, retards the recovery.   The debt debate is reminiscent of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In a grand inversion, minor characters have usurped center stage, while the more important ones are out of sight. The quarrel about public debts is really a proxy for the argument about how to produce a strong recovery.   To that end, we should be discussing how to relieve the burdens of private debts and prevent future abuses of the power of the financial industry to create debt and engage in speculation.   As the economic anthropologist David Graeber shows in his encyclopedic survey, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, since antiquity   the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors—of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors’ children into slavery.   He quotes the classical historian Moses Finley as saying that in the ancient world all revolutionary movements had a single program: “Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.”   Despite the implications of Graeber’s history for events since 2008, the present economic distress scarcely figures in his book. Rather, he has written an authoritative account of the background to the recent crisis. Both erudite and impertinent, his book helps illuminate the omissions of the current debate and the tacit political conflicts that lurk behind technical budget questions.   Graeber, an American teaching at Goldsmiths, a part of the University of London, begins his book with an anecdote. He is attending a garden party at Westminster Abbey. The guests are international activists and do-gooders, corporate liberals as well as antiglobalization radicals. He falls into a conversation with a lawyer for a foundation and explains his involvement in the campaign to stop the International Monetary Fund from imposing austerity on third-world nations. He mentions the biblical Jubilee, in which Hebrew kings periodically proclaimed debts forgiven.   “‘But,’ she objected, as if this were self-evident, ‘they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.’”   Graeber reminds her that even in standard economic theory, “a lender is supposed to accept a certain degree of risk.” Indeed, the higher the anticipated return, the more likely the danger of default. Yet the premise that “surely one has to pay one’s debts” is so persuasive, Graeber writes, “because it’s not actually an economic statement: it’s a moral statement.” A debt, by definition, is something you owe that must be repaid.   In Graeber’s exhaustive, engaging, and occasionally exasperating book, three themes stand out. One is the “profound moral confusion” in our understanding of debt. A second is the perennial struggle over debt forgiveness, and who receives it. A third is the function of debt in the politics of social class and social control.   * Access the link below to read the complete article. Visit the related web page
	Governments can no longer shirk human rights responsibility by Salil Shetty Amnesty International   May 2013   A new UN protocol raises economic and cultural rights to the same prominence as civil and political rights.   The idea is simple: all people are born free and equal in dignity and rights. No exceptions. Yet, in the 65 years since the modern human rights movement was born from the ashes of World War II, some rights have been seen as more crucial than others. Civil and political rights have been prioritised over economic, social and cultural rights. Governments have ignored their obligations to promote the right to education, health, housing, food and a living wage.   Numerous promises of overseas direct aid have been broken. Governments claim lack of resources and argue they are not responsible. They have allowed responsibility for helping those living in poverty to fall on charitable organisations, while continuing to invest in military assistance.   There is nothing inevitable about poverty, and income disparity is not just a matter of numbers. They are a consequence of laws, policies and practices of governments; an indicator of whether a state is committed to promoting equality. Those that reject the principle of equality do so knowing that they are placing individual lives at risk.   Vast numbers of people globally are denied their rights to adequate housing, food, water, sanitation, health, work and education due to lack of political will rather than lack of resources.   Every 90 seconds, a woman or girl dies over pregnancy related complications - complications that can be treated. Lack of investment in health care services and entrenched discriminatory attitudes towards women mean that countless women die - women who could have easily been saved.   Each day, thousands of people move to slums because they have no other options. In some cases they were forcibly evicted from their land. In other cases, the failure of the government to address environmental degradation means that they had to move to survive. On current trends, 1.4 billion people will live in slums by 2020.   It is impossible for people who are poor to be treated equally before the law and difficult for those who are ill and without access to healthcare to participate actively in society.   And yet, despite their neglect, these rights are enshrined in the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; a treaty that has been ratified by 160 states and has the same status under international law as other human rights - such as the right to a fair trial and the right to free speech.   Amnesty International can point to many examples where governments routinely flout international law protecting these rights, such as in Nigeria, where the local government in Port Harcourt on August 28, 2009, ignored a court order and demolished a waterfront settlement, leaving more than 13,000 people homeless; or in Slovenia, where many Roma families living in informal settlements are denied access to water and sanitation. From segregated education of schoolchildren in Europe to the lack of access to reproductive health care for women in Africa and the Americas, the list goes on.   Access to justice and an effective remedy is essential for victims of all human rights violations and a new hope is on offer to victims of these violations. On May 5, the Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights came into force.   Ten countries - from Ecuador and Argentina to Spain and Portugal - have accepted the new mechanism, enabling individuals and groups to seek justice from the United Nations should their economic, social or cultural rights be violated and an effective remedy in their own country be unavailable.   Almost 40 years after the equivalent protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights came into force we have finally achieved parity between the two treaties and given true meaning to the principle of indivisibility and interrelatedness of all rights that found expression in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.   Despite this significant step, not a single African country is currently party to the protocol, while Mongolia is the only Asian country to ratify it. Worldwide, just ten of the 160 countries that are in a position to ratify the protocol have done so.   I congratulate the first ten countries that have ratified the protocol, but all other states must follow. For human rights to be truly achieved, everyone whose rights are violated, whether civil and political or economic, social or cultural, must have an effective remedy. The legacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights demands no less.   * Salil Shetty is the Secretary General of Amnesty International. A long-term activist on poverty and justice, he leads the movement"s worldwide work to end the abuse of human rights. Prior to joining Amnesty International, he was the director of the United Nations Millennium Campaign. Visit the related web page
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