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For half a millennium, vaccines have saved millions of lives
For the last 3 years, experimental gene therapies have generated huge big pharma profits, even though perfectly valid vaccines existed....

statista.com/chart/21725/ti…

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by the rich
They are not just unjust
They are also economically regressive & counter-productive.”
How can this happen? Well, guess who sets the rules?
There is little that is fair and open about procedures to re-negotiate poor country debts today For years the secretive Paris
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Club – a cartel of sovereign creditors - has dominated debt-rescheduling processes, hand-in-hand with the closed, bureaucratic IMF
private lenders to sovereign low income governments, unlike creditors to corporations, do not submit to either the discipline of insolvency law
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concessional assistance from int'l financial institutions was only $2 bn—even as famine spread That process - of money flowing from the poor to the rich - is a bizarre economic phenomenon [defying laws of physics/ economics flowing upwards from poor to rich countries not down
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developed west, don't attract the comment they should-
“In 2023, the private sector collected $68 billion more in interest + principal repayments than it lent to the developing world International financial institutions & assistance agencies extracted another $40 bn, while net
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The nationalisation of private debts, the massive accumulation of interest and compound interest on outstanding debts & the bailing out of creditors by the IMF, makes lending to sovereign governments the most profitable business of all, George Soros once said 'International
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environmental crises
Debt service=combined total spending on education, health, social protection + climate, & exceeds it by 50% in Africa
It is 2.5 X education spending, 4 X health spending & 11 X social protection spending
These are usurious rates of exploitation of the poor
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exposition of the Lucas paradox
Ann Pettifor is an unquestioned heroine of the movement to protect vulnerable debtor states and what she demands here is unquestionably justified, but forgive us if we doubt that under prevailing global power structures, we'll see such a shift
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Ann demands that “to avoid such injustice & to end the indecency of poor countries transferring their meagre resources to rich, private creditors, we need a just, independent +transparent international framework for resolving sovereign debt crises”
Ann's article is a stunning
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Ann Pettifor in our lifetimes;- sovereign disparities continue to widen and dependencies continue to grow and those most in need of protection seem to have ever decreasing agency to determine their own futures. Thankfully, they continue to have Ann and her colleagues fighting their corner
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the international financial institutions”

It’s worse than 25 years ago and deteriorating-
“flow reversals between rich creditors & poor debtors are intensifying
Debt payments to much richer governments and corporations are pushing aside key spending to confront social &
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Singh [recently noted] how much the perversity of ‘uphill’ capital flows has intensified
“rising interest rates + bond + loan repayments meant that nearly $200 bn flowed out of developing countries to private creditors in 2023, completely dwarfing the increased financing from
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when they talked up foreign aid to poor countries & downplayed a bigger truth: low income countries were sending back larger sums to rich countries - as debt repayments
Our campaign caught the eye of the brilliant film-maker, Anthony Minghella [who produced] a movie that in
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creditors - private and public - when lending to sovereigns defy the most fundamental principle of the Rule of Law: that one must not be judge in one’s own cause
Creditors must not decide on their own claims”

And yet, thanks to the IMF and to New York courts they do

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from rich to poor countries] questioned by Robert Lucas in 1990 and since named the ‘Lucas Paradox’'
Ann explains how for the last quarter of a century “Together with colleagues we tried to explain this largely hidden reality to a wider public that believed western governments
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