Move Would Allow Company to "Leave Devastation Behind and Walk Away without Consequence"
HOMEF, Social Action Nigeria, HEDA Resource Centre and Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Centre
A proposed sale of Shell’s shares in the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) to the Renaissance consortium, alongside similar divestments by TotalEnergies and other oil companies, threatens the environmental and social well-being of the Niger Delta and its people for generations to come, warned a letter from Nigerian groups released on 16 December 2024.
Covid-19 et la fin du corps ouvrier moderne
Larry Lohmann
The vast territory of transnational capitalism is partly constituted by particular kinds of human bodies. One of those bodies is the body of the wage worker. The worker who is supposed to show up on time every day. The worker who gets only so many sick days each month. The worker who can be relied on to come in and make money for the boss, year in and year out.
Saturday, 1st November 2014, in London
The People vs PFI conference will bring together those disturbed by the implications of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to brainstorm political and practical solutions; share stories of working for a PFI-run public service, or of living in or near one; and help build effective grassroots opposition to PFI across the UK.
Genetic Promises and Speculative Finance
Sarah Sexton
This book chapter explores some of the parallels, connections and disjunctures between the promised genetic revolution in medicine and health, and the crash of financial capital in 2008, aiming to illuminate several known insights for pursuing public health futures and finances that are often kept in the dark or conveniently forgotten.
Political Organising Behind TRIPS
Peter Drahos with John Braithwaite
When TRIPS was signed in 1994, the United States, Europe and Japan dominated the world's software, pharmaceutical, chemical and entertainment industries. The rest of the world had little to gain by agreeing to these terms of trade for intellectual property. They did so because a failure of democratic processes nationally and internationally enabled a small group of men within the United States to capture the US trade-agenda-setting process, to draft intellectual property principles that became the blueprint for TRIPS and to crush resistance through US trade power.
Women's Health in a Free Market Economy
Sumati Nair and Preeti Kirbat with Sarah Sexton
This briefing evaluates the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development. It assesses several processes that affect women's reproductive and sexual rights and health: the decline and collapse in health services; neo-liberal economic policies and religious fundamentalisms; and development policies underpinned by neo-Malthusianism.
Sarah Sexton
The World Trade Organisation's General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) could have a significant effect on human health, and health care services.
GATS, Public Services and Privatisation
Sarah Sexton
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is revising its General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) so as to increase international trade in services. If current proposals are implemented, GATS could be used to overturn almost any legislation governing services. Particularly under threat are public services -- health care, education, energy, water and sanitation. This briefing explores the potential for private companies to capture the most profitable components of publicly-provided and -funded health care services, leaving a reduced public sector to cope with the elderly, chronically sick and the poor who most need health care and who can least afford it.
Power and Decision-Making in the Geneticisation of Health
Sarah Sexton
Most discussions about human embryo cloning focus on ethics and potential health benefits. In the process, the many social, economic and environmental aspects of health and disease are increasingly hidden, while issues such as how the potential benefits of biotech would be obtained and distributed are sidelined. It has therefore become hard to raise key questions about the increased geneticisation of our lives and societies.
The Politics of Contraceptive Research
Judith Richter with Sarah Sexton
For the past 25 years, scientists have been developing a new class of birth control methods -- immuno-contraceptives, also known as an anti-fertility “vaccines” -- which aim to turn the body’s immune system against reproductive components. Immuno-contraceptives are likely to be unreliable as far as an individual is concerned and to entail an unprecedented potential for abuse; severe health risks cannot be discounted. They are a clear example of the impact “population control” has had on contraceptive research.
The Politics of Protection
Sarah Sexton
Corporate and legislative responses to reproductive hazards in the workplace have been based on ideological assumptions about human reproduction and working women. The controversy surrounding US employers’ recent practices of excluding women from work where they might come into contact with known or suspected reproductive hazards has made these misconceptions explicit -- clarified the direction of more constructive action.
