If you’ve ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you – at least in respect of the United States.

In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ”Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,” he says.

Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop and the takeover of political power in America by the ”corporatocracy”.

First is the well-known military-industrial complex. ”As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then,” he says.
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Second is the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system towards control by a few […]

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The New York Times took a long look Sunday at the double-digit premium increases that have persisted under the Affordable Care Act. It’s a good story and good moment to look back at how health insurance premiums have changed, what role the Affordable Care Act has played and what happens moving forward.

1. The average American family pays $15,022 a year in health insurance premiums. There is a fair amount of variation by state though, which you can see in this chart from the Commonwealth Fund.

That same Commonwealth Fund report finds that 80 percent of Americans now live in states where health insurance premiums equaled 20 percent or more of average income. All states’ average premiums now work out to at least 14 percent of average household income.

2. Insurance premium growth has wiped out the last decade of wage growth. Overall, that middle-income family saw its income go up by $23,000, from $76,000 in 1999 to $99,000 in 2009 – not too bad. But rising health-care costs in the form of increased insurance premiums and co-pays, ate up nearly all of that. Factor in that spending, as a recent Health Affairs article did, and the average family only had $95 […]

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NAIROBI, KENYA — As the sun sets over Africa each day, instead of flicking a light switch or heating up the oven, most people put a match to a kerosene lantern or a burning ember to a charcoal stove.

Africa, home to 15 percent of the world’s population, consumes just 3 percent of the world’s energy output, and 587 million people, including close to three-quarters of those living in sub-Saharan Africa, still have no access to electricity via national grids.

But the situation is changing, and swiftly. At 4.1 percent growth, Africa’s per capita energy consumption is growing faster than that of any other country, driven by improved infrastructure, inward investment, and efforts to tackle corruption.

Meanwhile, in the past five years, there have been 64 major discoveries of potential new fuel supplies – mostly oil and gas deposits. Of those, 13 were found in the first eight months of 2012 alone.

‘The potential impact is ginormous,

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In corporate boardrooms and global-investment seminars, more CEOs and business leaders are talking about Africa. That much was evident at a recent New York Stock Exchange investor conference, where along with references to Africa as the ‘new Asia

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Women’s bodies have become a global battlefield. The brutal New Delhi gang rape case, and the fierce protests it sparked, is just one example. From education of Afghan schoolgirls to veiling in France, female sexuality and freedom has come to symbolize a global conflict ‘over the nature of the self,

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